🚀 go-pugleaf

> PS_1: The Battleship 'Salvo Variation' described in the BattleShip
>       rules sounds almost unplayable to me. Any commments?

We have a couple of "salvo" variations lying around, and they are actually
quite interesting.  The rules we use are:

1)  Each ship gets to shoot a certain number of shots based on the size
of the ship.  (eg, a destroyer fires one shot, a cruiser fires two shots).

2)  When one of your ships is sunk, you no longer get to fire its shots.

3)  When your opponent is shooting at your ships, you must tell the number
of hits and which ships were hit, but you do not have to tell which
particular shots did the damage.  For example, the shooting player rattles
of a list of shots:  "a6, b8, c7, d5, ...".  The player being shot at
replies:  "You hit my cruiser once."

4)  To make things easier on the computer, ships may touch.  In fact, they
may even intersect diagonally.  (Ships may be placed along diagonals in
addition to being placed horizontally or vertically.  No two ships may
occupy the same square.)

This game is somewhat similar to mastermind in that you make multiple
guesses, but you only obtain partial information about the accuracy of the
guesses.

I particularly enjoy this game because it's interesting to figure out an
optimal search algorithm.

Chuck Simmons     chuck@dartvax