One empire, multiplayer?

[Suicide Junkie]

Re: Repairs.
I guess I was thinking too P&N-ish.
In most mods, one repair base is sufficient for any amount of damage, so yeah, War might as well do the repairs himself.

Re: Retrofits.
War has to do the final retrofitting, or he loses control of the strategies. Thus, he might as well do the whole thing.
Peace will design production hulls with the most components in common, but war will always have to make some change.

Re: Troops.
I suppose that if the War and the defense units can't stop the troop transports, they might as well have the planet, and rebuild later.

Sounds like a very solid alliance

[Baron Munchausen]

This thread has hit on an idea I've been mulling for some time. The trend is towards more and more elaborate game worlds. People want to exploit the power of the computer to get greater detail. Recently the emphasis has been on graphical detail but MOO III is now shifting it towards simulation detail. If MOO III is a commercial success, I expect to see an explosion of strategy games that use massively detailed simulations.

The way MOO III is doing this without forcing the player into hours of tedious micromanagement per turn is by designing the AI to do most of the actual play and accept 'policy' directives from the player. In fact, the number of actions you can take as 'yourself' in a turn is deliberately limited. There are several threads in the MOO III forums that have become rather, uh, 'heated' over this concept and what it means for game play. Some people think this defeats the purpose of strategy gaming and consider it a really stupid idea while others think it's equally stupid to expect to personally manage the amount of detail that MOO III is going to contain. But there is some value in the argument that having the AI do everything takes a lot of the 'participation' fun out of the game. I'll just have to see how MOO III turns out.

There is another approach to this problem, and you have just brought it up in this thread. Instead of each 'empire' being a single player, each 'empire' would be a team! Imagine this: Space Empires V is a 'team' game where several people take roles equivalent to 'AI ministers' in SE IV. One person is the 'military minister' and manages attack/defense. One person is the 'colonization minister' and manages the choosing of new colonies and building them up to usable 'contributing' members of the empire. One person is the 'Diplomacy minister' and tries to manage (a vastly more complex system then SE IV) diplomatic relations with the other empires in the game. I suppose you could divide the game into many small chunks and then 'allocate' them in various ways that aren't too rigidly identified by these minister categories but that's the general direction of it.

Now, this has some problems. Not only must it be in 'simultaneous mode' by default, but the actions of the various 'jurisdictions' must be coordinated! If you are 'defense' minister and you order an old ship un-mothballed for use but the 'maintenance minister' orders it scrapped on the same turn, what happens? This will be a serious design challenge. If it can be worked out though, the gaming possibilities are great. The 'empire chat' window where you talk to your teammates will be one interesting place...

[ 25 January 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[CW]

quote:

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Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
If you are 'defense' minister and you order an old ship un-mothballed for use but the 'maintenance minister' orders it scrapped on the same turn, what happens? This will be a serious design challenge.

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That's not too hard to do, just give every person in the team a rank so a higher ranking person will override a lower rank's orders. Still you will need a lot of coordination though, and who wants to be ranked lower than his team mates?

And yes, "multiplayer empires" is surely a nice feature to have in the SEV!

[ 25 January 2002: Message edited by: CW ]

[dogscoff]

I love the "War and Peace" idea. It would make a great PBW game, with a bunch of 2-player teams playing against one another.

You could even have War and Peace controlled by the same player, it would mak for a very diffrnt game. In fact I might try that in a vsAI game - when I'm next about to conquer an AI race, I could just change it to human control instead and turn it into my "War" empire.

[ 26 January 2002: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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That's not too hard to do, just give every person in the team a rank so a higher ranking person will override a lower rank's orders. Still you will need a lot of coordination though, and who wants to be ranked lower than his team mates?

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Better, yet, set the priority (rank) of each players orders with regard to the object type.

Ships
"Attack ships" -> Attack minister, Defense minister, retrofit/repair minister, etc...
"Defense Ships" -> defense, attack, retro, ...
"SY ships" -> retro, defense, attack.

Beyond that, you should try not to override someone elses orders unless it is nessesary.
(If attack orders a repair ship to join his fleet, don't recall the thing unless you have a good reason)

[CW]

Emm... we are sounding more and more like we are talking about the admin rights and that active directory thingy in M$ Windows 2000!