Idea for Galaxy variant From: mckinney@cs.utexas.edu (Durwood Y. McKinney) Date: Thu, 01 Oct 1992 03:23:33 +0000 I was thinking about Galaxy the other day, and an interesting variant came to mind. What if each player had a secret power that benefitted their race in some way? Like say, the ability to spend x amount of production to spy on an enemy planet, or the ability to make 1 group of ships per turn move faster than normal, or something like that. You'd need 64+ powers defined, and this number would be a limit on the number of players that could be in a game. Furthermore, what if when you killed a player you acquired their original power? (I don't know, studying the ruins just before you nuke them to oblivion, or capturing slaves of the destroyed player's race). Killing a player would involve both nuking the home planet and having no more of the race's colonies around. Anyone could nuke the colonies, but only the person who bombed the home planet would get the power. If 2 or more races participated in a homeworld battle, the one with the highest number of weapon factors surviving, modified for tech, would get the power. If you take someone out you get only their original power, not all the others they have accumulated. All powers would be secret. They might at times be revealed through usage. So the game would get kind of a cosmic-encounter or Illuminati type feel to it, as well as the traditional galaxy stuff. Of course, the hard part is coming up with 64 or so well-balanced powers. Ken McKinney Referenced By Up