World Map

[Enno Rehling]

Now that the game is over, I've extended my faction's map with the data from the final summary to create a map of the entire world: http://imgur.com/9ladTaQ

Maybe this will spur discussion about the size of the world, and other future design changes. Where did you all live? How was it?

[Bernd Rinx]

Thanks for sharing the map. I suppose it's rather telling that we were
playing for almost half a year (right?) and I didnt even get to see
half of my home island (I started on the big one right south to the
little lake). The one region per turn movement rule makes the game
incredibly slow and it must be a real pain to conduct a major war in
these circumstances.

Another big issue for me was the high rate of player drop outs. Seeing
each faction go into stasis and vanish right after you meet them sucks
all joy out of the game. It's the same problem that pretty much killed
Eressea (for me at least) and I dont see how this can be fixed without
changing fundamental game concepts (or hosting small games with
players you know personally).

Thirdly the game mechanics struck me as very inflexible and frankly
boring - there's really only one good strategy and once you figure it
out all you need to do is move from region to region and apply your
chopping, mining and taxing machinery everywhere which is time
consuming and little rewarding. In fact I believe it would be more fun
to write scripts and watch them compete with each other than actually
playing the game even with a small faction manually.

Having said that, I signed up for the next game and I'm looking
forward to see the improvements you're planning implemented.

Oh and thanks for hosting this game - I've always wanted to play the "original".



2013/9/26 Enno Rehling <enno.r...@gmail.com>:

[Dirk Meister]

Hi,

I've started on the 13 regions isle in the east.
The one-region movement of ships makes explorations incredibly slow (I see it as Bernd). I have nothing to add to his remarks.
Sadly I hadn't an interactive neighbour on my isle, so it was nothing more than a "training area" to study the rules :)

So I'm looking forward to the next game.

Greetings,

Dirk


"Bernd Rinx" <atrop...@gmail.com> schrieb:

[Enno Rehling]

Hi!

Nice to hear from you, especially. Congratulations on having the biggest faction, and the one we were all most afraid of :-) I hope you don't mind that I am copying the Atlantis Developer list in this conversation.

On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Bernd Rinx <atrop...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for sharing the map. I suppose it's rather telling that we were
playing for almost half a year (right?) and I didnt even get to see
half of my home island (I started on the big one right south to the
little lake). The one region per turn movement rule makes the game
incredibly slow and it must be a real pain to conduct a major war in
these circumstances.

The slow movement is probably my biggest gripe about the game, and it's high on my wishlist for future improvements. The slow ships are even more frustrating, because once you have built them, they don't actually save you much time over going by foot. I wish I could make the faster movement happen for my next game, but it comes with a lot of design decisions and some hairy code. If only more programmers would join the effort! I am considering just making faster movement for ships as a first step. It will strengthen ships as a gameplay element, and it avoids a lot of the hairier questions of terrain modifiers, guards, automated attacks, and players passing through each other. I'm going to update my milestone plan right now, in fact. There.

Another big issue for me was the high rate of player drop outs. Seeing
each faction go into stasis and vanish right after you meet them sucks
all joy out of the game. It's the same problem that pretty much killed
Eressea (for me at least) and I dont see how this can be fixed without
changing fundamental game concepts (or hosting small games with
players you know personally).

I found that when I was running ten hexes before I ran into more than occasional scouts, I was busy enough just micromanaging everything that there wasn't enough time for diplomacy. Things got better in the end, when my turns were written by two people as a team. In the next game, I am going to start more players in the same city hex, so you'll meet someone pretty much in turn one. I hope that his increases communication and reduces dropouts. I was really glad you stuck around, because that gave the rest of us something to do. We were preparing to whoop your ass for what happened to Don Chaos. :-)

 

Thirdly the game mechanics struck me as very inflexible and frankly
boring - there's really only one good strategy and once you figure it
out all you need to do is move from region to region and apply your
chopping, mining and taxing machinery everywhere which is time
consuming and little rewarding. In fact I believe it would be more fun
to write scripts and watch them compete with each other than actually
playing the game even with a small faction manually.

Agreed. The lack of strategic variation is a huge problem, and I don't quite know how to fix that yet, other than make there be less of everything. As you say, we were pretty much running each region independent of any other, and the exploitation function is the same for each hex. You may be right about the scripts: It would be possible to condense the strategy into a simple algorithm for exploiting a hex to the max. As a human, executing an algorithm is not half as fun as coming up with it. I've considered plugging the report into a scriptable bot, but that's beyond what I want to do for the game right now. I'd rather make new games than win the old one.

 

Having said that, I signed up for the next game and I'm looking
forward to see the improvements you're planning implemented.

That's good to know, and I hope the game improves notably. I look forward to hearing your opinion on those changes after the next game!

 

Oh and thanks for hosting this game - I've always wanted to play the "original".

Thanks for playing, and sticking with it, even if the "original" didn't turn out to be all that exciting :-)

[Enno Rehling]

+atlantisdev

Hi Dirk,

Apologies to you and Arno for your lousy starting islands. You had at least one other faction on there, but Henning (Tiuris) stopped playing after about 16 turns, I believe. Poor Arno had it worse, I think he lived on the three-hex island east of you. You two were the only others  that built ships beside myself.

If all goes according to plan, then the next game is going to have faster ships, and all starting locations will be reachable from each other by land routes.

Enno.

[Enno Rehling]

Good News! The next game will definitely have faster ships, I just finished the code for that. Clippers have a range of three, other ships two hexes.