mood: tired

music: none up here

Please have a look at the first essay in this series for some of the technical details.

Results are “current” up to Future Proof. Notable points here are the inclusion of the following new pieces of Ice (given that I included A Study in Static partially – based on existing spoilers at the time - in the last analysis):

• Tyrant (Str 4 Barrier (0 subroutines) – ASiS);


• Uroboros (Str 4 Sentry – ASiS);


• Data Hound (Str 2 Sentry – HS);


• Salvage (Str 0 Code Gate – HS);


• Whirlpool (Str 1 Trap – HS);


• Burke Bugs (Str 0 Sentry – FP);


• Eli 1.0 (Str 4 Barrier – FP); and


• Flare (Str 6 Sentry – FP).

The question of whether there is merit in the use of the Mulligans rule in Android: Netrunner has come up in my mind recently. Since I started to play the game, I have adopted my old approach to Mulligans, as a legacy of my long experience with the original game. As such, I deliberately never employ the Mulligans rule. Still, with the emergence of Andromeda as a second Criminal Identity and the clear advantage of being able to look at nine cards in a starting hand, and then choose to redraw this massive opening hand, I thought it worthwhile reconsidering my stance.

A Genesis Cycle Mid-Term Report

First off, apologies for the title but this is a continuation of a sub-series of articles on the correspondences between Original Netrunner (O:NR) cards and Android: Netrunner (A:NR) cards. Keeping the series straight means keeping the series title consistent and I started off the original post by being ranty, before deciding to do something useful with my time.

I was initially intending to report on all the cards available at the time of writing but my development speed wasn’t keeping up. The rate of producing the original article meant that if I kept trying to update it with the new monthly expansions I might never get around to publishing the first article, let alone ever completing the analysis. As such I decided to break out the Genesis Cycle expansion cards and leave them for this article. I think I’ll do another one, as an end of term report, wrapping up the cycle and the correspondence analysis, as a retrospective. If a few previewed cards creep in to the discussion, well I think they’re fair game for consideration even if we haven’t actually got them yet. What are previews for apart from fomenting discussion?

I think that the first thing to note is that a lesser number of correspondences (more NULL matches) indicates that in this expansion cycle, the game’s designer Lukas Litzinger is starting to stretch his “design legs” a little. While there have been no truly novel mechanics introduced thus far, the focus on tracing has remained throughout the cycle thus far.

I got interested in a new programming language (Haskell, if you are interested) just about the time that Android: Netrunner came out. Given that I knew a fair bit about the efficacy of the various types of Program – Icebreaker in the original game, I was keen to see what the new set of breakers was like against the existing crop of Ice that could be found. Combining the two interests suggested writing a function that could calculate the cost of an breaker being used on a piece of Ice, and then applying that to all the relevant breakers in the same class.

By making it a program, I could simply extend the data as new expansion packs came out, and relatively easily compare the varying costs to break Ice across all the breakers. New Ice in the expansion packs gets added to the Ice data, so that when calculating the average cost to break with new breakers, it also stays up to date against all the Ice that the breakers might contest.

While little on the Internet is ever truly gone, I did find that in writing one of my recent essays on Android: Netrunner that it was rather difficult to find information discussing the nature of the experimental distribution mechanism called “Rolling Thunder”. This distribution mechanism was a monthly release of expansion (subsets) for the Legend of the Five Rings CCG (amongst others, vide. below), trialled by Wizards of the Coast in the late 1990s. I view this as a failed precursor to the Living Card Game distribution model that Fantasy Flight Games have managed to make successful with several games now, including A Game of Thrones, Call of Cthulhu, and of course Android: Netrunner.

While Google and Wikipedia might fail me, the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive did not, and so I thought I would like to resurrect the page that I was specifically looking for. The original compilation was made by Zen Faulkes, and sadly his web site Steel and Iron, dedicated to L5R, has gone the way of the dodo, but credit is due to him for the original work. NB: I suspect that any spelling errors (left uncorrected below) are the fault of the original authors, not Zen’s. Editorial comments below are primarily Zen’s until my closing remarks in the last few paragraphs.

Rolling Thunder Post-mortem

'I decided to write this article well before encountering some of the opinions that I might be mentioning and detracting from later on. Hopefully none will take offence at what I’m saying, or consider it an attack. That said, I think there might be an emerging view of the nature of a Netrunner game that needs to be countered, or at least argued against, so this is – in part - an attempt at that.

When considering the strength of the two sides of Netrunner’s asymmetric game-play, there are also two distinct scales at which one can consider the question. There is a global scale, extended in time, during which many match-ups of players occur and might be considered. There is. on the other hand, a far more fine-grained scale of consideration of the strength of the two sides; that of the individual game.

Here’s a review that Dave posted to a local gaming Facebook group, after learning to play Android: Netrunner and had a chance to try a few games at our place one weekend. Further comments are from Emma, lifted from the same group, which Dave thought deserved to be included after I asked him if I could replicate the review here for posterity. Note that there are a few terminology issues in the review, which I’ve chosen to leave uncorrected.

Some of the design decisions in Android: Netrunner (A:NR) seem to be a little arbitrary and detrimentally remove some of the facets of the original Netrunner (O:NR) game. I've already written in a previous article about some of the distinctions between the old and new versions of the game. Where that was a dispassionate consideration of the version's differences, this is a more hyperbolic and rhetorical diatribe (i.e. a rant) against some of FFG's individual card selections and redesigns. In short, Lukas Litzinger, et al. have reduced the originality that was available to the Netrunner player.

location: home

mood: contemplative

music: new weird australia

A problem in many of the (collectable/trading) card games is that there is a collective refinement of the various deck builds. Cards entering the pool are quickly evaluated and the results are rapidly communicated across the community through game-devoted forums, or articles on the web from game aficionados. Deck designs are disseminated throughout the community and are analysed, tested, and refined by multiple minds, eliminating weaknesses and moving towards an optimal design.