@52:43: Ben was wondering about how the AI won a hand. All simples (aka Tanyao) is an easy hand because you can use any combination of number tiles between 1-9. Since 1 and 9 are terminal tiles, they cannot be used to complete a Tanyao. Honor tiles (dragon, wind) also cannot be used in a Tanyao. The hand can also be open, so you don't have to worry about when to call Pon or Chi. Opening your hand of course cheapens the score value further, making Tanyao a relatively cheap hand. Still, it is a useful hand to keep gathering points or to keep the dealer from repeating their turn.
As for a use for honor tiles, you can use them in a hand that otherwise has already been granted a win condition (yaku) to fill the hand. These may include anything from having a concealed hand or/and calling riichi to including a valuable group of honors such as 3 identical dragons or seat/round wind. One important note is that dora (in Mahjong Soul indicated by any shiny tile) aren't by themselves a yaku. Instead, they are han, which increase your hand's value but only count if you otherwise have a valid hand.
One simple example to use honor tiles effectively would be to go All Pon (aka Toitoi). It's a 2-han hand that can be open and includes any matching group of 3 tiles and single pair. Similarly All Kan (Sankantsu) includes 3 Kan and a pair and is also more valuable due to the rarity of getting to call multiple Kans in a single hand of mahjong.
Another more valuable and simple in execution (but a lot harder to actually get!) is Half-Flush (Honitsu), which is using only one suit (bamboo, numbers or circles) in addition to honor tiles.
The key to winning in Mahjong thus becomes being able to combine multiple different kinds of yaku in order to win big like Ben did in his first hand. Ben had a really lucky hand that was able to combine multiple different yaku together to get haneman (18000 points). Let's take a quick look at it:
Double riichi, 2 han: declare riichi on your first discard. Ben already had a valid hand at the beginning, so this applied.
Ippatsu, 1 han: win after calling riichi but before you do your first discard. Ben wins by picking up the winning hand for a Tsumo, meaning this yaku applies. Likewise if Ben had called Ron on any of the 3 discards before his next turn, Ippatsu would have applied.
Fully Concealed Hand, 1 han: default han by winning without calling any Pon, Kan or Chi. Usually combined with Riichi because if you are one tile away from a winning hand, 99% of the time you will call Riichi for the extra yaku and the sweet, sweet han it grants you.
Dora, 2 han: Ben has two of 4-pin (circle) in his hand, which is a dora tile for this round (as indicated by the dead wall1). Including any dora in your hand will automatically grant you one han per tile.
Ura dora, 0 han: in a real life game of mahjong, Ura dora is indicated by picking up the section of the dead wall with the dora and looking at what the tile underneath is. In Ben's case the tile was Red Dragon, meaning the White Dragon would be the valuable dora. The order for dragons goes White -> Green -> Red -> back to White.
1 the dead wall is usually not fully visible in a digital mahjong game because you also don't have the actual walls visible. Dead wall, as the name implies, is a collection of 14 tiles (7 stacks of two) that contains tiles that are not available in the current game. Because of this, the dora indicates the next tile in sequence that will be the actual valuable tile. Thus, it is possible that 4 of the indicated tiles are in play.
Abby, your Thirteen Deadly Sims was the reason I became a premium subscriber. Thanks for all the extremely good and entertaining video content! See ya later!
I did not play the campaign with RTX and boy is the section at around 11:38 different. The corridor between the two rooms was just a black hole with no light. The raytraced puddles make a huge difference here which kinda leads me to believe it's an oversight in the level design.
Abby's experience is similar to mine and based on these comments, a lot of other people's as well! The first few games are hard as balls but suddenly the game just "clicks" around the first remix. It's not so much reacting to the rhythm but actually becoming one with it that takes a while.
I knew from the moment I started this game that this was a game designed for Vinny. Good stuff, hope you keep at it!
One big pro-tip to Vinny and anyone else: object's mass is displayed on top of your O2 meter on the right. You can use this to discern whether or not the object you are pointing at is connected to something or not. Ships weigh in tens of tons so if that hull piece you're trying to cut off is not significantly lower than that (in the tons for grade 5 ships), it's not disconnected yet. Airlocks and cockpits are usually the reason the hull is still connected. They require some more fine cuts to get the hull off intact.
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