Re: Olympia Economics & Strategic Warfare

From: cedman@714-725-3177.nts.uci.edu (Carl Edman)

Date: Fri, 22 May 1992 15:46:48 +0000

TERANCE CHILDS writes
> Using these kinds of variables will make the game much
> more political oriented, but still allowing players to
> explore the world if they wish to do so. It could also be
> said that after a while, the top twenty players would
> control the world and it would be very hard for newbies
> (such as myself) to stake out a piece of the world. I don't
> know the answer to this problem. Perhaps a solution would
> be to declare a PC the winner after a while and then restart
> the game. Another would be to introduce random
> "events"to shake the foundations of the kings and
> queens. These would include earthquakes, meteor
> strikes, large NPC armies, assasination of PC's by
> NPC's, etc etc. However this would obviously not be fair
> to the PC's affected.

I agree that this would be a problem, but any of your
solutions would be worse than the original problem.
Declaring one PC a winner would destroy one of the most
attractive parts of Olympia - being able to set your own
goals and victory conditions. Who should win ? The PC with
most cities under his control ? The one with the most money
? The one with the most men ? What about people who never
tried to become any of the above but instead to become the
most powerful mage in Olympia (like myself) ? Setting a
victory condition imposes one style of play on the entire
world, much to its impoverishment. And we certainly
don't need any more randomness in Olympia.

No, the real solution to this problem is to ensure
constant warfare. Twenty PCs each with one or two little
cities in constantly changing alliance, making war on
each other and wiping each other out allow a great deal of
upwards mobility even for landless PCs. A baronet who is
about to be wiped out by an opponent both has a great
incentive to hire landless PCs to his side to save him, and
makes a great target for landless PCs who want to organize
a putsch in one of his cities and take them over.

Of course every kinglet desires to become the overking of
all of Olympia. That should be very very very hard and
staying overking should be even harder. One way of making
this hard would be to require every city to have a
governor. And governors should be particularily
susceptible to sudden loyality drops i.e. rebellion.
And the chance of rebellion should possibly even
increase with the amount of time which has passed since
the governor last saw the PC. This would make larger
empires very hard to sustain and would require their
leaders to spend most their time riding from city to city
to prevent (and if necessary squelch) rebellion. Of
course, a rebellious city makes a perfect target for a
landless PC rebel leader.

One other problem would be pacification (and hence
ossificiation) of the entire world by large cooperative
alliances of independent kinglets. These would not
really be subject to the anti-empire rules, but would
have the same deleterious impact. One way to prevent this
might be to make warfare and in particular backstabbing
very profitable.

Carl Edman (BtA[801])

References

Re: Olympia Economics & Strategic Warfare
tchilds@metz.une.oz.au (TERANCE CHILDS)
Fri, 22 May 1992 04:02:20 +0000

Referenced By

Re: Olympia Economics & Strategic Warfare
tchilds@metz.une.oz.au (TERANCE CHILDS)
Fri, 22 May 1992 04:02:20 +0000