Adopt-a-Neutral

Ed Kolis · #1 September 2nd, 2003, 04:29 AM

Someone might have proposed a similar idea before, and this probably won't work in practice, but I had a thought... What if there was a PBW game with no combat between the player empires, and all fighting was done by means of neutral empires that served as proxies? You'd have to gift ships and things to the neutrals in order for them to fight for you, but of course, once you "deployed" a ship by gifting it to your neutral, it could never leave the system it was deployed in, since neutrals never leave their system! To keep the player empires from fighting, you could simply mod the game so that Aggressiveness can be set to some insanely low value (way below the current minimum of -50), and require players to take this value, and also mod out the Talisman. (OK, so they COULD ram...) The player whose neutral survives the longest wins!

Suicide Junkie · #2 September 2nd, 2003, 05:00 AM

You could also stipulate a treaty between all player empires.

You would be prevented from invading deeply into your opponent's territory by his neutral defense ships and their superior attack/defense skills...

E3 · #3 September 3rd, 2003, 01:56 AM

Actualy I have seen a neutral ship outside of its home system without my putting it there.

I had gifted the race a planet, several systems over. I guess the game interpreted all the space between the two systems, as now being a part of one system or something like that, because I saw ships flying between the systems. Don't know if he went anywhere OUTSIDE of that or not though.

geoschmo · #4 September 2nd, 2003, 02:11 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by E3:
Actualy I have seen a neutral ship outside of its home system without my putting it there.

I had gifted the race a planet, several systems over. I guess the game interpreted all the space between the two systems, as now being a part of one system or something like that, because I saw ships flying between the systems. Don't know if he went anywhere OUTSIDE of that or not though.

That was a fluke, because it definetly doesn't happen under normal circumstances. The Neutrals are not normally able to warp period.

Ed Kolis, I actully had a similer idea to this. I was thinking instead of trying to make teh Neutrals do anything in particular each player would just have a specific neutral they were assigned to protect. Then the object would be to hunt down and kill the other players neutral protectees. You could gift your neutral race colony ships so he could expand and stuff. Although there would be no guarantee your neutral wouldn't turn on you and attack you. Part of the challange would be to protect them even though they might be attacking you.

PvK · #5 September 3rd, 2003, 01:16 AM

I think the neutral AI just doesn't give Warp orders. It does give orders to move between its own planets, though. I'm not sure what its restrictions are about which ships and planets it can attack, however.

Seems like this would work better if the AI's used weren't neutral, but were full AI's. Then require all players to maintain treaties with each other, and perhaps to maintain no peace treaty with the AI's (except maybe their "own" AI agent).

PvK