Galaxy idea - capturing planets
Gerald Siek
Has anyone of you ever though of the idea of making Galaxy less destructive?
I wonder how the game would be if conquered planets would not be bombed but
captured by the invading force. Perhaps this would lead to longer (and
more exiting?) fights as the defeated side would have a chance to reconquer
the planet, restoring its original industry level.
A rule could be that after a planet has been conquered only 10% of it's
industry and population would be destroyed and that the winner may use
the planet's industry on the very next turn.
I have no idea if this would be easy to implement. Any reactions from the
authors?
Jerry
--
Gerald Siek - je...@uni-paderborn.de - University of Paderborn, Germany
russell wallace
unrealistic - it would be almost impossible to capture a planet from
space without causing massive damage to the economic infrastructure, and
also the government (at least in the context of a game like Galaxy)
would probably blow up the planet themselves rather than let it fall
intact into the hands of an enemy. Also, I *like* the megadeath massive
destruction aspect of Galaxy (in the League - Southern Alliance War of
Rob McNeur's Game 1, over a trillion people were killed!!! Name one
other game where that can happen!). *All* the other games around seem to
be fairly tame in this regard so I think at least one should have
planets getting bombed rather than captured.
However, I do have some ideas lined up for Galaxy II (a separate game,
not a new version of Galaxy), for if and when I ever get a chance to
write it, and one of these is to have the ability to have your race
specialize in space or ground combat, so you could adopt a strategy of
either bombing planets or trying to capture them (more expensive, but
gives you the planet's industry relatively intact; also, you might
capture items of technology there if the other race has more advanced
technology than you have).
--
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwal...@unix1.tcd.ie
Samuel S. Paik
>intact into the hands of an enemy. Also, I *like* the megadeath massive
>destruction aspect of Galaxy (in the League - Southern Alliance War of
>Rob McNeur's Game 1, over a trillion people were killed!!! Name one
>other game where that can happen!). *All* the other games around seem to
As an aside, this statement reminded me of a verse from a filk song...
"Never start an interstellar war,
It has no useful uses.
If people ask you what's it for,
You'll only give excuses.
If thirty trillion folks get hurt
You'll go to bed with no desert,
No never start an interstellar war..."
-- Frank Hayes
Sam Paik
Carl Edman
> Also, I *like* the megadeath massive destruction aspect
> of Galaxy (in the League - Southern Alliance War of Rob
> McNeur's Game 1, over a trillion people were killed!!!
> Name one other game where that can happen!).
ObSillyInJokeForOlympiaPlayers: Well, you tried. :-)
Carl Edman, BtA
--
Being trapped in the Netherhells is not the most fearsome thing that can happen
to you. It is, in fact, probably no worse than being trapped in a cave for a
weekend with all your spouse's relatives, and, in most cases, will not lead to
total drooling gibbering madness, as is the popular misconception. If, on the
other hand, you find yourself trapped in the Netherhells for a weekend with all
your spouse's relatives, well, sometimes drooling and gibbering can be fun.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXIII
Ingolf Markhof
I aggree to the proposal of Gerald Siek to introduce planet capturing.
That's exactly what I was thinking about.
Russell Wallace claims that it would not be realistic to capture a
planet without causing massive damage to the economic infrastructure.
But one could also say that it is not realistic that a planet that has
been bombed can be re-colonized immediatly. In fact, the relation to
"reality" is a poor basis for arguments. And it's more important if
a new rule will make the game better, or not. For my opinion, planet
capturing would make the game _much_ better! And I will explain why.
First, let my describe a good strategy for playing Galaxy:
To win the game, you have to rise you production power. In fact, there is
no reason to attack anyone as long as you have enough planets. And as
rising the production is very expensive and very time consuming, you can
play just the economical game for a long time. Of course you have to care
for the other races nearby. Just building transports and capitals can lead
to sudden death if one fellow nearby is disturbed by the boring economical
game, if he will build some war ships, if he will attack you. So don't forget
to use a certain amount of the production for your defense. But keep in mind
that it's more expensive to build ships that are able to attack than to
build ships for defense, only. Try to spend as less as possible for defense.
There are some remarks:
1) The more player follow this strategy, the less will happen in the game.
