FWIW I had fun, or at least I remember it that way (I could have suppressed memory of frustrations). I do think I prefer things that are more complicated, or have “secrets”, in terms of the underlying dynamics. As you noted in the original post, even if we don’t find everything we can still find some things.
I was still planning on doing more analysis but was busy the last few days. (I also made a mistake where I tried to separate the different merfolk areas with a column and row check and noticed afterwards that only the column check had worked, which provided a tiny, but maybe not insignificant psychological activation barrier to continuing.)
Where complication is maybe less desirable is in terms of the data we are supplied. Even so, while I didn’t look at, e.g. captains or voyage purpose, I don’t feel it was a detriment to my enjoyment of the scenario and I could have looked at them if I had more time.
One thing that did provide some frustration at the start was separating the planned voyages into columns. Text-to-columns did not work correctly in LibreOffice Calc until I made all the hexes the same number of characters. In Excel on the other hand it immediately worked with dash as a separator. (I ended up switching back to LibreOffice Calc again though when I couldn’t immediately figure out how to use regular expressions in Excel.)
Edit: I agree with abstractapplic that I’d prefer complicated dynamics to arise from simple rules where possible, but also don’t know if that’s practical when setting up a puzzle. I am fine though if they are not simple—in real life things are usually not simple. And, in a sense, extra complications are kind of like random noise when you don’t figure them out, and are fun-to-deduce regularities to the extent you do. Which is OK (or good) either way.
FWIW I had fun, or at least I remember it that way (I could have suppressed memory of frustrations). I do think I prefer things that are more complicated, or have “secrets”, in terms of the underlying dynamics. As you noted in the original post, even if we don’t find everything we can still find some things.
I was still planning on doing more analysis but was busy the last few days. (I also made a mistake where I tried to separate the different merfolk areas with a column and row check and noticed afterwards that only the column check had worked, which provided a tiny, but maybe not insignificant psychological activation barrier to continuing.)
Where complication is maybe less desirable is in terms of the data we are supplied. Even so, while I didn’t look at, e.g. captains or voyage purpose, I don’t feel it was a detriment to my enjoyment of the scenario and I could have looked at them if I had more time.
One thing that did provide some frustration at the start was separating the planned voyages into columns. Text-to-columns did not work correctly in LibreOffice Calc until I made all the hexes the same number of characters. In Excel on the other hand it immediately worked with dash as a separator. (I ended up switching back to LibreOffice Calc again though when I couldn’t immediately figure out how to use regular expressions in Excel.)
Edit: I agree with abstractapplic that I’d prefer complicated dynamics to arise from simple rules where possible, but also don’t know if that’s practical when setting up a puzzle. I am fine though if they are not simple—in real life things are usually not simple. And, in a sense, extra complications are kind of like random noise when you don’t figure them out, and are fun-to-deduce regularities to the extent you do. Which is OK (or good) either way.