Re: Ongoing Strategy Games.

From: js138@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Sloan)

Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1993 13:34:54 +0000

|> Why not try doing it the way the Legends games do? Give the players a list
|> of possible orders as long as your arm. Require parts of the to be written
|> in a particular order (Force manipulation then Transfer and Training then
|> General). Have some quite complex order formats.
|>
|> With this method controlling a small position is easy, its a short task to
|> check everything you have written. When you get to `big' positions and have
|> 200ish orders to write you are bound to make mistakes which usually foul
|> you up. eg. Our faction leader in RTI 3 (UK) was going to transfer a Priest
|> into a force belonging to me, he wrote the wrong Character number on the
|> order, it failed, the priest then left with the force he wasn't supposed to
|> be in any more and ended up miles away. The position was so big he didn't
|> have any spare movement orders (the number of movement orders doesn't scale
|> linearly with the size of the order sheet) so the priest is now on his way
|> back, approximately 3 months later!
|>
|> ---
|> Phillip Fayers                           JANET    : P.Fayers@uk.ac.cf.astro
|> SunAdmin/Support/Programming (TM)        INTERNET : P.Fayers@astro.cf.ac.uk
|> University of Wales, College of Cardiff  phone    : 0222 874000 ext 5282
|> Department of Physics and Astronomy
|> P.O. Box 913, Cardiff, CF2 3QD.
|>

This is bad.  Most games don't try to simulate difficulty of running an empire by
making it difficult in real life for a reason.  Its no fun to have your empire
trashed because you missed a decimal point somewhere in your 300 orders.

And besides, it boils down to who has written the better turn-checker to check
their orders for typos and mistakes.

If you want a random chance for a certain order to fail, the have it implemented
in the game system - don't increase the ammount of effort required to submit
error-free orders.

References

Re: Ongoing Strategy Games.
pmf@astro.cf.ac.uk (Phillip Fayers)
Thu, 08 Jul 1993 11:28:46 +0000
Re: Ongoing Strategy Games.
bruno@cerberus.csd.uwm.edu (Bruno Wolff III)
Thu, 08 Jul 1993 05:23:36 +0000