I mean, the opening will be extrem long (about 30-40 turns). In during
this opening phase, the game will be boring...
2) If you will be involved in a conflict early, your chances to win the game
are reduced dramatically. War is expensive an will stop you economical
development. Some of your colonies may get bombed, so your industrial
power can even decrease! All other people which are able to rise their
industrial power while some stupid persons make war will be happy about
this! Even if you "win" a war by elemination of you opponent, you will
get nothing than empty planets! While you might have been able to double
the number of your controlled plantes, other people doubled the number
of their capitals instead. These will kill you later on simply be their
superior production power!
3) The most important on 2) is that you don't have to start the war. Beeing
attacked by some stupid aggressive person is sufficient. You won't never
win the game...
So, for my opinion, there would be much more action in the game if war
could bring some profit, too! In fact, there would be more attacks! That's
the reason why planet capturing is a very good idea!
By the way: Introducing planet capturing does not mean to exclude bombing
from the game! There would simply be a choice to bomb or not to bomb, but
to capture, instead.
Greg Lindahl
>It would be reasonably easy to implement. However, I think it would be
>unrealistic - it would be almost impossible to capture a planet from
>space without causing massive damage to the economic infrastructure, and
>also the government (at least in the context of a game like Galaxy)
>would probably blow up the planet themselves rather than let it fall
>intact into the hands of an enemy.
... not to mention that it guarantees, on a certain level, that when
you win a Galaxy game, it was because you were good at playing, not
just that your neighbors were extremely stupid and gave you all their
resources. When you win Galaxy, you've certainly earned it.
Also, you avoid the problem of people dropping out early in the game
giving some players a huge advantage. If your neighbor drops out
before building defenses, now you get a nice planet. If you could
capture his population and industry, you'd be twice as wealthy as your
neighbor, all because of blind luck.
Just say YES to megadeath! War should be bloody!
Bruno Wolff III
some things that could be done to make the game more playable as it is now.
You should always get the planet reports for all planets not just the ones
in your map area.
To go along with this it would be nice to ask for several maps in a turn,
though this may cause problems for mail.
The production, speed and shield calculations should be simplified. I haven't
used my hp15c so much since I was a TA for the physics department.
At least you could allow an order that would switch production in the middle
of a turn. Perhaps a modified production order that will finish what's in the
works before starting the new thing.
Howard J. Bampton
>Before considering things that will change the nature of the game, there are
>some things that could be done to make the game more playable as it is now.
>You should always get the planet reports for all planets not just the ones
>in your map area.
Personally, I wouldn't want all of this info. My turn reports towards
the end of Rob's game 1 were already pushing 200k. If you automaticaly
give me the names of all 400 planets, you are adding another 12k per
player to the amount of mail going out, plus those empires off in a
corner get info on 100's planets that they have no interest in.
>To go along with this it would be nice to ask for several maps in a turn,
>though this may cause problems for mail.
Multiple maps on the other hand, would be a nice addition. That way,
you can get a general overview of where your own empire is, as well
as a closeup of the one you are attacking (or being attacked by). A
map 100x100 LY is fine for getting a general layout, but is far to
crowded to go about labeling planets & distances on.
I suspect that the plot.c program that one can ftp from [whereever the
sorce code is, I forget] could be used if you go for a galaxy map, but
I've never bothered to try it.
>The production, speed and shield calculations should be simplified. I
The speed one is easy. Shields, I'll admit are a pain, especially when
you want a specifc strength shield...
The production one is the only one that I'd like clairified. In the
V2.7 rules, which were the only ones I could find to ftp (admittedly
2 months ago) don't cover production from population unsupported by
industry, which was in the V2.92 source code available (and which
Rob is/was using.
>At least you could allow an order that would switch production in the middle
>of a turn. Perhaps a modified production order that will finish what's in the
>works before starting the new thing.
This is why one either tunes ship designs to the planet (and ends up
with hordes of ship types) or bites the bullet, and allows some
roundoff error into the budget.
After all, how does one deal with the player who goofs, and tells
planet x to finish off a ship and then start on the next variety, when
the one currently under production won't be finished this turn? Either way
you do it, someone is going to be unhappy.
[Russell, if noone liked the game, we wouldn't be trying to pick it
apart (:-) please take my comments in that light.]
