IT manager duels gets a second look and a longer game play session today. After playing the tutorial last week and covering, the basics of game play along with some fundamental mechanics of the game. This week like in the movie Inception, we will be going deeper but not Deep Throat deep as that would be too much for the younger readers. So where do we start? Well maybe we should look at the strategies of winning the single player game.
In the single player game it is you versus the computer who when set to regular difficulty is rather dumb. Nevertheless, what do you expect I am not Ken Jennings nor is the computer the IBM beast of a machine called Watson. However, IT Manager Duels is just a Java applet that is downloaded to your computer’s memory and ran on the local machine. This did not affect the performance of the game on the machine it was running on though. As for strategies what is the key?
When you are logged into the site, you will note at the top of the page the asset store. It is in the asset store that you can purchase new and more powerful assets. After you have played a few rounds you can come here and stack your deck per say. There are only two rules when building your deck. First, you can have no more and no less than a 100 assets in your deck and second the total point value of your deck cannot exceed 10000 points. Furthermore, when playing single player the computer will build its own deck to match the point value of yours.
This means that you have to keep a balance of assets in your deck to cover all the situations you might find yourself in like having your data center flooded or a virus strike. However most disasters can be managed more effectively by having a large staff to deal with it. As the cost of deploying counter measures often exceeds the labor cost to fix it. That disparity is not even close to real-world experience in such situations. In light of this little fact, having a large staff is much more cost effective than deploying expensive counter measures in the game.
Secondly, staff is like land in the card game Magic the Gathering you cannot do anything without a large effective staff. Remember this is a card game you don’t know what cards you are going to draw out of your deck so you might have a 10 or 15 card staff drought at the start of the game that all but guarantees that you are going to lose. If you have no staff you cannot deploy assets or if you have insufficient staff you cannot counter cyber-attacks that take out all of your server farm. Therefore, a winning strategy is to have a quality staff heavy deck, which allows you deploy assets as soon as you get them and quickly recover from IT disasters.
Now that you have a staff heavy deck you can dump all the counter measures out of your deck and load up on attack vectors and more assets. As for attack, vectors do not bother with the ones that only affect one asset get the ones that can take out a whole cluster and hope they do not have the staff to fix it right away. Furthermore, as you win more and build up more career points you can buy more powerful staff and assets for your deck. This allows you to have more options in the strategy you use to build your deck as you can swap out the poor preforming cards and replace them with the ones that are more beneficial to your style of game play.
What does this all have to do with IT management, one would ask. Well sadly, not a lot as it is just a cool tactical trading card game using IT themes. For the lay person though you could learn a bit about some basic ideas related to IT management like disaster preparedness and resource allocation related to job load. However, these same concepts can by learned through other gams like RISK also. Remember a staff heavy deck wins every time.
Works Cited
Intel. (2014, 05 31). IT Manager Duels. Retrieved from Intel: https://itmanagerduels.intel.com/en_us/
Janssen, C. (2014, 05 31). Computer Cluster. Retrieved from techopedia: http://www.techopedia.com/definition/6581/computer-cluster
Sérgio. (2012, 08 09). Jogo da Intel – IT Manager Duels. Retrieved from dicasdosergio: http://www.dicasdosergio.com.br/2012/08/jogo-da-intel-manager-duels/
