galaxy communication and alliances
Karl Anderson
a huge alliance won by steamrollering over the other races. I
felt that I had to join another alliance to protect myself from
both. I personally don't like playing this way. The best solution
that I can think of is to eliminate communication between players.
Alternately, messages could only be sent via ship, that is, a player
would attach a message to a ship and the recipient would only
recieve it when that ship reached one of its worlds, or perhaps a
group of it's ships. This would also discourage players from
declaring war indescriminately.
k
russell wallace
My favoured solution to the problem of huge alliances steamrollering
everyone is,
*** NOT TO ALLOW ALLIANCE VICTORIES WITH FOURTEEN *!@!#? PLAYERS!!! ***
In my games, there can be only one winner, and this means that huge
alliances are a self-limiting problem, because the more the alliance
establishes military domination over the external galaxy, the more each
member will start looking over his shoulder and considering his allies a
greater potential threat than outside enemies.
--
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwal...@unix1.tcd.ie
Gerald Siek
>kand...@reed.edu (Karl Anderson) writes:
>> [ ... ] The best solution
>>that I can think of is to eliminate communication between players.
>>Alternately, messages could only be sent via ship, that is, a player
>>would attach a message to a ship and the recipient would only
>>recieve it when that ship reached one of its worlds, or perhaps a
>>group of it's ships.
Too complicated! In fact I'd like so have *more* communication
facilities in Galaxy, for example anonymous broadcast messages.
Every player may add one anonzmous 'rumour' per turn and all
messages are summarized at the bottom of the turn report. This
would make diplomacy even more interesting.
>My favoured solution to the problem of huge alliances steamrollering
>everyone is,
>*** NOT TO ALLOW ALLIANCE VICTORIES WITH FOURTEEN *!@!#? PLAYERS!!! ***
That's it. Once a strong alliance is established the other players
have but three choices:
* Fight alone (and lose the game)
* Join the alliance (and "win" together with 13 other players)
* Try to form a counteralliance (which is very difficult and
mostly fails because of the lazyness of the other non-organized
players)
All three situations happend to me and I found none of them very exicting.
So the maximum alliance size that could claim a victory should be limited
on 1-3 races, depending on the game size.
Jerry
--
Gerald Siek - je...@uni-paderborn.de - University of Paderborn, Germany
Michael Hall
In article <1992Jul20.1...@uni-paderborn.de> je...@uni-paderborn.de (Gerald Siek) writes:
>rwal...@unix1.tcd.ie (russell wallace) writes:
>>kand...@reed.edu (Karl Anderson) writes:
>
>>> [ ... ] The best solution
>>>that I can think of [to the problem of massive alliance victories]
>>>is to eliminate communication between players.
>>>Alternately, messages could only be sent via ship, that is, a player
>>>would attach a message to a ship and the recipient would only
>>>recieve it when that ship reached one of its worlds, or perhaps a
>>>group of it's ships.
>
>Too complicated! In fact I'd like so have *more* communication
>facilities in Galaxy, for example anonymous broadcast messages.
>
>>My favoured solution to the problem of huge alliances steamrollering
>>everyone is,
>>*** NOT TO ALLOW ALLIANCE VICTORIES WITH FOURTEEN *!@!#? PLAYERS!!! ***
>
>That's it. Once a strong alliance is established the other players
>have but three choices:
> * Fight alone (and lose the game)
> * Join the alliance (and "win" together with 13 other players)
> * Try to form a counteralliance (which is very difficult and
> mostly fails because of the lazyness of the other non-organized
> players)
>All three situations happend to me and I found none of them very exicting.
>So the maximum alliance size that could claim a victory should be limited
>on 1-3 races, depending on the game size.
As one of the 14 victorious players, I faced the above choices, and
certainly it would have been suicide for me to choose anything but
to join the alliance.
If victory were permitted for only one race, it would in theory pretty
much fix this problem by causing the alliance to fragment and fight itself.
(You might still get steamrollered by the alliance early on, but the
alliance would be at least weakened because of paranoia about the
inevitable backstabbing.)
In practice, the game would have gone on for a *long* time to get down
to one victorious player and probably would have died under its own weight.
I had one of the two largest empires in the game, which was but a small
fraction of the galaxy, and it was already hell to manage, and I had access
to a lot of empire management software that other players did not. I was
ready to end the game, as I think most were, simply because I couldn't bear
the thought of managing an even bigger empire. I had 3 dozen worlds, 6 dozen
ship types, and the killer: 300+ ship groups, which had to be sorted through
when writing orders. Now some of that is my "fault": I should have designed
fewer ship types, which would have decreased the number of ship groups,
sacrificing efficiency for sanity. But mostly it is Galaxy's inherent
problem.
To solve this problem, one could increase the cost of ships. Russell
already did this once. Nearly equivalently, one could decrease the size
of the worlds. If this is done in the extreme, then maybe, just maybe,
large numbers of worlds could be manageable.
