From: mmhazewi@cs.ruu.nl (Maarten Hazewinkel)
Subject: Re: Galaxy: More on communication and alliances)
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 11:13:17 GMT
Organization: Utrecht University, Dept. of Computer Science

In <1992Jul23.172404.1572@kronos.arc.nasa.gov> hall@kronos.arc.nasa.gov (Michael Hall) writes:

>Now crossposted to rec.games.design...
>
>In article <1992Jul20.102311.11903@uni-paderborn.de> jerry@uni-paderborn.de (Gerald Siek) writes:
>>rwallace@unix1.tcd.ie (russell wallace) writes:
>>>kanderso@reed.edu (Karl Anderson) writes:
>>
>>>>                   [ ... ]                      The best solution
>>>>that I can think of [to the problem of massive alliance victories]
>>>>is to eliminate communication between players.
>>>>Alternately, messages could only be sent via ship, that is, a player
>>>>would attach a message to a ship and the recipient would only 
>>>>recieve it when that ship reached one of its worlds, or perhaps a
>>>>group of it's ships.
>>
>>Too complicated!   In fact I'd like so have *more* communication
>>facilities in Galaxy, for example anonymous broadcast messages.
>>
>>>My favoured solution to the problem of huge alliances steamrollering
>>>everyone is,
>>>*** NOT TO ALLOW ALLIANCE VICTORIES WITH FOURTEEN *!@!#? PLAYERS!!! ***
>>
>>That's it.   Once a strong alliance is established the other players
>>have but three choices:
>>	* Fight alone (and lose the game)
>>	* Join the alliance (and "win" together with 13 other players)
>>	* Try to form a counteralliance (which is very difficult and
>>	  mostly fails because of the lazyness of the other non-organized
>>	  players)
>>All three situations happend to me and I found none of them very exicting.
>>So the maximum alliance size that could claim a victory should be limited
>>on 1-3 races, depending on the game size.   
>
>As one of the 14 victorious players, I faced the above choices, and
>certainly it would have been suicide for me to choose anything but
>to join the alliance.
>
>If victory were permitted for only one race, it would in theory pretty
>much fix this problem by causing the alliance to fragment and fight itself.
>(You might still get steamrollered by the alliance early on, but the
>alliance would be at least weakened because of paranoia about the
>inevitable backstabbing.)
>
[stuff about lots of groups deleted]
>
>Abstraction would be an alternate solution.  If the player could
>group groups into fleets, this would help;  I often had to issue 20+
>orders just to get a war fleet to move from one world to the next, and I
>had to sort through which of the groups at the first world were actually
>defense fleets intended to remain in place.  Another possibility is that
>one could simply abstract away ships altogether: players could produce
>"goo" of a certain amount and tech level.  This goo could be sent to
>other worlds, where it would mix with goo belonging to the same player
>there.  This might simply average out the tech levels, or you could
>use the mean and variance (keeping track of the summation of the goo
>techs and the goo techs squared).  Well, this might be pretty weird,
>and might not work, but I'm just trying to avoid having hundreds of ship
>groups.

Well, this merging groups, and averaging tech levels might also work on
groups as they currently exist. Other solutions could be:
- Scrapping outdated, lowtech groups. Possibly with some return in Resources.
- moving satellites (no drive ships) to a seperate place in the report, 
  possibly under the planets they are placed at.
- Allow upgrading of groups to current tech levels, so as to merge more 
  groups together.

>I understand that Russell is working on another space empire game, so I'm
>throwing out these ideas with that in mind.

I'd like to hear more about that.

>-- 
>Michael Hall            \ 
>NASA Ames Research Center\ 
>hall@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov \

Maarten Hazewinkel
mmhazewi@cs.ruu.nl
-- 
Newsgroups: rec.games.pbm