Howard Bampton
bam...@cs.utk.edu
Rich Skrenta
> [Russell, if noone liked the game, we wouldn't be trying to pick it
> apart (:-) please take my comments in that light.]
No one says that about Olympia! (sniff, sniff).
--
Rich Skrenta
Ingolf Markhof
|>
|> Before considering things that will change the nature of the game, there are
|> some things that could be done to make the game more playable as it is now.
|>
|> You should always get the planet reports for all planets not just the ones
|> in your map area.
|> To go along with this it would be nice to ask for several maps in a turn,
|> though this may cause problems for mail.
It's true that the kind in which information is given by the results is not very
useful to support your playing. Of course you can request some changes as you did.
Another useful change would be to change the ordering of information. For
example, it would be better to get all information about groups together with
the data of the related planet. And, instead of distributing information about
the type and technology of ships, it would be better just to present the effective
drive-weapon-shield-cargo values in the group information. And, and, and...
There are so many enhancements...
But in fact, the results give you all the information. So a way to achieve what
you want is to pipe the results to some "postprocessor", which collects all the
information and prints it in a more useful format. This is what I did. Or better:
What I'm currently doing. For my opinion, it's useless to ask for more than one
map in the results. The map is the results without any labels is almost useless!
Therefore, I orders the full information about the whole galaxy each turn. From
that data, my postprocessor is able the create labeled postscript maps of any
clipping area of the galaxy. Moreover, you can use a verbose option which will
print many usefull data nearby each planet (Size, ressources, population,
industries, IP/turn left for production after production of COL's, maximum ship
mass production/turn, ships at or incoming to the planet).
I will make the software available once it will be finished.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
____
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___/ / P.O. Box 500 500, D-4600 Dortmund 50, F.R. Germany
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Maarten Hazewinkel
>But in fact, the results give you all the information.
I have to disagree here. I know of at least one area where you do not get the
information.
This is when you bombard a planet. You don't know who it was you bombed flat.
That's ok if it's someones last planet, but if it's just a newly colonised
planet, i'd like to know who to apologise to, or who to watch for retaliation.
I had one case of this when I exterminated a player a long time ago, and I
still don't know who it was.
Maarten Hazewinkel
mmha...@cs.ruu.nl
--
Gerald Siek
>[Russell, if noone liked the game, we wouldn't be trying to pick it
>apart (:-) please take my comments in that light.]
Yeah! In fact everybody should thank Russell for writing such a great
game and distributing it for free. And making suggestions and/or
modifying the code is very helpful to make the game even better. Think
of "nethack" which has been improved by dozends of people over many
years.
Jerry
P.S.: Russell, how long did it take to design and write galaxy?
russell wallace
*I* keep saying it about Olympia in my messages slagging off the
excessive complexity! :-)
Multiple maps in Galaxy: unfortunately this would increase the outgoing
mail bandwidth, which is something I'm trying to reduce. You can get
different maps on successive turns.
Showing the data for all planets all the time: What about the poor sod
who can't run any programs like PLOT on the results and has to look at a
printout, who starts off Galaxy Game 6 and gets a list of 600 planets
all the time, and hasn't a hope in hell of finding his neighbouring
planets among the list? Most of his colony ships then end up spending 2
centuries drifting halfway across the galaxy. At least with the current
system you can restrict the list to the planets you're interested in.
Simplifying the shields calculation: how?
Putting the list of groups after each planet description: this is a
matter of opinion, I personally find such a description format very
irritating in the games I play that have it. However, it is quite easy
to sort the list of your groups by planet name, and the list of planets
by planet name, and look at them side by side.
Howard J. Bampton
>
>I have to disagree here. I know of at least one area where you do not get the
>information.
>This is when you bombard a planet. You don't know who it was you bombed flat.
>That's ok if it's someones last planet, but if it's just a newly colonised
>planet, i'd like to know who to apologise to, or who to watch for retaliation.
>
This is a problem.
It also looks like it would be a small change to the code: just add an
owner field to the bombing structure and change the turn report code.
Howard Bampton
bam...@cs.utk.edu
Alan Mead
>Multiple maps in Galaxy: unfortunately this would increase the outgoing
>mail bandwidth, which is something I'm trying to reduce. You can get
>different maps on successive turns.
