Re: Thoughts wanted...

From: Rob Alexander <robnews@nospam.demon.co.uk>

Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Upon the day of Thu, 29 Jan 1998, EricSum <ericsum@aol.com> scrawled on
the wall (in blood):
>Some of the startup formats I have considered:
>
>1 - Everyone starts on the same planet and moves out from there, like BSE. The
>players would be safe around the startup planet but on their own after moving
>away from there.

This sounds good. Under this system, everything in the game will be
player-created, which is always good (when it works).

>2 - Players start in different portions of the galaxy. Let's say that there are
>4 possible startup places, players would be distributed around the galaxy as
>they sign up for the game. The starting planets would be safe havens.

This would almost certainly create default 'nations', based around the
starting points, unless they were all very close together. It might be a
good idea to make the areas surrounding the start points distinct from
each other (in terms of resources etc.), thereby encouraging players to
move between areas.

>3 - Two startup places, on opposite ends of the galaxies. Players who start on
>Planet X have no knowledge and would be given no info on players who started on
>planet Y. When ships from X and Y meet, they are not given email addresses or
>anything like that, their turn reports do not indicate in any way whether the
>ship they are encountering is player run or computer run. I thought for a while
>that this might be interesting, but have pretty much decided against it, unless
>you all can give me a good reason and some ideas for doing it this way.

I don't think that this would work, although if there were genuine
computer players as well it my work up to a point. If there were more
than two groups, it might work better; after playing for some time, you
might know that one group were human, but be uncertain about the rest.

>4 - Every player has a planet. Each player would start on their own planet with
>one ship and one small base. Startup planets would not be safe havens.
>Newcomers who show up later in the game would have to lay really low or
>immediately find an ally to help defend their homeworld until they could do so
>themselves.

--
Rob Alexander
                You _may_ need to replace 'nospam' with 'mhairi' to reply
http://www.mhairi.demon.co.uk

References

Thoughts wanted...
ericsum@aol.com (EricSum)
Thu, 29 Jan 1998 00:00:00 +0000