Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

Alright, so my Factions concept never really took off (well, maybe it secretly did and I should have tried setting up a game for it). Here's another.

Overlords: These nations have pre-defined empires, 10 provinces large with 3 starting forts (including the capitol). No labs/temples added on the extra forts. Their provinces already have magic sites at the beginning of the game so their advantages over lesser nations should be even more so. However, they can only attack normal nations or independents if their pretender is in the army or if they have dominion in the normal nation's (or independent's) province (an overlord cannot take a normal nation's capitol unless all other overlords are dead). They can attack other overlord nations whenever they want though. Overlord nations will be seperated by normal nations, but will be given gatestones to allow them to attack each other more easily. Gatestones will also be moved down to construction 6, and made forgeable only with e9s9. Overlords will start with one gate stone.

Victory conditions: Either all other overlords must be dead and the sole surviving overlord in control of at least 5 capitols for 3 turns OR control 10 capitols for 3 turns(assuming all nations).

Only more experienced players will be considered for overlord positions. Otherwise the game would quickly come unbalanced. Either all overlords will have stealth preachers, or none will. Overlords will not be able to choose blood sacrificing nations.




Normals: Normal starting empires, one province, no extra sites or anything. May do whatever they wish, except that they may not cast ANY globals. Note that the Overlords may cast these spells should they so choose.

Victory Conditions: For a normal nation to win, they must control at least 5 capitols for 3 turns, including an overlord capitol.


Since there are spells that some people are allowed to use and others are not, either they will have to be made into nationals (annoying, and possibly mod conflict inducing?) or there will have to be a game master to deal with unallowed globals. I am leaning towards the game master idea as without one, it is possible one of the players of an Overlord nation could mess up the game by doing things he's not supposed to. Plus as I intend to admin rather than play, it would give me an easy way to know what turn the game is on and when hostings are.



Suggested Settings:
Age - QM has suggested MA, this seems a decent starting point. Any should work though.
Pre-set starts
Mods - cbm 1.5 or whatever the latest version happens to be at the time, no gem gens, and if water nations are included UWGIM.
Gold/resource/supplies/indies - normal
Players - as many as possible
Magic sites - 20
Renaming - on
HoF - 15
Research - difficult
All other settings default, on a 15-20 PPP map.


Comments, criticism, and sign ups welcome. Veteran player input on settings is particularly desired and may result in changes to the above.

Re: Megagame 3 - Overlords?
 

I really like this idea, but I'd rather keep it to one era. More thematic, more manageable, and there would probably be trouble filling up a mega game anyway.

Re: Megagame 3? - Overlords
 

That is a good point. It would be fun from my perspective to make it into a mega game, but probably unrealistic.

Re: Overlords
 

As long as you restrict only globals I really see no need to do anything about it. If someone who isn't allowed to use them uses them just kick him out.

If you really want to have no access I could probably change a script of mine to make national spells out of the globals.

Re: Overlords
 

If there's a game master though, there is no need to kick them out. Just take down their global with a massive dispel. Plus the game master nation (hidden in some corner somewhere with no connected provinces) can punish someone who goes against the rules and attacks people they're not supposed to, again without having to search for a new player to play the nation after kicking them out. But really being physically in the game and getting turn files when the game hosts would be immensely useful to me. I am admining 3 games right now already and it is getting a bit difficult to keep track of everything that's going on from turn to turn :P That said the game master bit is not completely necessary. It would just be convenient.

The script would be useful in either case though, actually :)

Re: Overlords
 

QM has suggested that this game be MA with jotunheim, abysia and ashdod as the Overlords, along with any underwater nations that happen to be in the game. I have no particular problem with this, however if a different era would be preferable that can be changed. Thread title updated to reflect this.

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

Overlord attack rules updated.

Additions: Each overlord starts with a gate stone. They are forgeable with e9s9. Overlords will get a forge bonus site in their cap to help with making these.

Also abysia is replaced by pythium as an overlord. All blood sacrifice nations are banned (van, abysia)

Also I will only accept more veteran players for overlord positions, as having newer players in for them would be very unbalancing for the game.

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

I wouldn't put a forge bonus site (or any bonus site) anywhere on the map. Why not just hand out a gate stone and if they lose it, too bad for them. If they're forgable, they can be wished for easilly enough. I don't think that's a bad thing.

