[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Never-Ending Spacerace

[Raimar Falke <rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, May 10, 2003 at 05:43:28AM -0300, Mark Metson wrote:
> 
> 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...

If you add events which penalize a good player and help a bad one
people won't like it. It just does add too much random.

If you penalize the first player which colonize a planet nobody will
want to be first.

IMHO it should be so that if one player decides that he want to go
away that he has to built an expensive ship and then leave earth
completely. So the remaining players get more space and the cities
with the buildings and the player who left gets a new planet for
himself. To make it not this easy the nation which left earth splits
during the flight and so not all resources are under the control of
the player when the ship arrives at the new system.

        Raimar

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