Alpaca: 10 player game to test new server(started)

[llamabeast]

I'd like to start a new middle era game, with something in the range of 8-10 players. The object will be:

1) To have a normal fun game.
2) To test a new automated PBEM program I've been working on.

The program in question is called the LlamaServer (I named it after myself ), and I'm hoping it may help to ease the general scarcity of games. Essentially you just e-mail it your 2h file, and when it has all the 2h files it processes the turn and sends the new trn files out. You can check who's taken the turn and when the next turn's due at any time on the website (currently pretty rudimentary, www.llamaserver.net).

The idea is that it'll be *nearly* as good as a hosted game - obviously not quite, because you have to open your e-mail program. I went for a PBEM option firstly because I'm stuck behind a university firewall and so couldn't run a normal server anyway, and secondly because there's much less overhead to running a PBEM game, so it should eventually be able to run lots and lots of games at once.

Anyway, I'll probably waffle more about how it works and what it does and stuff later. The first thing is to get the game going. So far we have:

llamabeast - Marignon
DrPraetorius - Pythium
Tyrant - R'lyeh
GameExtremist - Arcoscephale
JayThomas - Man
Reverend Zombie - Shinuyama
Digress - Caelum
Xietor - Pangaea
Valerius - Vanheim
Sieger - Ermor

Map: Cradle of Dominions (Edi's fixed version)
Settings: Independents 6
Graphs on
Renaming on
Mods: Worthy Heroes 1.6
DrPraetorius' blessings hotfix

To upload your pretender, just send an e-mail to pretenders[ at ]llamaserver[ dot ]net, with the pretender file attached. If you want you can zip it, rar it or gzip it. Or not. The subject line has to be 'Alpaca', because that's the name of the game (I thought I'd stick with the llama-like theme). Then also post here to say you've joined.

It would be quite cool if you did everything you can think of to break it. I say this because I've plugged all the gaps I can think of, and at the moment I can't think of anything you could do to confuse it. But, I want it to be super-robust. So please go crazy in your attempts to mess it up, I can soon fix it again. For example, why not rename an ordinary 2h file as if it was a pretender? Create a random text file and send that? Please let me know if any of its responses aren't reasonable for what you did. Also let me know of any typos or errors in the e-mails it sends. I want it to be nice.

Okay, here's the links to the maps and mods you need:

Edi's fixed maps
Worthy heroes mod
Blessing hotfix

The worthy heroes mod is a rar file, which has been known to cause difficulties in the past - if you can't open it (and you're using windows), download WinRar from here.

[Gandalf Parker]

Very impressive. I tried two old standard cracks against badly written email handling. Both of them sent me back a form-letter response about the problem.
I am impressed.

Dont speak lightly of pbem servers.
A pbem server can handle at least 10 games for each 1 that a direct-connect server runs.
Instead of maxing out at 10 games, my server could run 100

[llamabeast]

Hey, thanks Gandalf. I like your crack e-mails! They look evil.

It looks like people have joined as Man and Shinuyama already, good stuff - who are you?

[llamabeast]

Oh, by the way, if you want to change your pretender in some way, you can just send the new file, and it'll overwrite the previous one. You can't change nation though.

[Digress]

I sent through a pretender for Caelum.

And it was accepted without a hitch.

[GameExtremist]

I'll take Arco : )

[Reverend Zombie]

as Shinuyama.

[llamabeast]

Anyone have any thoughts as to what map we should use?

[DrPraetorious]

For 10 players? Creadle of Dominion is handsome.

Orania might be better balanced (note also that it is only slightly larger).

Do you want me to scatter the start locations over a map to maximize consistency of placement? It's a hangup of mine, if you post (or pick) a map-file, I can do whatever you want to it.

[llamabeast]

Cradle of Dominions sounds good. Isn't 20 provinces each a little on the large side though, or am I being silly? Maybe 12 players would be a little better.

Once we've worked out how many players, scattering the start locations sounds like a good idea, thanks Dr P.