Re: More Arguments. Favourite games.

From: srt@xkey.com (Scott Turner)

Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 19:05:32 +0000

A TAG player pointed me at this (interesting) discussion, so I thought
I'd throw out a few comments.

NPs serve a very important game function in Olympia/TAG.  However,
I've never much liked the implementation -- it seems a little too
intrusive and out-of-context to me.

When I've designed games from scratch, I've leaned towards including
self-balancing mechanisms.  (One of the great things about designing
computer games -- as opposed to board games -- is that you can include
hideously complex game mechanisms :-) Arena has a number of these
sorts of features.  For example, the markets are all based on supply
and demand.  If players discover that broadswords are very effective
weapons, then the run on broadswords in the markets will drive the
price of broadswords up, automatically making them less effective
weapons.  Similar mechanisms are at work behind the scenes in other
parts of the game.

The advantage of these sorts of mechanisms is that they aren't limited
to the game designer's pre-conceived (and often incorrect :-) notion
of how the game will be played.  As long as the general principle
(e.g., "maintain a balance between cost & demand") is correct, it
produces good results.  And they can usually be blended unobtrusively
into the game.

Incidentally, TAG definitely does not have Conservation of NPs.  NPs
are really the only currency of value in Oly, and it seems silly to me
to have a game where you cannot lose the only thing of value.  (Rich &
I have argued over this in the past. :-) But what TAG does do is
prevent you from capturing NPs from players within your own nation;
this limits the amount of "abuse the new player" that tends to go on
otherwise.

Enno mentioned that one problem he's had with Olympia is the pain of
getting complex order sets (or even simple ones) correct.  It's a
common complaint.  TAG has simplified some mechanisms, added aliasing,
and (perhaps most importantly) added some extensive error checking
mechanisms that have reduced that problem.  When players submit orders
they get back an argument-checked, commented interpretation from the
order processor:

give garrison 36     # give all skirmisher [36] to garrison
   move t91             # move to The Den of Thieves [t91]

Again, one of the nice things you can do with a computer game is make
the computer work really hard to reduce the uninteresting stuff the
player has to do.

Without turning this into a complete advertisement, I'll mention that
there is a "novice game" of TAG that anyone can play for free for 20
turns or so (which is half a year!) and that the newest closed-ended
game is about to start up, which is a good opportunity if you haven't
played before.  It's all available through:

http://www.pbm.com/oly/tag

-- Scott T.

References

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
Re: More Arguments. Favourite games.
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Tue, 10 Apr 2001 07:47:09 +0000