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

Actually yes, the construction sites are unnecessary. So scratch that from my post. The rest stands, will update again later when I am thinking more coherently.

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

I think ths could blossom into a really good idea that could take off for games in the future.

I was just wondering why you would go MA with very difficult research?

It would seem that for the 'underlings' to compete,magic would have to come into play. It wasn't clear to me if the Overlords where the only ones to be able to cast globals, or if no one could.

I would think EA would be good for the underlings and maybe MA for some of the overlords ect.

Just an opinion off the top of my head.

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

MA was pretty much an arbitrary decision for this particular game. Difficult-very difficult research is to keep magic more rare. Basically the overlords are the only people who have much magic. They also have most of the gems in the game. They need these advantages to be competetive, and it creates a scenario that could lead to interesting diplomacy between normal nations and overlords.

EA would probably be good for overlords actually, because there are so many nonhuman superpowers. In the end I decided to go against it on the basis that ea super nations are sort of cliche here :P


So, any takers?

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

I am interested, I think. Will mod nations be allowed? Actually, on the mod theme, how about mods like CPCS, Holy War, or Endo's Site Mod being included?

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

I'm open to more mods, so long as they don't scare people off. This is a completely out there theme already, so I am worried that adding more mods might make it even harder to get players. So far I think the most controversial mod I have listed would be UWGIM... and at least parts of that are going into the next cbm update. I certainly have no objection to the mods you mentioned, I actually really like the idea of adding holy war.

So the inclusion of more mods is possible, but I would like to hear more players thoughts first.

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

Did you have some sort of idea what you wanted for the map? As in generally what placements, how many provs the overlords get and how many extra gems, etc? Depending on how hard it might be, I might be able to edit up a map if I knew generally what you wanted.

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

I just thought - Tharoon: Decadent Overlords ought to be a must-have for the game :D

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

Sounds intresting, but I don't have room for any more games. But I still got a friendly hint: Once you have all the details worked out, you should make another thread for the game. People aren't really too hots on joining games where the first pages of the game thread are arguments and announcements for changing the settings.

Re: Overlords - Experimental (ma?) game
 

TheDemon: Ideally it would be a map with 3 lakes for the underwater overlords. Overlords should be surrounded by normal nations if possible, and at the least should have at least one normal nation seperating them from other overlords. I am thinking possibly a circular map an overlord on top and bottom, and to on the sides? Or maybe a wraparound map with the overlords in columns with a nation in between them in each direction. Does that sound like it would work? Overlords would start with their full province count, so if it was a 15 province per player game they'd have 15 to start. If you made up the map I would really appreciate it.

Gregstrom: Heh, yeah, that would be pretty fitting. Perhaps I could do mod nations instead of some of the water nations. Tharoon, tomb kings, r'lyeh? If mod nations prove more popular than water nations.

Yeah, you are probably right burn. This can be the concept/planning thread, and I will make a game thread once all of this is hashed out.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

There may be difficulties over dominion spread. Overlord nations could potentially use their starting income advantage to spam temples, giving them ample opportunity to expand freely into normal empires before they get off the ground, and possibly domkill them rapidly.

Maybe some limits should be put on the overlords to help prevent this.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

Well, they could. But if they are devoting that much effort into expanding their dominion it would make it harder to deal with the other overlords. And I am not sure expansion of dominion would be so quick. They have a lot of territories to fill with dominion after all, so I expect it would take at least some time before they could get their dominion into other people's lands. That is perhaps a valid concern though.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

I would say overlords perhaps should not have their full province count. If they had only 10/15 to start, then the problem of spammed domspread is lessened since they need to take an extra 5 before they start encroaching on normals.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

Thinking about it yeah, that does make sense. Otherwise some of the normal nations could have issues getting picked at by the overlords before they had anything to fight back with.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

One other idea I had when looking at the map manual was you could set the overlords' non-cap provs to have a certain ammount of unrest at the start of the game. They would start with only their gem income advantage but their gold income advantage would come online automatically. A bit of tax micro on the players' part. Plus, if you want, the overlords' sites can be hidden at the start of the game and would have to be discovered by searching (they would still be guaranteed).

I'm not sure if either of those are necessary at all, but the ideas jumped out at me.

