[Olympia] Suggestions for Changes From: srt@sun-dimas.aero.org (Scott Turner) Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 15:01:49 +0000 I originally posted this only to my alliance list, but Rich asked me to repost it here for wider response... Message-Id: <9408191413.AA03655@sun-dimas.aero.org> To: gl8f@virginia.edu Subject: Suggestion for Changes Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 07:13:13 -0700 From: Scott Turner <srt@sun-dimas.aero.org> Resent-Message-Id: <"cnfvD2.0.cG4.0uBLk"@orion> Resent-From: gl8f@virigina.edu X-Mailing-List: <council> archive/latest/431 X-Loop: gl8f@virginia.edu Precedence: list Resent-Sender: gl8f@virginia.edu Greg -- Please forward this to the rest of the members of the Council for comment. Make sure they send comments to Rich... ========= I have a couple of suggestions for changes to Olympia for Rich, and I thought that I would post them to this entire list for comment, since this list has a number of experienced gamers on it. (1) Exchange items across inner locations. I've been bitten twice by trying to GIVE something to someone in an inner location in a province. Of course you can't do that; you need to enter the inner location before doing the GIVE. But that's a little confusing, because in the turn report you can see the people in the inner location, and the natural assumption is that if you can see them, you can exchange things with them. And there seems to be little reason to require people to enter the inner location to do a GIVE. Since the enter and exit are 0 day commands, it really doesn't add anything more than some extra bookkeeping for the player. My suggestion is to allow GIVE and GET from inner locations to the province (and vice versa) providing the acting unit could do the necessary moves into and out of the inner location (province). The only consequence I can see of this is that you could avoid triggering WAIT loc conditions (i.e., if someone is waiting for a unit to leave an inner location, it will miss the "virtual" exit in the GET command.) But to my mind that's not a big deal. Is there anything I've missed? (2) A mechanism for enforcement of actions. "Do this or else" is something I'd like to be able to say to other players (units). "Pay me 100 gold or I'll attack your ship". "Swear over a noble to me or I'll execute all these prisoners". Etc. Currently the only way to this is something like "Pay me 100 gold this month or I'll attack your ship next month". But that's difficult, because for most actions in Olympia a threat to do something "next month" is easily countered. Prisoners escape; stacks move away. Except with a very large force, a very dedicated player and a fair amount of luck, it is very difficult to enforce any ultimatum. (Even then, "attack a stack" is really the only action that can be achieved.) To me this is a serious shortcoming. On the other hand, I understand and sympathize with the argument about not making Olympia into a programming language. The more general purpose constructs you put into a language, the more they'll be "used to the optimum" by some players. Is there some useful command construct that wouldn't be complicated and badly abused? I was thinking all the lines of an if-then-else with limits on the various parts. The IF part would be a WAIT condition, with the last condition required to be a TIME condition: IF not fog time 7 This will execute the THEN branch if the first condition becomes true before the timeout occurs. The THEN and ELSE branches are limited to a single (non-IF) command, i.e., THEN move ap5p ELSE wait time 0 Here I'm using "WAIT TIME 0" as a no-op. Perhaps you could drop the ELSE if it wasn't needed. Of course, this scheme is limited by the existing conditions, but I think that's not such a big problem, since most situations involve getting or giving resources. Comments? -- Scott T. Referenced By Up