Re: MMOG PBM stategy game, your opinion?

From: keenuward@hotmail.com (Rob Alexander)

Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 12:03:03 +0000

spambucket666au@yahoo.com.au (steve) wrote in message news:<433ffd38.0301102127.49a1e854@posting.google.com>...
> This game would generate personal turn reports.  But the UI would be
> for order entry and validation, using an online map for locating and
> moving things.  I find email text entry tedious and error prone.

This sounds very like the mechanism used by Total Conquest - you can
play the solo game for free, so I suggest you have a look. The game
provides full information about your position as an attractive colour
PDF, and to enter your orders you run a graphical client program,
which provides a colour map which you can click on, etc.

Only issue from my personal perspective is that you have to be online
to use the client, as it downloads your position status from their
server every time you run it.

The client is written in Java and used Java Web Start to provide stuff
like updating to the latest version. Disadvantage is that players have
download the Java runtime before they can use it, this might put off
some less technical players, or those who only have dialup internet.

I would prefer a client that used files for transferring position
status and my orders, since i only have a dialup connection at home.
There's no technical reason why this couldn't be fully graphical.

I would agree that I find coded orders a chore these days. It's
somehow more annoying to type them in or code them in a client program
than it was to write them on paper forms back when I played by postal
mail.

> How many games are you aware of that use take the multi-player per
> empire option?

Not many, as such. Phoenix, Beyond the Stellar Empire and the
forthcoming Tales of the Haven Expanse are the best examples I know
of. They are all open-ended science fiction games that focus on
conflict between empires. The basic game unit is the individual ship,
ground party or colony, and each player joins a faction, with an
appointed faction leader etc. This approach helps to smooth entry for
new players and seems to foster a friendly game community that keeps
players coming back.

You also have games like Quest (KJC again) where the basic unit of
control is a party of adventuring heroes, which can join an alliance,
fight other alliances etc. Alternatively, they can just wander off and
kill monsters, though they will be missing out on many aspects of the
game.

> Yeah, I suspect that the audience will end up being more the older
> 'traditional gamer' set than the RTS online set.  Im hoping that the
> monetary issue is less important to this audience than the quality of
> the game.

Search rec.games.pbm for 'survey' or 'engineer', there's some
interesting comments on this.

> How many of these people are out there?  2000 players for that
> previous game you mentioned is encouraging.

Hmmm...not that many, these days. I think Eressea managed that many
players because (a) it's free and (b) it was originally in German so
is attractive to native German-speakers. Also, I don't know how
accurate that figure is.

In terms of current commercial games, it's hard to get hard facts
since the information is commercially sensitive. I know that Phoenix
has over a hundred, DungeonWorld I would guess five hundred.

With modern presentation a la Total Conquest, you might be able to
pull in a whole new group of players.

Another issue is subscription pricing, most of the commercial games
I've mentioned use some kind of per-turn pricing, or pricing that
varies with position size. To my mind this is daft in this day and
age, and probably more of a turn off to new players than a
subscription is.

Couldn't say for sure, though. You'd need to do proper market
research, which is hard on a small budget. I imagine the big computer
games companies have done research on pricing models, though, maybe
you could find someone in the industry who knows what the consensus
was from that.

rob

References

Re: MMOG PBM stategy game, your opinion?
keenuward@hotmail.com (Rob Alexander)
Fri, 10 Jan 2003 11:50:44 +0000
Re: MMOG PBM stategy game, your opinion?
spambucket666au@yahoo.com.au (steve)
Sat, 11 Jan 2003 05:27:08 +0000
MMOG PBM stategy game, your opinion?
spambucket666au@yahoo.com.au (steve)
Fri, 10 Jan 2003 02:36:15 +0000

Referenced By

Re: MMOG PBM stategy game, your opinion?
keenuward@hotmail.com (Rob Alexander)
Fri, 10 Jan 2003 11:50:44 +0000
Re: MMOG PBM stategy game, your opinion?
spambucket666au@yahoo.com.au (steve)
Sat, 11 Jan 2003 05:27:08 +0000
MMOG PBM stategy game, your opinion?
spambucket666au@yahoo.com.au (steve)
Fri, 10 Jan 2003 02:36:15 +0000