Re: FLAGSHIP #88 - AD

From: jonmmorris@aol.comnospam (John Morris)

Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 21:17:18 +0000

>"Roy Pollard" <plod@ntlworld.com> writes:
>
>> we use both PDF and HTML turnsheets to make our own
>> efforts look as professional as if you were paying for it.
>
>It still amazes me how many peopole equate "cute" with
>"professional". Do keep in mind that another big plus with email games
>is the ability to write programs to parse your turn output and help
>you play the game. With yor "professional" turnsheets, that's much
>harder unless you also provide plain ASCII output.
>
>As one example, my Olympia turns get mailed to a program which keeps
>our world map. I used to do that with pencil and paper in older games.
>
>-- g

Greg,

I know that a lot of players enjoy the programming and tool-development aspect
of PbM but nowadays it's not "too" hard for a moderator to provide some of
these tools for the players.

Aside from leveling the playing field between experienced and novice players,
it provides everyone with the basic tools "required" to make the game more
enjoyable and playable.

I'll toss out an example from my game with this disclaimer: I'm not claiming to
be the world's best programmer/developer!

http://www.gunboatempires.com/GE3/GEMap1.htm

displays a game map with a few informational displays.

1) the map is an image map with links to an html file containing the latest
regional information.  If you move your mouse over a region's hot-spot, you'll
get a tool-tip showing the region's name - useful since the map is illegible at
this resolution.  If you click on the region, the bottom frame scrolls and
displays the region's stats - most importantly, who owns/controls the region.
This html file with all the regions is created by my moderator's program each
turn and I FTP it to the website each turn along with all the other
game-related web pages.

2) The top frame contains links to each of the 28 countries.  If you click on a
specific country, a separate window appears with a list of all the regions
controlled by that player and some other info (capital location and name,
ruler's name, etc.)  This info comes from another HTML page generated each turn
by the moderation program.

3) The top frame also contains a link to a database through an Active Server
Page application.  The "where-is" function allows you to enter a region's
5-digit ID and determine the region's map coordinates, the region's name, and
adjacent regions (again useful because of the poor resolution of the map!).

I won't claim this didn't take a lot of time to set up (I still have a bunch of
map coordinates and region names to plug into the database) but it has been
helpful and popular to the players.  It's especially helpful to new players who
haven't had years of exposure to the map.  It's also helpful to standby players
(who join the game mid-stream) because they don't have to sift through reams of
newsletters to figure out who's conquered what over the course of the
game-to-date.

For what it's worth, many of my players like to build their own spreadsheet
models to play with various "what-if" scenarios of different economic and
military growth scenarios but I suppose that is part of the nature of
"conquer-the-world" type games.

End of my $.02

John

*** (AD) Gunboat Empires has moved from PBM to PBeM
     http://www.gunboatempires.com                      ***

References

Re: FLAGSHIP #88 - AD
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Sun, 10 Dec 2000 17:01:52 +0000

Referenced By

Re: FLAGSHIP #88 - AD
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Sun, 10 Dec 2000 17:01:52 +0000