Re: Ultimate Goals in Olympia

From: johns@unipalm.co.uk (John Sloan)

Date: Tue, 17 Jan 1995 12:42:55 +0000

srt@sun-dimas.aero.org (Scott Turner) writes:

>I think restricting the number of nobles allowed a player in Olympia
>would address some of the ills in the current Olympia.  At the same
>time, though, I worry that it will take away some of the interest.  To
>judge by the number of players pursuing conquest, the goal of building
>an empire and dominating other players is an important part of the
>current Olympia.

Dominating other players is fine as long as you don't actively detract from
their ability to enjoy the game without good reason.  For instance if you
regard every stack with more than 10 soldiers as a potential military
threat, you are going to kill a lot of starting factions which are still
in their exploration and discovery phase, and nobble a lot of people who
while uncommunicative, aren't a threat.

>Rather than take that away completely, is there some mechanism by
>which that can be made more difficult?  For discussion's sake, suppose
>that adding new nobles to your faction took 1 NP each for the first 5
>added, 2 NPs each for the next 5, 4 NPs each for the next 5 and so on.
>This limit would apply whether nobles were added through CREATE or by
>capture from another player.

Some people find even 10 nobles too time consuming.  [like me, for instance]
It's a question of whether you _want_ people who have more time to have
an advantage in the game or not.  Limiting to 5 nobles means that busier
people can still compete on an equal footing with less busy people, if
nothing else, and I regard that as a feature worth having.

>Something like this (it seems to me) would limit the problem of
>"floodfill" factions without totally removing that motivation from the
>game.

It would limit it only slightly more than it is limited at present.  With
10 nobles, I had three castles and the third largest pile of money in the
playtest game.  And I didn't start on turn one either.  I obviously
hadn't reached my limit of expansion with the nobles I had, yet I was
finding the time taken to submit orders starting to get excessive.  Mind you
this was with faster turns, but the principle stands.

>In fact, I'd still like to see some underlying resource that was used
>to limit development in a variety of areas (nobles, skills, magic,
>etc.) so that concentrating in one area (lots of nobles) would
>necessarily mean limits in other areas (few skills).  I think the fact
>that there is no interdependency between the various advancement areas
>in Olympia is a big problem.

One way to give more variety would be to have the skills you can pick up
from cities be more geographically skewed.  So if you wanted to learn
Necromancy, you could only do it on a certain island.  If you wanted to
learn about Weather Magic, you would have to have a noble half-way around
the world.  This would make gathering all these skills a more challenging task
and would spread factions out a bit, so that a landowner spending all his
noble-days developing his kingdom wouldn't pick up all the skills so quickly.

It isn't a total fix, but it might help.

>					-- Scott T.

John

References

Re: Ultimate Goals in Olympia
srt@sun-dimas.aero.org (Scott Turner)
Mon, 16 Jan 1995 20:36:17 +0000