[geoschmo]

You could do this. The game owner really shouldn't be a player then, or at least you would want to have a non-involved third party. (I would be willing)

Just have the players all submit their empires as normal. Then this third party person could go through and edit (He'd need the passwords, the reason he shouldn't be in the game) and and "tweak" the descriptions just a little to give them some commonality. If you are playing this on PBW, it would need to be something other than the shipset, cause you can see that from the game info screen.

To be really fair though you should have starting positions so one team isn't on opposite sides of the quadrant while everyone else is right next to each other. But again that could be set up by the non-involved third party and noone in the game would know which way to go to find their ally.

Edit: Actually, you could use shipsets, if everyone agreed to use stock ones and didn't display on the game info screen which they were using and didn't tell anyone which they were using. If more than two people used the same set, the third party person would just ask one of them to switch so you had two of each shipset. But you could use whatever empire name and history you wanted, just leave the bio description alone.

Geoschmo

[ June 07, 2002, 22:09: Message edited by: geoschmo ]