Re: Storm of the Eye

From: jonmmorris@aol.comnospam (JonMMorris)

Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Gavin wrote:
>No automation and uncontrolled expansion, basically there were not
enough active players for the size of the map.  Add to that the fact
that everything had to be done by hand, although the frontend was
improving somewhat in allowing one order to apply to many units.  There
was just too much housekeeping needed in order to keep going.

I must have missed something - their website gives the impression that they
have a powerful java-based GUI front-end - was it just flash and not
functional?

>I ended up with well over a hundred towns, I had to keep destroying
units to prevent from crossing the 10000 limit.  It was just too
unweildy in the end, although it was a really good game.

Couldn't the moderators incentivize players to stop building thousands of
piddly units?
1) Combine the existing units into larger units: if you combine 10 squads into
1 cadre, they will have the fighting power of 20 squads.  And combining 10
cadres produces 1 legion with the fighting power of 20 cadres.
2) Make it cheaper to build the new, larger units than it would be to build the
smaller units and then combine them into larger units.  (Maybe a cadre costs
75% of the cost of 10 squads).
3) Allow the player (actually, the moderator's program) to pool the resources
of all their towns/regions into a central pool.  Then the player has 1 budget
to manage, not hundreds of individual budgets for each town/region.
4) Don't allow players to break down the larger units into the smaller parts.

Any or all of these might help manage the problem you describe.  If the game
has a few players then they are all building armies.  If the game has tons of
players then they are all building squads.  But either way, the player workload
is about the same.

--John (full of free advice worth every penny paid) Morris

*** Remove "nospam" from the e-mail address to reply.
     (AD) Gunboat Empires is moving from PbM to the web
     http://members.aol.com/gunboatemp                      ***

References

Re: Storm of the Eye
"Gavin Kinsey" <ghworg@kinsey.u-net.com>
Sun, 16 Apr 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Referenced By

Re: Storm of the Eye
"Gavin Kinsey" <ghworg@kinsey.u-net.com>
Sun, 16 Apr 2000 00:00:00 +0000