Re: [Fwd: Re: XConq playable intermittently?]

[Stan Shebs <shebs at shebs dot cnchost dot com>]

Bob Carragher wrote:
> 
> What Duane was asking for sounds similar, as well, to another
> "network" game I idled away many an hour with, called "Conquer."
> This was completely text-based, and differed also from xconq
> in that movements were conducted "independently" of other sides.
> That is, each person logged into the system, entered his moves
> for that turn, and logged out.  At a predetermined time, the
> system would read in all the moves, adjudicate conflicts, and
> update the world status.
> 
> Would it be very difficult to adapt xconq to such a paradigm?
> It might solve his original problem, where a person temporarily
> leaves the game and all his units just defend themselves but
> take no offensive action.

Internally, Xconq does have a split between specifying actions
and executing them, not just for the sake of networking, but
also to allow games structured as you describe.  As usual, working
out the details is a little more effort... :-)

> On that note, I have another thought.  In most of the xconq
> games that I've played -- that is, one starts out with a city,
> explores and acquires neutral towns for additional production,
> and obliterates AIs before meeting a human in a real showdown
> B-) -- dropping out of the game before all the non-human-owned
> production sites have been "allotted" would be equivalent to
> deciding one didn't want to win.  Production in such games is
> vital.  Yes, you should try to concentrate resources against
> your opponents' weak points, but he'll likely be doing the same,
> and if you have only 80% of the production capability of your
> opponent, you will eventually lose!

That was one of the rationales for allowing fewer independent
cities in the standard game - less chance for a random setup
to be severely imbalanced.  I've been thinking about how to
reduce the influence of production capability overall, perhaps
by adding some sort of "overhead penalty", or limiting the
total number of units a side can have at any one time.

> If one drops out for maybe 2 or 3 turns, then that would not
> be traumatic.  One must take bathroom breaks when necessary.  B-)
> But a drop-out of, say, 5-10 turns (heaven forbid more) would
> be suicidal, particularly in the early, exploratory phase of
> a game.  At that point, the lost production really hurts.  Put
> another way, your opponent's increased production will enable
> him to do more things while simultaneously increasing his area
> surveyed and his number of neutral towns acquired.  Bottom line:
> do you really want to do that?

You'd probably want to choose particular setup options.  For instance,
world-seen eliminates the exploration phase, and you could make
players' starting countries larger while reducing the numbers of
independent towns.

> During the midgame, when most of the AIs have been eliminated
> and the humans are now meeting each other and feeling each other
> out, dropping out might not hurt too much, although you're still
> losing opportunities to pick up production from the AIs.  Towards
> the endgame, when it's just humans vs. humans, it might be to one's
> advantage to take a small break and let supplies build up.  On the
> other hand, if I know that my opponent will be sleeping for the
> next 5 turns, I'd have no qualms about sending scouts into his
> territory, locate a nice, quiet, out-of-the-way location, and
> build bases right under his nose.  B-)

Heh-heh.  However, if the rules were modified to use people/control
layers, and sanctuary included inviolability of frontiers, the most
you could do would be to try to blockade, which would be difficult
to pull off if the country were very large.  If the player could
move units around unseen before breaking sanctuary, you'd be best
advised to CYA just in case the breakout included a massive attack
against your own country...

Stan