Re: Alliance Victories in Galaxy

From: slothoub@cs.utwente.nl (Frans Slothouber)

Date: Tue, 04 Feb 1997 00:00:00 +0000

Tim Hughes (ac804@dial.pipex.com) wrote:
: Tim Franklin wrote:
: >
[Snip]
: > On the subject, are there any pointers to how these scores are determined
: > / awarded?  I'm about to start running a Galaxy game, and I'm worried I'm
: > missing something glaringly obvious...
: >
: > TIA
: > Tim.
: >
: > --
: > Tim Franklin        tim@leaphome.demon.co.uk              Powered by
: >                     http://www.flibble.org/~death              Linux

: Tim,

: I believe that the Galaxy 3.5 rules state:-

> "Winning a Galaxy game is simple in concept: you must have completely
> exterminated all other races. When a race has no planets or ships
> left, it is declared extinct and deleted from the database.

> "Note that alliance victories are NOT allowed; there can be only ONE
> winner.

[snip]

> The total number of victory points on offer is usually the number of
> races at the start of the game.

> Some GM's (including Franz) allow alliance victories.  Points are then
> split according to some prearranged formula.  Commonly this would be
> total industry or perhaps "Effective Industry".

OK this is the rule for GalaxyNG

At the end of the game, players that were no longer active or that had
a population and industry of 0 are removed.  The remaining players are
sorted according to effective industry.

Say we get the following list

1 Player_1
2 Player_2
3 Player_3
4 Player_3

and suppose the game started with N players,  then the
victory points are computed as follows:

Player 1 gets   N   points
Player 2 gets   N/2 points
Player 3 gets   N/3 points
Player 4 gets   N/4 points
etc

Please notice that there is no mention of alliances!  The only purpose
of this formule is to acknoledge that the 2nd, 3rd, etc players also
put a lot of work in getting that far in a game, and are therefore
should be allowed some points also.  But still the far most points go
to the winner of the game.

I agree that this method is not perfect, but it is the best we
could come up with sofar.   A better method would be to have a system
similar to the chess ratings where your rating is based on the rating
of the players that you beat, but I would not know how to compute that.

As to alliances, I have the following rule for alliances, the players
in an alliance can divide their total victory points in any way they please..
so for instance if Player 1 and Player 2 have are allies, they can
divide N+N/2 points between them.    However in all the games
that ended sofar no-one has used that possibility.  And in the light
of Tim criticism  the rule might be abandoned.

If anyone has better I ideas for a rating system, this is the
place to express them...

For the current hall of fame based on a number of GalaxyNG games
run by me and Tommy Linqvist  see

http://wwwtios.cs.utwente.nl/~slothoub/Galaxy/

> This seems like a good point to air a long-standing grumble of mine:-
> I don't approve of alliance victories.  My objection is that they
> unbalance the game and destroy the best part of a Galaxy game.

[snip  see previous article]

> and shields.  Defeating an widely spread well-armed and usually
> experience player is hard.  Who knows, you might lose :-), but I
> guarantee you will have a very exciting and tense series of turns to
> prepare.  Bring back the Galaxy endgame.

> NO MORE ALLIANCE VICTORIES!

I would like to know from Tim if he thinks about the way the
victory points are divided in GalaxyNG...  and if he things
his criticism still applies when  the alliance rule is removed.

Have Fun,
Frans.            <-- that Frans with an 's' btw :o)

--
( Frans Slothouber, Centre for Telematics and Information Technology )
(       www.xs4all.nl/~slothoub      slothoub@cs.utwente.nl          )

References

Re: -- Galaxy Matrix Ended --
tim@leaphome.demon.co.uk (Tim Franklin)
Fri, 31 Jan 1997 00:00:00 +0000
Alliance Victories in Galaxy
Tim Hughes <ac804@dial.pipex.com>
Mon, 03 Feb 1997 00:00:00 +0000
-- Galaxy Matrix Ended --
slothoub@cs.utwente.nl (Frans Slothouber)
Tue, 28 Jan 1997 00:00:00 +0000