As for the map, I'm thinking wraparound for sure. I'll probably crib a slice from another map and copy it a few times to make something that's more or less symetrical. With 6 overlords and 15 normals, placement might be a little tricky. I might just place overlords in some sort of equidistant pattern, mark their provs nostart, and then open a game and see where it randomly places the remaining nations.

Ideas?

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

I just edited a map for the Early Days game. It had some nations in prefixed start locations and other placed randomly in a choice of prefixed starting locations.

Some hints:
- Nostart overrides the command for fixed starting position, so if you mark a province as a nostart and set a nation there, you will get a crash error when you try to start the game.
- You need to keep an eye for terrains that are marked as nostart in their terrain code. That also overides any #start commands

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

Wouldn't it be in the interests of the normal nations helmed by the less experienced players to at least coordinate with one another in the beginning against the overlords before fighting it out amongst themselves?

Having a co-admin is a great idea, especially for games with large numbers of players. Even for smaller games, having a co-admin or at least a backup admin is great to have, just in case life gets in the way and you cannot access the Internet for some reason.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

I like the idea of unrest at the start, it will give them a less stellar start and hopefully help them from starting up too fast. I want them to start with the whole gem income though, they won't be able to use it completely for a while anyway, and I think they will need it if they get rushed.

You're right, fitting 15 would be somewhat difficult. Making a completely symmetrical map with 14 players would be doable though. Here's a basic grid style, 1s are overlords, 2s are normals.

2 2 2 2
2 1 2 1
2 1 2 1
2 1 2 1
2 2 2 2

Since it's wrap around, the left side would be adjacent to the right side... would that be acceptable? If you can get 15 in without it looking inherently unbalanced, I would find that quite satisfactory.


Septimius, that is quite possible and one of the reasons the overlords need to have significant starting advantages over the normal nations. Otherwise it would be too easy to gang up on them and take them out. Hopefully, the way they are going they will be unattractive enough targets to dissuade such an early ganging.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

If it's wraparound, wouldn't it be better like this?

2 2 2 2
2 1 2 1
2 2 2 2
2 1 2 1
2 2 2 2
2 1 2 1

Also, what nations were you anticipating being overlords? Shinuyama, Ashdod, Tien Chi, Mictlan? uh, C'tis, Ulm, Ermor? I'm just trying to think of what possibilities are left for the chump normal nations.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

You are correct, I was thinking only horizontal wraparound, rather than complete wrap around.

Tentatively, overlords would be pythium, ashdod and jotunheim for ma, plus all water nations. In all honesty though, there don't have to be specific set overlords except for underwater. If a player felt they could do particularly well with a nation under the setup, I don't see any reason why they couldn't play them.

Also Demon, if you think it would be too much hassle to have underwater overlords in the game for mapmaking purposes, that's fine. We can just switch to ea and not bother with underwater nations for simplicity's sake.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

how about overlords must reach dominion amount 3 friendly in an enemy normal province to attack it?


this way it's much harder? and preaching much more effective against it?


without changing the vision or simplistic nature or etc?

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

I don't know, I think it will already be fairly hard for overlords to expand into normals. I don't think adding a specific dominion quantity is altogether necessary.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

Unless anyone else has comments, I think the basic idea is set. I will wait to make certain whether there will be water overlords or not, and then I'll start a thread for a game using this concept.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

The unrest thing has been scrapped. So has the game master mod. Also, various updates.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

Change "normal nations" to "normal nations or independents" in the overlords section and that should pretty much cover it. We did wonder a bit in IRC about if we should keep the gatestones. Even if the overlords can't attack caps, it might be a bit too much to have them take all the provs next door to a normal cap using the pretender rule and their gate stone early on. But maybe not.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

I think the gatestones add the flavor to the game. I would not scrap them.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

How about national globals, like Carrion Woods. They are banned too for non-overlords? What about spells like Wild Hunt?

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

All globals are overlord only. Honestly I doubt a normal nation would have much luck trying to cast a global anyway with the extreme lack of gems.

I think the gatestones add flavor to the game also, and I'm not inclined to scrap them.

Re: Overlords - Experimental game. Concept thread
 

I will play an overlord, if needed. Rdonj's inclusion of me seems a bit inconclusive.