Re: Ongoing Strategy Games.

From: rwallace@cs.tcd.ie (Russell Wallace)

Date: Sun, 04 Jul 1993 12:53:42 +0000

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.

>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
>other players, increasing the ammount of communication required, and increasing
>the chance of being betrayed.  This fits well into a feudal model where the
>ammount of influence one noble could exert was limited by the need to travel from
>place to place, and subordinates coulnd't always be trusted.

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.

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.)

--
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwallace@cs.tcd.ie

References

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

Referenced By

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