Re: Olympia reviews/post-mortem

From: sjc@cs.purdue.edu (Steve Chapin)

Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 02:04:58 +0000

Disclaimer:  I was the first Olympia player, and as time went on
became a co-developer, so my view is quite probably biased.

I think that yes, Olympia was about to become stagnant, but not
because of anything wrong with Olympia.  It is true that everyone who
wanted to be was loaded with money, but that had been fixed (or we had
designs to fix it before we took Oly down).

The problem with that run of Oly was that we fixed bugs as we found
them, but as in any playtest, certain people had gained advantages
from the bugs that weren't available after the fix.  Thus, certain
older players (like, say, Rocko 'The Truth' Zigarelli), had all the
money they wanted, highly skilled units, etc.

In a "fresh start" game, I would not have had all those advantages.
One of the tweaks to the economic system was to put in limited
resources, so that infinite growth wasn't possible.  In Oly I, it
wasn't only possible, it was easy :-)  Not quite so easy as in T'Nyc,
but still easy.  The game had degenerated into a "form as many units
as one can so as to keep up with the Joneses."  Then, we plugged the
economic holes, and suddenly there were more units than there was work
for them to do.  Had we finished the fixes to the economic system, we
would've seen a collapse of Olympian society, as units died of
starvation, and went on rampages, etc., until a stable point was
reached with much smaller average faction size.

In short, things had gotten so far skewed that we decided it would be
better to take Oly down.  Of course, we immediately started on a
rewrite, and I got sidetracked by this little dissertation thing.  So,
Oly II is not ready yet.

But when it is, you can be sure it'll be complex enough to make
Russell Wallace nauseous :-)

sjc@cs.purdue.edu                 Steve Chapin                 ...!purdue!sjc
                    Those two want to go to the zoo, too!
                 They're aware bears bare their hair there.

"Anyway, distributed shared memory is the worst idea since ioctl()."
                                  -Rob Pike

References

Olympia reviews/post-mortem
troyer@cgl.ucsf.edu (John M. Troyer)
Wed, 21 Apr 1993 21:53:50 +0000

Referenced By

Olympia reviews/post-mortem
troyer@cgl.ucsf.edu (John M. Troyer)
Wed, 21 Apr 1993 21:53:50 +0000