Swarm in the Field – Commander

An enjoyable time-killer by commanding your swarm to shoot down a tower.

Swarm in the Field – Commanderis the short form ofSwarm in the Field – The Commander

TARGET AUDIENCE

This "time killer" is designed for quick visual and audio enjoyment while your are lining up in a queue, commuting, or waiting for friends and have a minute to kill. You may end this game any time without losing any earned progress, for everything happens here are purely by chance. From this game, you have learned something about using stochastic method to solves a problem - taking down the tower. You still need to study the topics seriously for mastering the mathematics behind. This game just help you to develop a feeling for it and demonstrate to you that – it really works well.

BACKGROUND

The story is set on a remote planet. You, as the commander, have located an enemy ammunition tower. You send a swarm of shooting machines landing one-by-one to take down the tower. However, these machines have lost their sights inside the walled-field. You can only remotely monitor the last landed machine as the visual channel. Fortunately, you can still make commands to all the machines for firing all together.

GAME PLAY

There is no enemy in this game. All are teammates. You are playing the role of a commander. You have a task to take down the tower of ammunition with your team of shooting machines. However, they appear randomly, wander around randomly, ... The only thing certain is your firing command. They will take it seriously – with random delay. You make a firing command by tapping the lower half of the screen. See how fantastic that your task will be completed! You may change the level of difficulty and degree of excitement by varying the game setups (e.g., maximum numbers of shooters). Remember, you want to take down the tower, not your team members.

CHARACTERS

Tank – A fast and powerful shooter. Shooting shells in fast round and make large damage, both to the tower and other machines. When you identify one facing the tower through the radar, it is a good time to make more rounds of firing commands.

Cannon – A slow shooter throwing cannon balls in high profile trajectories. When a cannon ball drops, it creates damaging shock wave as well, be careful. Also, it takes some time for the fuse to burn after taking your command. Plan ahead!

Chariot – An agile shooter firing rapid rounds of low profile firing arrows. These are short range but fast. Low profile projectiles also ensure hitting items in front without passing over like a cannon ball. Be careful!

MATHEMATICS

Last but not least, the mathematics behind. Skip this if you are not interested. This is a simple and primitive Monte Carlo type simulation. It is wrapped in a game for your enjoyment.

Solution space – A bounded 2-dimension continuum on the real space.

Process – There are several levels of processes. 1. sampling on the solution space; 2. applying a random offset; 3) searching within a fixed uniform range. (I will not reveal what are the exact processes for each type of shooters. You will tell them with certainty once you have developed a sense of the processes!)

Feedback loop – Internally, none. The sampling goes on until the objective is achieved (tower down). The only feedback loop of supervision is you, by monitoring (if you do) the status of the tower and the conditions of other sampling points.

Scoring – The score displayed in the game is based of a particular financial formula for calculating return on investment. You may use other formula (more complicated or simpler) you prefer by making use of the parameters displayed. But this will not shown up in the high score record.

Great of Black

2018