Game customization

[Hans Ronne <hronne at 2 dot sbbs dot se>]

Stan and I just had a discussion about the three standard game options
(world-seen, see-all and sequential), which are now enabled for some games
and disabled for others. Would it make sense to enable them for all games,
or would that make it to easy to cheat, e. g. by making the whole world
visible in exploration games?

If complete freedom for the player to customize these options is not
desirable, should one at least make it possible to turn off world-seen in
more games? I'm talking about games like Flattops, Roman Civil War and
several ww2 games, where you are now forced to see the whole map. I think
that these games are  more fun if you hack them so that the world is not
visible, but this may be a matter of taste.

We also discussed other forms of customization, some of which don't even
exist yet. Right now, I am working on giving the independent side a brain,
so that these units also can move around and take part in the game. An
important question is how smart the independent side should be. Should it
be able to build, do research and at least some strategic planning, or
should it just restrict itself to defending its own units when attacked? My
feeling is that this may vary from game to game, and also that different
players may have different preferences. I would therefore like to put some
customization in the setup dialog for the independent side.

I'm also working on making the population code in ane.g, where cities can
grow in size and thus become more powerful, available to other games. The
question then arises if this code should be on by default (which would have
profound effects in some existing games) or off (which wouldn't change
anything in existing games). Again, I feel that customization during setup
could be a good solution. This would make the new features available in
existing games, but would not force players to use them against their will.
As I see it, this could be a good strategy for handling other new features
as well.

However, too much customization could be confusing, particularly to the
newbie. Would it be a solution to hide some of this stuff in a separate
dialog that is accessed by a "Customize" button, as in Civ I? Or would that
be even more confusing? Is it perhaps better to have all customization in
one place, even if it gets crowded? Or in an avalanche of dialogs that
follow each other, like in Civ II? And should one consider making some of
these options preferences that can be saved from game to game, in order to
facilitate the startup procedure?

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@2.sbbs.se