Re: New Standard Game?

["Ari Rabkin" <asrabkin@twcny.rr.com>]

>From: Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>
>To: xconq7@sourceware.cygnus.com
>Subject: New Standard Game?
>Date: Mon, Jun 21, 1999, 11:25 PM
>

> I've been thinking about the standard game.  While it's very familiar,
> and has more depth than is at first apparent, it's also, well, a
> little *too* familiar.  The fundamentals of the game design haven't
> changed in literally 10 years, and if you've played it a thousand
> times, there's not much left to learn about it.

  There are always new users, and it's worth playing, if not a thousand
times, at least one hundred times, so please don't delete it entirely.

> I can see two basic ways to go here.  One is to make small
> enhancements; add hill terrain, add radar, mines, missiles, etc a la
> Lynn Stanton's and other enhanced versions.  While this would help,
> it seems a little timid to me.

   It seems to me that, if one enhanced version were designated as
canonical, all the effort devoted to enhancing standard.g could be
pooled, and the incremental strategy might work, although there is
the possibility of having merely 1001 tweeks, not a unified game--
we can't add every possible gdl structure.
   The only table that I think *must* be added is terrain effects on combat,
no library games use it, and it is hard to model warfare without it.

> The other way is to define a whole new game that has the same general
> flavor, but is more complex.  I've sketched out a design that is
> similar to postmodern in that it has a larger number of unit types,
> but that is set in the present day, with little or no tech development
> time needed.  There are about 8 types of ground units, about 10 naval
> (including missile subs), about 8 types of air/space units, and about
> 10 types of places, including barracks/HQs for ground units, ports,
> and ICBM silos.  The design also includes about 5 types of materials,
> but the emphasis of the game is still on warfighting not logistics -
> the materials are just to keep things organized.  There would be a
> couple more types of terrain, but nothing extreme.
>
> The goal for the new game is that it would become the standard game
> and thus get more development and tuning than the average library
> game.  It would become what new players see when they first fire up
> Xconq.

[note that I currently have only used the macintosh interface, so I
perhaps do not fully understand the importance of the standard game;
it isn't special on the mac.]

   Instead of having one 'standard' game, you might consider having a
small set of dissimilar games, and call it the "core scenarios", or
somesuch.  A.N.E. would also qualify, and perhaps 'space'.  I envision
a dialog box comparable to the one in the mac UI, but for all interfaces,
though the X11 interface could perhaps have command line flags for the
Top 3 games, e.g. -n for [Ancient] Near East, -s for space, etc.


> So, what do people think?  I can supply more detail on the new design
> if anyone's interested; it's currently residing on three pieces of
> paper, nothing's been tried yet.

    I'm interested.  As I am on summer vacation, I'll have the time free
 to work on it.

    It might be a good idea to have a file for new scenario ideas--scenarios
are in the projects file, but it might be a good idea to separate gdl coding
from C -- many, for instance myself, can easily understand a short, simple,
gdl file, but can't quite follow the ... grandeur of the Xconq sources.
(although I'm trying!)
    This file should be distributed with the final releases as well--there
are likely many users who would be happy to develop scenarios, but who are
unwilling to invest the time to work on Xconq proper.
--
Ari Rabkin