From: esj@cs.brown.edu (Eugene Santos Jr.)
Subject: Some thoughts on the *Stategic Game of Netrek*
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1992 18:52:42 GMT


I don't know if many of you folks will be interested in picking up the following
thread, but I think it's an interesting thing to talk about. Probably, for those
of you who are more strategically oriented, i.e., team play, cooperative work,
or who just love to work out tactics/strategies given different game settings,
you might give some thought to what I'm gonna get to (long winded aren't I? :))
in a moment.



Myself, and I believe a fair number of players out there enjoy the standard
bronco style game server. I dislike chaos-servers because of an *innate*
imbalance in them. For example, galaxy class ships just simply outclass any
other kind. Yet, it's easily arguable that there is still *balance* in the
game. The *nature* of the game has simply changed. Unfortunately, what turns
me off about chaos servers is that the *nature* of this chaos game is
simply "dogfight with GAs" and not much else. Sure, sure, you could still
try taking planets and such, but consider the following complaint that
keeps cropping up on chaos-servers:

	"I hate resurrection scummers! There were these two enemy bases that
	just kept orbiting my home world and blowing me away as soon as I
	come in to the game!"

You could argue that players should exhibit constraint and not do this sort
of stuff. However, players who do *scum* are well within their rights! It's
part of the game! Why should they be considered as "ruining" the game?
You're the ones who are ruining their fun by complaining/cussing/etc at
them!! ----------This is the basic problem of "imbalanced" games.---------
Imbalanced games usually restrict you to only one or two activites, usually
dogfighting whereas the beauty of balaced games provide a huge assortment
of variety for individual play, team play, etc. Chaos is fine if you can
lay out the groundworks on what you want to do. In this case, just
dogfight. You are NOT allowed to cry scum since scumming is within the
parameters of the setup.

Well, all this thinking came about for me as I was setting up my configurable
server here at Brown. Here's a question for the veteran netrek players:
HOW MANY OF YOU SOMETIMES GET TIRED OF PLAIN OLD BRONCO NETREK? IS IT
BECAUSE MOST OF THE STRATEGY/TACTICS OF THE GAME HAVE BEEN WORKED OUT
AND HAS BECOME STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE? For example, BOMB BOMB BOMB!
(The only reason I capitalized the above is not to get attention, but to
highlight the things I want you to think about.)

What I am considering, is setting up various *balanced* scenarios
where strategies maybe vastly different at winning them. For example,
consider the following scenario:

	"The Early Federation" - early technology
		-Ships available - SC, DD, CA
		-CA's only allowed once a player has earned 4+ kills.
		-No plasmas
		-No cloaking
		-Weapons on SC/DD also scaled down.
		-Lower repair/fuel rates.
		-Persistent damage - Permanently retain 10% of any hull damage
			until a refit. Repair planets do not fix permanent damage.
		-Beaming up/down armies slower.
		-Slower ship rebuild time. Refit also slower.

CA's become more powerful. Good idea to mass ogg CA's. Thus, CA's are very
very valuable. Many other new strategies to consider.

Well, that's enough for now. Any comments?

Limofel / Quovadis / timid / StarBase / (too many others)

uucp:	...!{ihnp4,decvax}!brunix!esj		Eugene Santos Jr.
bitnet:	esj@browncs.bitnet			PO Box 1910, Computer Science
arpa:	esj%cs.brown.edu@relay.cs.net		Brown University
csnet:	esj@cs.brown.edu			Providence, RI 02912