long-term fun From: "Enno Rehling" <rehling@usa.net> Date: Tue, 02 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000 This is something that pops up every now and then when our Eressea Design Crew sits together. How do you achieve long-term playability in a strategic pbem? I'm talking about more than just a hundred or two hundred turns. A lot of these games are interesting in the phase when you're still building your empire, drafting troops, building fortresses, an armada and so on. But at one point, the player will have either too many units to handle, or he'll become unbeatable, or reach some other point where contiuing to play doesn't make much sense. At least, that's what happened in the games I know. To me, an important point in a game was the ability to have new players join at any time. That's incredibly hard to achieve, because either the older players will be so strong they can kill the young ones riht away, or if they aren't then they'll be bored after 30 or 40 turns, because all the work they put into their faction doesn't really pay off. If the game has a few different 'threads' of development (specialisations) for players, a new player specialising in a neglected field might be a worthy ally, but you can only create so many specialisations, and then that's that. We have created obstacles that are high for old factions. The dragons in Eressea are fierce enemies even for factions that have lived to see 100 or more turns. Some of the buildings are so hard to construct, and require scarce resources, that only very old factions can build them. The result is that young players complain about the dragons being unbeatable (we tell tehm that yes, teehy are, and they should run whence they spot them) and those buildings being impossibly hard to buy (we tell them that there are people who have built them). Creating such incentives for older players is always a lot of work for the programmers. I wonder what other designers do to achieve that. Anyone want to share a few ideas? Enno. --- Eressea PBeM: http://eressea.home.pages.de/ Referenced By Up