Abstraction would be an alternate solution. If the player could
group groups into fleets, this would help; I often had to issue 20+
orders just to get a war fleet to move from one world to the next, and I
had to sort through which of the groups at the first world were actually
defense fleets intended to remain in place. Another possibility is that
one could simply abstract away ships altogether: players could produce
"goo" of a certain amount and tech level. This goo could be sent to
other worlds, where it would mix with goo belonging to the same player
there. This might simply average out the tech levels, or you could
use the mean and variance (keeping track of the summation of the goo
techs and the goo techs squared). Well, this might be pretty weird,
and might not work, but I'm just trying to avoid having hundreds of ship
groups.
I understand that Russell is working on another space empire game, so I'm
throwing out these ideas with that in mind.
--
Michael Hall \
NASA Ames Research Center\
ha...@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov \
Howard J. Bampton
>I was
>ready to end the game, as I think most were, simply because I couldn't bear
>the thought of managing an even bigger empire. I had 3 dozen worlds, 6 dozen
>ship types, and the killer: 300+ ship groups, which had to be sorted through
>when writing orders. Now some of that is my "fault": I should have designed
>fewer ship types, which would have decreased the number of ship groups,
>sacrificing efficiency for sanity. But mostly it is Galaxy's inherent
>problem.
>
An alternative, is to allow scraping or upgrading of ships. By the end
of Game 1 (the aformentioned game), I had 30+ groups of cargo ships,
all of the same design, in 10 different speeds. If I could have gotten
them all to the same drive tech level, the number of groups would have
been cut in half.
In Spiral, the empire I took over has 30-40 groups of old (tech = 1)
defensive satelites (no drives). Against the neighbors I have left,
these ships are useless, as their shield tech makes any shielded ship
virtually immune to my weapons.
Allowing me to scrap them (say for the raw materials cost only), or
upgrade them to current tech (10% of original cost?) would at least
allow me to get some value out of them.
The "battlefleet" idea is a good one as well. Most players send more
than a single group on an attack (except when we are scouting). Being
able to issue a "send battlefleet A to planet x" would be a godsend.
Restricting the fleet to the speed of the slowest ships would be a
nice bonus as well. A number of people have had little goofs where
they missed a group (like their cannon fodder (:-) ) that was to go,
or had a group end up < 1 LY away from the planet, and lost the battle
as a result.
Howard bam...@cs.utk.edu
Maarten Hazewinkel
[stuff about lots of groups deleted]
>
>Abstraction would be an alternate solution. If the player could
>group groups into fleets, this would help; I often had to issue 20+
>orders just to get a war fleet to move from one world to the next, and I
>had to sort through which of the groups at the first world were actually
>defense fleets intended to remain in place. Another possibility is that
>one could simply abstract away ships altogether: players could produce
>"goo" of a certain amount and tech level. This goo could be sent to
>other worlds, where it would mix with goo belonging to the same player
>there. This might simply average out the tech levels, or you could
>use the mean and variance (keeping track of the summation of the goo
>techs and the goo techs squared). Well, this might be pretty weird,
>and might not work, but I'm just trying to avoid having hundreds of ship
>groups.
Well, this merging groups, and averaging tech levels might also work on
groups as they currently exist. Other solutions could be:
- Scrapping outdated, lowtech groups. Possibly with some return in Resources.
- moving satellites (no drive ships) to a seperate place in the report,
possibly under the planets they are placed at.
- Allow upgrading of groups to current tech levels, so as to merge more
groups together.
>I understand that Russell is working on another space empire game, so I'm
>throwing out these ideas with that in mind.
I'd like to hear more about that.
>--
>Michael Hall \
>NASA Ames Research Center\
>ha...@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov \
Maarten Hazewinkel
mmha...@cs.ruu.nl
--
russell wallace
allow scrapping of obsolete ships. It also has a much more compact
battle report format.
Michael Lewchuk
Why not something like:
Upgrade_Cost_of_Ship = 10 production points *
(
Drive * (New_Drive_Tech - Old_Drive_Tech) / New_Drive_Tech +
Weapons_Qty * Weapon_Size * (New_Weapons_Tech - Old_Weapons_Tech)
/ New_Weapons_Tech +
Shield * (New_Shield_Tech - Old_shield_Tech) / New_Shield_Tech +
Cargo * (New_Cargo_Tech - Old_Cargo_Tech) / New_Cargo_Tech
)
It would use no resources 'cuz the old units would be scrapped and
"recycled" into the new ships. That is, old metal would be melted down
and refitted into more efficient gun shapes; old circuitry would be separated
into its components and redesigned, the hull would be ripped apart and
refitted, etc. etc.
The cost relfects the amount of upgrade. Upgrading ships from tech 1 to 4
will cost 3/4s of the ship cost. Upgrading ships from tech 2 to 3 would
only cost 1/3rd of the ship cost. This reflects things like out of date
parts and hull structure. Generally the most you can salvage from a tech
1/1/1/1 ship if your tech is now 5/5/5/5 would be some of the hull plates
(notably the straight ones), a few engine components which would not be
as nice but would get the job done, the gun barrels (or launch tubes for
missiles), and probably a few power cables from the shield generator.
Since cargo cannisters are "bolted on", to increase from cargo tech 1 to 2
would simply mean bolting a second cargo cannister on each ship (plus
probably a little fiddling with the hull design as well).
Perhaps add in MASS production points to rebuild the hull in the new,
high-tech, sleek, aerodynamic, and sexier design? :)
Michael Lewchuk
lew...@cs.UAlberta.CA