Re: Ongoing Strategy Games.

From: markiel@callisto.pas.rochester.edu (Andrew Markiel)

Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1993 07:36:00 +0000

In article <1993Jul4.032437.25823@infodev.cam.ac.uk> js138@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Sloan) writes:
>Another topic for your perusal.
>
>Given an ongoing strategy/wargame (such as Atlantis appears to be) - what
>is the best way to prevent older players with larger more powerful factions
>from domination the game?
>
>My premise here is that starting earlier shouldn't be a longterm advantage
>over someone who starts later.  Both players should have an equal chance
>to rise from obscurity to a certain level of power.
>
An idea that I like is to arrange for beginning players and experienced
players to be on the same "team". For an ongoing game, this means that
the beginner will start out under the wing of an established player,
and thus have some measure of defense. Furthermore (and this is true
for any game) if they are on the same team, then the experienced player
has an incentive to see the beginner do well: so for example he would
catch and correct obvious mistakes that would severly hurt a beginner,
as well as giving tricks and tactics..this helps increase the information
turnover and reduce the "win through obscure knowledge" factor.

One way to do this in an ongoing game is to consider very large empires.
In real life, as the empire grew larger, more and more power would be
held by subordinates, vassals, lower level commanders, whatever. So, an
idea would be to break off a piece of the empire and place it under
control of the beginning player, but still under view and command of
the experienced player. This reduces the load on the experienced
player, while giving the beginner a nice niche in which to game.

Just a thought.

-Andrew
markiel@callisto.pas.rochester.edu

References

Ongoing Strategy Games.
js138@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Sloan)
Sun, 04 Jul 1993 03:24:37 +0000