Your outrageous high score is breaking the endless leaderboard UI! Well done :)
I get your point about the pausing concern. I've actually thought about that in past playtests and I think the long-term solution for these things is likely even more drastic: increasing the difficulty of the procedural gens incrementally more after X levels have passed. And/or capping the winnable time back from solving every consecutive level after the first Y. There are lots of interesting things that can be explored in this area - see the last section of the original echo chess writeup.
Awesome to hear you reached LEVEL 157 in one run! Curious if you got taken by the 'one more turn syndrome' [0] in that session, or if you had embarked on this run with a clear goal of surpassing 100,000,000?
And please make sure to ice those fingers. echo chess cannot be held liable for finger damage.
Increasing the difficulty over time sounds fun! As an idea, there could also be multiple endless modes which either have faster/slower ramp-ups, start "further into" the difficulty, or just have fixed "easy," "medium," "hard," and "ramp-up" (curve).
To be honest, at first, it was less of an urge to get "one more turn" in and more of an urge to make sure I had beat my original high score. Once I surpassed it, I was trying to see how long I could survive without running out of time. It was at that point where I realized I could keep going forever without running out of time (I could recoup more time than I spent, and I would regularly hit 99 capped time). After this revelation, I set a goal of going until my hands got tired. Once my hands got tired, I almost succumbed to the "one more turn syndrome," but after moving (I believe) one piece, my score had a nice 3-digit repeating pattern and was a round number, so I called it quits.
Luckily(?), my hands have made it through games that are far more torturous on the fingers (though it has been a while).
I get your point about the pausing concern. I've actually thought about that in past playtests and I think the long-term solution for these things is likely even more drastic: increasing the difficulty of the procedural gens incrementally more after X levels have passed. And/or capping the winnable time back from solving every consecutive level after the first Y. There are lots of interesting things that can be explored in this area - see the last section of the original echo chess writeup.
Awesome to hear you reached LEVEL 157 in one run! Curious if you got taken by the 'one more turn syndrome' [0] in that session, or if you had embarked on this run with a clear goal of surpassing 100,000,000?
And please make sure to ice those fingers. echo chess cannot be held liable for finger damage.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)