Re: More Arguments. Favourite games.

From: rwallace@esatclear.ie (Russell Wallace)

Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 01:18:16 +0000

On Fri, 13 Apr 2001 00:42:45 +0000 (UTC), lindahl@pbm.com (Greg
Lindahl) wrote:

>Right. So the other mechanisms that I've seen have not done that well,
>either. The silliest (no offense, Geoff) was the "choose 1 of magic,
>war, or trade". I got 2 allies and did the obvious thing, and it was
>just as bad as the playtest.

Yeah, we realized that at the time; it was still the best idea either
of us could think of. At least it meant you couldn't recruit a fire
team of 50 mages even if you had the cash for it.

>So if we were starting afresh, what new, clever idea would people
>pick?

For Cosmos (still on the shelf until I can think of ways to fix the
flaws in the economic model that have been pointed out to me, and find
the time to design and implement the fixes... open ended game design
ain't easy :P) I had the idea of charging faction points for several
different things:

- special characters with important skills
- each character learning Psionics skills (functional equivalent of
magic)
- each kind of economic activity you do (e.g. first factory, first
shipyard etc. cost faction points)
- each location you have production facilities in
- each location you have political control over

and use the Oly 2 model of slowly gain faction points over time, never
lose or transfer them. How well this would work in practice has yet to
be seen.

>BTW, I looked into adding noble points into the Atlantis source code,
>and it was easy, easier than fixing all of Russel's O(N^2) algorithms
>with O(1) and O(NlogN) algorithms.

This sort of thing is, I suspect, a more important reason for more
programs not being open source than it's commonly credited to be :)

--
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
mailto:rwallace@esatclear.ie
http://www.esatclear.ie/~rwallace

References

Re: More Arguments. Favourite games.
rwallace@esatclear.ie (Russell Wallace)
Fri, 13 Apr 2001 00:17:12 +0000
Re: More Arguments. Favourite games.
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Fri, 13 Apr 2001 00:42:45 +0000
More Arguments. Favourite games.
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Mon, 09 Apr 2001 20:49:16 +0000
Re: More Arguments. Favourite games.
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Mon, 09 Apr 2001 23:47:54 +0000

Referenced By

Re: More Arguments. Favourite games.
rwallace@esatclear.ie (Russell Wallace)
Fri, 13 Apr 2001 00:17:12 +0000
Re: More Arguments. Favourite games.
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Fri, 13 Apr 2001 00:42:45 +0000
More Arguments. Favourite games.
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Mon, 09 Apr 2001 20:49:16 +0000
Re: More Arguments. Favourite games.
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Mon, 09 Apr 2001 23:47:54 +0000