>Showing the data for all planets all the time: What about the poor sod
>who can't run any programs like PLOT on the results and has to look at a
PLOT.C works pretty well...
>Putting the list of groups after each planet description: this is a
>matter of opinion, I personally find such a description format very
>irritating in the games I play that have it. However, it is quite easy
>to sort the list of your groups by planet name, and the list of planets
>by planet name, and look at them side by side.
... and if you are using UNIX, I always make a new file with just my
groups. When vi'ing the file you can type "!Gsort +9" and it will sort
on the planet name. I find that printout more valueable than any other
aid I have. You can also sort on some other column like shipname or
tech level (or group number to get the original back for some reason).
Remember that sort counts columns starting at zero.
You can also use sort from the command line, redirecting input and
output.
One problem remains: other players' groups have a different column
spaceing and so it looks bad or isn't possible to sort them in with
mine. That would be nice to have.
BTW, I've tried the same thing with MSDOS sort and with the sort
feature of WordPerfect 5.0 and neither one worked right. I think
it has to do with the columns of hyphens used to indicate nothing
carried.
-alan mead
Howard J. Bampton
>
>BTW, I've tried the same thing with MSDOS sort and with the sort
>feature of WordPerfect 5.0 and neither one worked right. I think
>it has to do with the columns of hyphens used to indicate nothing
>carried.
>
Don't forget that, at least in some versions of the code, TAB's are
used in the turn reports. It took me quite a while to figure out why my
turn analyzer worked for Game 1 & Spiral, but not on a game that the
person I gave a copy of the program to. These days, I run the thing through
"expand" first, so I don't have to make the sed commands any harder
than they already are.....
Howard Bampton
bam...@cs.utk.edu
russell wallace
>In <13u4b7...@fbi-news.Informatik.Uni-Dortmund.DE> mar...@ls12r.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Ingolf Markhof) writes:
>I have to disagree here. I know of at least one area where you do not get the
>information.
>This is when you bombard a planet. You don't know who it was you bombed flat.
Yes, version 3.0 (currently being debugged) has this information,
together with how much population, industry etc. you destroyed.
russell wallace
>P.S.: Russell, how long did it take to design and write galaxy?
Hmmm... Galaxy was originally designed and coded during about 3 days of
Christmas 1990 when I didn't have anything else to do ... on the other
hand, that was version 1.0 and it's now up to v2.97 and I'm currently
debugging v3.0 (apologies to all the people who've had their turn
reports delayed during the latter process :-)) so it probably comes to
quite a lot of time altogether. It's been loads of fun though.
Douglas Selph
>In article <1992Jul13.2...@uwm.edu>, br...@cerberus.csd.uwm.edu (Bruno Wolff III) writes:
>What I'm currently doing. For my opinion, it's useless to ask for more than one
>map in the results. The map is the results without any labels is almost useless!
>Therefore, I orders the full information about the whole galaxy each turn. From
>that data, my postprocessor is able the create labeled postscript maps of any
>clipping area of the galaxy. Moreover, you can use a verbose option which will
>print many usefull data nearby each planet (Size, ressources, population,
>industries, IP/turn left for production after production of COL's, maximum ship
>mass production/turn, ships at or incoming to the planet).
>
>I will make the software available once it will be finished.
I agree. In my opinion the galaxy game is a two program game. There
should be a server program and a client program. The client program I wrote
reads in recieved turn reports, displays a variety maps with labels, helps with
ship designs, displays your groups and planets in a variety of forms etc. etc.
All the things computers are good at. The turn report should just contain the
'raw' data, so to speak, which can be read by the client program.
Digger
(dig...@csi.com)
Michael Hall
>groups. When vi'ing the file you can type "!Gsort +9" and it will sort
>on the planet name. I find that printout more valueable than any other
>aid I have. You can also sort on some other column like shipname or
>tech level (or group number to get the original back for some reason).
>Remember that sort counts columns starting at zero.
>
>You can also use sort from the command line, redirecting input and
>output.
Slight improvement:
From the command line, "sort +9f -11" (on a file with just your groups)
sorts by planet name first, travel distance second.
--
Michael Hall \
NASA Ames Research Center\
ha...@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov \