Pocket Card Jockey -- #4. The Peter Principle
0Yes, it's a real thing. And I can unequivocally establish that it's none of the Peters you immediately thought of. (It's Pete down in the mailroom, duh.)
Might one day be promoted to assistant general manager:
twitter.com/yuugijoou
discord.gg/bKT9pRW
Enough people seem to gravitate towards the "nonstandard" vertical orientation version that I guess I'll just let them coexist in peace:
https://youtu.be/j9WPCy99G9w
Obviously, I blame those newfangled smartdoohickeys and their pocket screens and whatnot.
So, actually, I was RIGHT all along, ever since the beginning about catering to them in any fashion whatsoever. (Who else could've possibly foreseen this?!)
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What I actually mean is that this game makes it really easy to be praised for your accomplishments and thus pressed to take on ever-harder challenges... challenges your horse just might flat out be incapable of matching. Because of those pesky numbers, I mean!
It's actually a pretty good feather in the cap of the gameplay itself, you know. If the numbers we see on the starting screen for each race had their full sway, Sprinting Titan would never stand a chance. Heck, First Ride probably wouldn't have made much of a dent in the standings.
Good thing this isn't a horse racing or even a horse training game... it's a solitaire game!
Inasmuch... while I love the amount of horseshoes-on-the-ground general tips the game provides as insight into the overarching meta of the equestrian-flavored antics of the framing device... how about some more general solitaire tips?
Granted, the whole idea is that the game is about as "self-explanatory" as it gets for the sake of being the main, load-bearing support column that the game at large utterly depends on... but there's always room for improving your performance, and not all of it boils down to pattern recognition and repetition, which generally improves the more you do and practice... not something exactly conducive to being explained.
That said, the game IS up front about how higher level comfort zones result in more difficult tableaux of solitaire, so it wouldn't be too much to explain how the width and depth of the field exacerbates your odds and ideal strategies for managing the cards you're dealt.
I say "managing," because this IS ultimately a game of chance, compounded by further elements of probability, skewing the weight and implications of each and every move you make and card you take. "You've got options"... y'know, just WIN the thing! That would be best. Don't try NOT winning! That'd be worse!
It actually took a surprising while to hit this, given that it's not like you'd TRY to leave cards on the tableau or anything... but clearing everything in a Lv. 3 Comfort Zone results in Super Unity.
Except... I threw all my Unity points into trying to get a good position instead of Giddyapping them into Energy during my Super Unity, and... went nowhere? Is that some kind of glitch? Grr!
Meanwhile, that Shugomasin is a real menace on the racetrack, often not even being visible as I struggle to hold on for dear life in the races themselves...
Incidentally, I'm starting to try to sift through all the repetitious nonsense Off-Course has to offer. A lot of it SHOULD be relatively obvious... some of it painful in a sort of "yeah, no kidding" kind of way. Oh, you noticed the thing I struggled with obviously that wasn't under my control at the time was a problem? You don't say!
One thing that's not generally well explained, or at least has multiple competing factors that aren't weighted equally... the starting gate mini hand isn't just grading you for the starting Unity bonus that Off-Course has stressed previously, and it might seem weird to have to point this out, given the horse racing framing device merely abstracted by solitaire... but "fast" doesn't just mean "within this still quite generous time limit crawling across the bottom of the screen"... you're directly rewarded for a fast start with a high Comfort Zone position right out of the gate!
And then there's when everything pretty much DOES go about as well as you could ever ask for. The horses are just too good, you couldn't really have done anything much better. I mean, it WAS a G1 race, after all... and here you are, some run of the mill nonstarter horse. A second banana and all.
I think it just takes a lot of digging around and trying to minimize the more general "tips" your losing races' postmortem analyses are likely to gather before you can coax Off-Course into telling you the truth of where you're really struggling... or not.
The fact that he won't give you pointers when you win means you're not going to get any reasonable insights into how to streamline your future attempts means you're going to get ambushed with a lot of feedback with mixed value all at once instead of when it'd be more reasonably targeted along the way.
Off-Course is only a horse, of course.