Re: Olympia

From: khearn@pyramid.com (Keith Hearn)

Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 00:00:00 +0000

In article <3uc9o9$hlp@grapevine.lcs.mit.edu>, Chris Conley  <quixote> wrote:
>wbruvold@weber.ucsd.edu (William Bruvold) wrote:
>>Some solutions would be to require maintanence of beast stacks
>>necessary or to make it impossible to have more than one/two kinds
>>of monsters in the same stack.  THat would at least have slowed down
>>the "vacuum cleaner" strategy.
>
>I'm really not sure how to handle this.  Lengthening the time required
>to Breed might help (it's rather impressive that a beastmaster can
>produce a full-grown Dragon in 6 days!).  Adding a cash maintenance
>seems somewhat silly; what about having a fixed %age of the beasts
>"escape" each month?  Reducing the capture rate might help as well.

I don't see what's silly at all about charging a cash maintenance for
  animals. Ever own an elephant? I'll bet Hannibal spent plenty to
  take his elephants over the alps. Large, dangerous animals aren't
  generally cheap to keep. I expect dragons require plenty of food,
  all of meat, no doubt. They probably go through handlers fairly quickly
  as well. I doubt a noble leading a stack of 200 dragons is dealing
  with each one individually.

Maybe that's the key. A beastmaster can only have a limited number of
  beasts in his stack. Any more than that, and there's a chance of them
  either escaping, or attacking the rest of the stack. That might help
  out some.

I think beastmastery is *way* too powerful. For the same amount of
  effort as learning to be persuasive, you get the ability to have
  complete and total control of huge, maintenance-free armies made up
  of units that are far and away stronger than any possible humans.
  Beastmastery, as it stands, seems to be more powerful than most
  branches of magic, yet you can have every noble in your faction
  learn it, easily.

I'll bet if beasts started costing in proportion to their strength,
  you'd see these huge beast-stacks start to melt down to a more
  reasonable size.

Keith Hearn

References

Re: Olympia
morrow@gandalf.rutgers.edu (John Morrow)
Fri, 14 Jul 1995 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Olympia
dave806459@aol.com (Dave806459)
Sat, 15 Jul 1995 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Olympia
wbruvold@weber.ucsd.edu (William Bruvold)
Sun, 16 Jul 1995 00:00:00 +0000

Referenced By

Re: Olympia
morrow@gandalf.rutgers.edu (John Morrow)
Fri, 14 Jul 1995 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Olympia
dave806459@aol.com (Dave806459)
Sat, 15 Jul 1995 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Olympia
wbruvold@weber.ucsd.edu (William Bruvold)
Sun, 16 Jul 1995 00:00:00 +0000