Re: Olympia and Game Theory (LONG) From: whalen@stromboli.usc.edu (Tim Whalen) Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 00:00:00 +0000 In article <460m9i$fnu@news2.ucsd.edu> wbruvold@weber.ucsd.edu (William Bruvold) writes: > >5. Fixing olympia. > >a. Each faction allowed four "free" skills. Excluding necromancy, >all factions would be allowed to study the first four base skills >free of charge. This would count across the entire faction, so that >if each noble studies combat it would count as 1 skill. > >Erik > A long while back I proposed an Olympia variant where any single faction would be restricted to X skill/spell categories. I'd say that X should be somewhere between one (a Mining faction would be pretty dull, eh?) and seven (minimum required for supermagi...) In alpha I tried to play a religion-based faction and it worked pretty well but I did dabble in the other categories. I think that Rich coincidentally finished the prayer coding at virtually the same instant I joined the game which made me actually useful to lots of factions that had written it off as useless. The specialization in Atlantis II makes it somewhat frustrating. My job there is sort of like the IRS, basically taxing and giving the cash to magic research labs and industrial consortia to play with, as well as some modest defense spending of course. If one had to specialize in Olympia IV folks would pine for the good old days too, I think. I miss my Atlantis I wizards. :>( My two cents on the broke stuff is that 99% of it can be fixed by : A. Adjusting combat ratings (e.g. elite guards), weights (e.g. dragons) etc. B. Revamping the beast breeding charts to slow down production of good beasts (e.g. only chimera + nazgul produce dragons with 25% chance for either parent to die and 50% chance of stillborn baby dragon.) In other words, dragon breeding becomes almost a zero-sum equation. Beasts that fly and/or with high combat ratings should be difficult or impossible to breed. (Sure, why not impossible to breed, for instance, giant birds?) C. Rethinking Faerie, Cloudlands and Hades to discourage the "warp zone" concept. These should be places that anybody *can* get to but that nobody can reasonably aspire to "control" Restrict access absolutely to nobles and non-combat items. (No recruiting, teleporting, breeding, capturing, etc.) Access from Olympia should be dynamic (i.e. locations of faerie hills, mountain under Cloudlands, GYs with Hades access changes every other game year or something...) D. Scaling inner location rewards and making inner loc IDs non-sequential. Prisoners/control artifacts/magic books should be *extremely* rare and require exploration, multiple required artifacts, etc. Those lone centaur guards should have trade goods, artifact weapons or a little gold. Unfortunately, large alliances are able to handle inner locs with item requirements better than lone factions but the required items are always found within a single region so lone factions can toward the netherlands and aspire to success here. Okay, so it was more than two cents... -----------------------------------Tim Whalen----------------------------------- "Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small pox on my mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whisky for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!--and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm 'bout to turn myself loose!" - Mark Twain -----------------------------whalen@lipari.usc.edu------------------------------ Referenced By Up