Ultimate Goals in Olympia From: srt@sun-dimas.aero.org (Scott Turner) Date: Thu, 05 Jan 1995 00:40:52 +0000 gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes: >And now your faction has shown its true colors, as the power-hungry >bunch of warmongers that it is. AOO-bashing aside, I'd like to discuss this. First of all, let me say that I love playing Olympia and I think it is a hell of a game. But early on in the game David commented that in the long-term there wasn't much to do in Olympia besides attacking the other players, and I'm inclined to agree with him. I don't see much that will hold a player's long-term interest other than attacking other players. * Exploration is obviously limited, and before you've explored a substantial portion of the map you're likely to have seen all the terrain types and sublocations. * Becoming a "skill king" doesn't seem to hold much interest. The list of skills is readily available, so there's no real joy of discovery. Furthermore, a dedicated player can probably pick up every skill available in 20 turns or so. It takes longer to get all the magic and researchable skills, but is that really so interesting? * I don't find trade routes very interesting. The economic model is too simple and static to hold my interest. The one trade route I am exploiting simply requires cutting and pasting unchanging orders depending upon where my trader is. Not much interest in that. Other ways of making money suffer much the same problem as trade routes. They're static and as ends in themselves not interesting. * Building a castle and garrisoning lands is straightforward and will inevitably bring you into conflict with other players. Even if you find these things initially interesting, I think it is clear that most players will eventually become bored with these things and turn towards conflict with the other players, or drop out of the game. Conflict with other players (and to a certain extent fighting monsters) is more interesting because it is both uncertain and challenging. The Olympia universe is a predictable, deterministic model. The challenge in Olympia comes from competing with and conflicting with the other players. So I think you should expect other players to be "power-hungry warmongers", rather than be surprised by it. I think that there are ways in which the Olympia universe can be made more intrinsicly interesting (mainly by creating more depth and content to the universe) but that's a topic for another discussion. -- Scott T. Referenced By Up