More on Undermined, new post to help avoid Wall of Text and making it easier to parse on its own new subthread.
Advanced strategy musings:
I don't have this part completely mastered yet but it shows "emergent strategy from simple rules":
Not unlike how I once beat Rubik's Clock puzzle (disappointingly) easily (but maybe more fun here):
There's something going on with something I'll roughly call "Numerical Overloading".
You start by ...
1. Checking what type of comfort each miner wants. There's 3 types of comfort: Hug, Listen, and Discuss. But there's five miners. So even in the "optimal" layout you get a "pull" of 2 2 1. That last one means that it is a "semi-dead" help type you can't use elsewhere and you'll often have to waste actions. Just now I kept getting bad draws so I kept getting more of that "limited use" one and all my miners died!
But at the meta level, if you make a chart, within two turns you might discover you have a "3 2 0" spread. In my opinion at the speed the problems develop, I consider that an "unwinnable" scenario unless you get incredibly lucky because every single time you get that dead resource you can't use it.
2. This game actually feels like a fantastic "tablebase" exercise. You have to mesh about four factors together, and it really feels like a computer program could produce a table (maybe exported to Excel so you can resort it in several ways to optimally use it!?) to show best play scenarios. But recalling the "gambler's fallacy" there's an element of forward projecting risk here. So You can risk letting one miner try to hang on "hoping" you get more of that crucial resource again next turn etc. But of course depending on the pure randomness of the seed etc, it's perfectly capable of sinking you with bad draws.
I missed the first time that miners either "really like" an action = -2 reduction of distress, but the middle one is "regular" and is a -1 reduction apparently. But the basic "squeezes" still are an issue if you get too many bad draws.
3. When miner's start to die, it looks like your available resources goes down, which looks pretty tough! I don't have all the answers on that one yet. So, looks good! But I also recommend if the initial draw looks impossible, just kill it and restart.
Hmm, maybe I found a bug - it's not detecting all actions used sometimes.
Hmm, it's calibrated rather tight. More reasons I haven't won yet!
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