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by adamrezich 20 days ago
I got way into Prosperous Universe for a few months, a few years back—it was fun for awhile but the pace at which new features were being added to the game was (and still seems to be) absolutely glacial, given what the game is. Really fun ideas in there, though.
1 comments
eminence32 20 days ago
There's been some new features in the past few years. But you're right that the general pace of new features is slow. There's only about 0.8 developers working on the game.

However, if you're the type of person that likes to work on spreadsheets to calculate profit margins and market trends, Prosperous Universe is worth checking out.

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adamrezich 20 days ago
One thing I didn't like about it (and briefly experimented with, in a prototype for my own game in a similar vein), was, much like EVE, it's called a “spreadsheet game”, but there's no spreadsheets in the game, or any sort of API bridge that makes doing stuff with the game in an external spreadsheet environment easier. I understand that this may just be part of the appeal of these sorts of games for many people—reading through stat blocks and wiki pages to figure out what numbers and what formulas need to go where to build the Ultimate Spreadsheet for your purposes (though in the end doesn't everyone just use existing Ultimate Spreadsheets created by others, or at least use them as reference?). And trust me, I did have a lot of fun building my Google Sheets infrastructure to coordinate business and production between myself and the three friends I got to (briefly) play Prosperous Universe with me. Also, don't get me wrong, I also enjoyed the subsequent rabbit-hole of learning how spreadsheet implementations actually work, including historical alternative spreadsheet implementations that had a lot of cool ideas like Lotus Improv [0]. But, in the end, I just wasn't having enough fun with Prosperous Universe to keep playing after awhile.

[0] This video is worth watching the opening few minutes of just for the vibes alone (trust me) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M

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progval 20 days ago
There is a third-party API now: https://doc.fnar.net/ , which collects data through a browser extension that scraps the traffic. This kind of extension is blessed by the devs as long as it does not automate actions.
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