[Freeciv-Dev] Re: single vs. multiplayer

[Mark Metson <markm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> I will eventually look at Freeciv's multiplayer, but I'll be amazed if I
> find it preferrable to single player, or even in the same ballpark of
> game.  In my own project, if game design stuff breaks multiplayer, I
> won't hesitate.  I have no idea how dependent the network stuff is on
> game design stuff.  And I think "I want to build cool Bigpox
> civilizations" is a single player impulse.

I figure the way to go for strategic multi--player games is long term 
campaigns. We ran here a thing called "Thy Kingdom Come" for years that 
was extremely simply, basically just give people some units, some terrain, 
and some units that can alter terrain and some that can manufacture 
weapons/armour and leave them to it. We ran it at one turn per day. Some 
people played for years and years.

Admittedly a big feature of TKC was ou dont all have to start at once. 
Gender was implemented so that some units could "get pregnant" then when 
the new units were "born" they had a timeperiod of "growing up" so that 
until they had been loyal to some other particular unit for some period of 
time (loyalty was changeable by "attack to subdue" technique) the new unit 
was potentially available to become played by a new player. So players 
could join at any time, be assigned some existing unit already on the 
board but young enough to not necessarily have had its personality fully 
formed by its neighboring units or parent unit etc, and try to make their 
way in the world from there, possibly by initially trying to convince the 
player of surrounding units that having a played unit among them could be 
advantageous.

So I think the ideas you alreday mentioned about trying to provide for 
incorporating players after the game has already started seem a good 
direction. I would like such ideas to go much further, so that no matter 
how long the game has been running new players can still join.

One way I figured on doing that is by fitting many scales of game 
together, so that many or even most of the smaller scale games might not 
even have any noticable effect whatsoever on the larger scale games. 
Players in smaller scale games, paticularly in first person shooters, 
might not even know whether or where their activities are being fitted 
into some larger game. Possibly they might be fitted only statistically, 
such as instead of taking individual shooter games as being specific 
incidents in a larger game they might merely be used to compute 
probabilities in a larger game, as in "tests using actual people to pit 
this many of these units against that many of those units in this kind of 
mission show this percent chance of that much damage to each unit with 
this much chance of this or that side holding the field".

Possibly also small scale games could be used simply to provide cool 
graphics for larger games, as in selecting from an archive an archived 
actual game that had the results that have been determined to have now 
occurred in a larger game, so that the actual small scale game could be 
animated as a depiction of what just happened. In that way smaller games 
could be put to use as methods of generating artwork in that instead of 
randomly generating animations of events one could look up actual games in 
which those kinds of events actually occurred and pick at random one of 
them to representwhat just happened.

Yeah I know, very far fetched... :)

-MarkM-

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