[geoschmo]

Ok, here's my revised plan for a simulated starting tech level PBW/PBEM game.

The game owner creates the first turn using stock SEIV files. For best results use the 100K start, although this is not totally neccesary.

The players play the first turn using stock files. (They will have to as the cheat protection will not allow them to do otherwise.) Once all the .plr files are in, the game owner processes the first turn offline, using modified data files. The facilities.txt file will be changed so that the research facility does nothing, and the Space Yard facility produces research points (100K per turn? Any number you want I suppose) and cannot construct anything. And change the settigns.txt file to reduce the base empire usage rates to zero. The effect of these changes is that as long as the modified data files are being used, empires cannot build anything, only research at a highly accelerated rate. These files will have to be distributed to the players so they can play there turns during the accelerated phase.

After a suitable period (1 year?) the turn will be processed using stock files and the players can begin constructing again.

AI can be used with this, although as stated before they may not be terribly efficent in the early turns and may lose some points because they only stack a couple projects at a time.

This has advatages over my previous ides, because each race will have only one research producing facility (modified space yard) regardless of whethere they are advanced storage or not. When I tested the other idea they were getting an extra research facility, which is a 20% bonus over the other races. With this plan the only difference in research production will be because of cultural or physical characteristics. If you still think that is unfair, you could mod the culture file to remove that one. Nothing you can do about the characteristics, except ban players from having improved intelligence. I don't see it as a big problem though.

One possible problem I can see would be is your homeworld population became unhappy because no ships are beign built. I don't think this would happen unless an enemy was in the same system, and that shouldn't happen if the enemies can't build ships either. If it does we can modify the happiness text file too.

Comments? If there is interest in this I can set up a game with this.

Geoschmo