Re: PBM design and formulae - getting hotter From: bc@lnec.pt (Luis Miguel Sequeira) Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1993 09:13:36 +0000 Before I start this letter, I wish only to inform you that I am currently unable to read rec.games.design (in fact, rec.games.pbm is one of the exceptional newsgroups I read here, thanks to Greg Lindahl). Thus, I hope that, even if the questions issued here are really DESIGN questions, they are PBeM questions nevertheless, so I hope this thread will stay here in rec.games.pbm so that I (and perhaps others without access to rec.games.design) can still follow it, and draw from it hours of endless satisfaction... :-) js138@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Sloan) wrote: >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. Well, my answer is simply: 1) You CAN'T prevent "oldtimers" to beat "newbies" (at least, all other things favouring the newbie, oldtimers will know the game better); 2) This is, in fact, quite realistic! Consider a nation like Portugal, which doesn't even have any nuclear power plants. If we tried to build a nuclear spaceship in competition with the Americans (say, both countries did realize that having the _first_ nuclear powered spaceship would get them first to that gold mines on Pluto :-) ), who do you think that would win? :-) Obviously, starting earlier gives you an advantage; that's true for real life, and that's true for games, too. What DOESN'T automatically follow from this is that a newbie is always in disadvantage. You can be a stupid player like myself, who'd play the same game for five years, but never really could figure out the rules! :-) Thus, any newbie could beat me easily... :-) 3) If you're penalizing experience, something is inherently wrong with your system. - At present, there are two solutions which I know of, and both of them are present at Russell's games (so, after all, he can't be such a bad guy... :-) ). 1) Start many new games, with a limited amount of players on each. This is what happens in Galaxy, and also in Diplomacy. GMs generally point out the level of experience they're expecting the players to come with. 2) See Russell's own post: >The way I do it in Atlantis is simply to start up batches of newbies at >a sufficient distance from older empires so that the older empires can't >just come along and overrun them. (I would only start up a new player >in the same region as an established player, if there wasn't going to be >competition between them, e.g. if the new player didn't want to go into >the empire-building business, and the established player was prepared to >leave him in peace.) eg. have a mega-hyper-super-large game map, and put players in clusters, according to their experience. At the time a large empire is established, and it spreads over the map, time has elapsed and the newbies on the other side of the map will most surely be apt to defend their lands for themselves. This is exactly the kind of situation best explained on the post by Carl Edman: it's realistic, after all... --- Personally, I prefer open-ended games with _very_ large maps, and clusters of players, instead of small games with a limited amount of players. It has to due with a certain sense of "belonging". That is, you are actually one of the 9,000+ factions living on The World of X. Obviously, you won't _ever_ meet any of those 9,000 faction, perhaps just a few dozens, but you hear astonishing news from the other side of the world which seem to be quite fascinating... well, you know. All those types of games generally feature a newsletter of some kind. Whereas a small game like Diplomacy for 7 is not so, ah, how should I put it? You simply don't "attach" yourself so much to the game. It has to do with a certain way of look at things (ie. via the role-playing gamer eyes, of course). - Luis Sequeira _________________________________________________________________________ / / Computer scientists do it byte by byte. _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/_/ _/_/ _/ We don't ask for miracles to get the job _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ done, we RELY upon them! _/ _/ _/ _/ If the job still isn't done, we'll stick _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ with Emacs instead... bc@lnec.pt Luis Miguel Sequeira Laboratorio Nacional de Engenharia Civil Phone 351-1-8482131 Ext. 2752 Centro Informatica/Grupo Sistemas Centrais "Don't call me, I'll call you" Av. Brasil, 101 - 1700 Lisboa, Portugal / _________________________________________________________________________/ Referenced By Up