Re: why noone plays best game around?

From: krumm@informatik.tu-muenchen.de (Jens-Michael Krumm)

Date: Tue, 09 May 1995 00:00:00 +0000

In article <3oc2mi$414@tang.ccr-p.ida.org>, desj@ccr-p.ida.org (David desJardins) writes:
>Greg Lindahl <gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU> writes:
>
>> Part of why it isn't discussed much is probably because it's a pretty
>> simple game, not to mention that it's kind of like the free game
>> "xconq", not to mention Walter Bright's Empire Deluxe.
>
>It's hard to believe that these reasons have anything to do with it.
>I've never noticed originality of game design being a crucial
>requirement for r.g.pbm discussions, or for success in pbm moderation.
>Furthermore WC does have many original concepts, including an
>implementation of phased movement, which make it much more suitable for
>pb(e)m play than XConq or Empire Deluxe.

WC looks simple but it is very hard to create succesfull strategies
against experienced enemies. There are many ways to attack fast and
hard and there are even more concepts to defend. But if the enemy is
prepared for your defence you even lose more...
It may be simple but it's very good. The best game? I don't know but
for me it is one of the TOP games (Others: Adventurer Kings, a bug-free
legends would be, too, Scenario - a german game...)

>I think the main reason is that WC is not really playable by email.  As
>I understand it, you can only play the game in two ways: (1) sending and
>receiving paper mail; (2) sending and receiving binary files and viewing
>them using a proprietary PC viewer program.  Most of the discussion here
>revolves around games which are playable by sending and receiving
>text-formatted turns and orders by email, because historically most of
>the people who had access to Usenet interacted with it through Unix
>machines rather than PCs.

The files used for the PC viewer programm are text files. There may be
some problematic ASCII chars in them but mostly it's plain text!
It would be easy to make the files InterNetAble :-) Only problem may
be the size. In advanced stage the turns really can become BIG.

Another problem is the viewer. But maybe the viewer is written in an
useful language (like C) and then it might be easy to bring it to
UNIX, too (the viewer is good looking but uses only a special
character set, nothing hard to code).

JENS

--
         Jens Krumm         email: krumm@informatik.tu-muenchen.de
Schochenbergstr. 26         CompuServe: 100024,2707
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References

why noone plays best game around?
GEORGE CAMPBELL <70523.2375@CompuServe.COM>
Mon, 01 May 1995 00:00:00 +0000
Re: why noone plays best game around?
gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Mon, 01 May 1995 00:00:00 +0000
Re: why noone plays best game around?
desj@ccr-p.ida.org (David desJardins)
Thu, 04 May 1995 00:00:00 +0000