Re: Ongoing Strategy Games.

From: wbruvold@weber.ucsd.edu (William Bruvold)

Date: Mon, 05 Jul 1993 03:39:15 +0000

In article <1993Jul4.125342.27117@cs.tcd.ie> rwallace@cs.tcd.ie (Russell Wallace) writes:
>js138@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Sloan) writes:

>>I offer here just one possible method.  There are many.
>
>>The larger a players position gets, the harder it is to maintain that position
>>without help.  Either the player spends an increasing ammount of his positions
>>power in maintaining the status quo, or he is forces to go into partnership with

THen Rusell writes....

>
>I don't like this idea because the player who's built up a big empire
>ends up being penalized, not for incompetence, but for competence, which
>in my view is a totally perverse and irrational thing to do.

A coupld of observations:
1)  That may be your feelings but Atlantis does have something like
this built into the game system with the 3 mage per faction limit.
There are incentives to bring players together to get a larger
number of mages concentrated together against a group of players
that while old may not have as many "factions" in it and hence less
mages.

2)  I don't think it "penalizes" players at all.  It simply builds
into game design something that has been a problem for all
political/military organizations _EXCEPT_ those found on computers
or on board games, the difficulty of diseconomies of scale which are
reached in all empires.  Eventually it is just to difficult to run
things in the province four vallies over so you hire a baron to do
it for you (who may or may not decide to cut a deal with the other
king? ;-)  )  What it does do is encourage "empire builders" to
remain good diplomats/politicians and not simply efficient military
tacticians.

ERik

References

Ongoing Strategy Games.
js138@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Sloan)
Sun, 04 Jul 1993 03:24:37 +0000
Re: Ongoing Strategy Games.
rwallace@cs.tcd.ie (Russell Wallace)
Sun, 04 Jul 1993 12:53:42 +0000