Bilateral Trade Valuation — A trade’s value isn’t what you get — it’s where both players end up 20 turns later.
Capability Without Leverage — A capability you paid to acquire is worth zero — or negative — unless something downstream lets it actually shift the outcome. Face efficiency (EPT-per-dollar, BattleValue,…
Efficient Frontier Trade Theory — Using EPT frontier curves to solve the 3+ player trade valuation problem — reducing the permutation space through structural truths about development velocity and game horizon.
Nobunaga’s Ambition (NA1) — A Game-Design Crucible — Reverse-engineering NA1’s bytecode VM down to the actual formulas turned a 1980s strategy game into a ground-truth source for game-design theses: claims you can *verify agai…
The Hollow Opponent — Where Game Depth Actually Lives — NA1’s AI decoded to argmin-weakest + threshold (one-ply, no dominance frontier); the perceived depth lived in player ignorance and migrated to the board once decoded. The flat-opponent end of the best-response/minimax gradient.
The Dead-Verb Test — Mechanism Viability and Whether KOEI Learns — the AI-tuning side: legitimate resource handicaps for weak-era AI vs the design miss of pricing the player’s alternative verbs (Bribe/Ninja/Pact/Marry) out of viability; falsifiable per-title “does KOEI learn?” scorecard.
Civilization Revolution — The City-Builder That Plays as a Rush — the deterministic, hollow AI (~5/~10-turn opening clock; wanders its first unit away from the capital) is the exploit that makes the opening decapitation rush deterministic; the human knows the script while the AI re-rolls blind.