[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Never-Ending Spacerace

[Mark Metson <markm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 9 May 2003, Joseph Ennis wrote:

> > But doesn't this increase the gap between the best
> > and the second
> > player if the first player has the planet 20 turns
> > for him alone?
> > 
> >     Raimar
> > 
> 
> Does that matter? This seems like the fair answer.
> 
> You should be able to choose the landing site on the
> new planet (at least with some amount of precision --
> i.e. this contienent or that island), so you shouldn't
> be too close to another player's cities, unless you're
> *really* far behind or the other player spread
> him/herself too thin.

Aha, yes, differing the circumstances for the players who are arriving at 
staggered dates could compensate. For example the standard assumption 
could be that there is no Apollo, evidently somehow the orbital module got 
lost, all you have is what is on the ground. But if someone arrives 20 
turns late, maybe they need not suffer that same way, maybe they DO have 
Apollo type of power - see whole map or all cities - due to being still in 
orbit during play. They might get to keep that power until the third 
player arrives and has the option to knock out the prior players orbital 
stuff before landing. And so on.

A lot of stuff could be done to balance things. Some kind of handicapping 
system could be developed that computes some string of coincidences and 
accidents calculated to hopefully make up for the "advantage" of early 
arrival.

There is of course already implemented the matter of are you sending one 
or two units of colonists. But we could tinker with other details like 
whether or not you get an explorer and/or aircraft, maybe even tinker with 
what social stuff happened on the voyage.

It would probably be modpack-dependent. Initially we'd probably negotiate 
all that stuff before setting up the scenario to play instead of having 
mechanical generation of scenarios. Like, do you want to have raced to Sid 
M's Alpha Centauri or to someone else's? What starmap do you want to us 
for figuring out where to race to next from there?

Oh also, how about being able to race to different places? So you beat me 
to Alpha Centauri, who cares, maybe there is better real-estate elsewhere. 
Sure, AC is close, but, maybe its not such a great spot to build? It might 
be better in the long run to skip AC completely and proceed directly to 
the longer journey to some much better destination...

We could also co-ordinate in tournament-like ways, and have scenarios 
where instead of assuming everyone who arrives at the new planet came from 
the same homeworld we assume they each came from a different homeworld. If 
we want them all to arrive at the same time we could group together all 
players whose savegame shows them arriving at AC on a specific year and 
build an "AC" that is to be a world all those different players from 
different starsystems all chose as their closest/likeliest planet and all 
came to from different places...

When the players are coming from different games we can also assume their 
homeplanet calendar systems differ and that what appeared to them in their 
homeworld calendars to be different years of arrival all turn out in 
actuality to be the same time of arrival.

Arriving first might not always be great either, for example suppose AC 
turns out to be already colonised by someone who turns out to be more 
sympathetic to the players left behind on your homeworld?

Or maybe you might end up having to ally with everyone from your homeworld 
to fight the aliens...

-MarkM-

-- 
Got a website? Get 10,000+ hits a day FREE...
http://makemoney.knotwork.com/10000hits/