Next DG Discussion

[Drogue]

Next DG Discussion

Since Tass' thread's been occulted, here be a replacement.

I think there was a consensus towards a single player DG with parties, with beefed up AI (but not *massively*) and with either our own faction or the PKs to make parties in character.

Please discuss

[GeoModder]

On top of having parties, I continue to press that single participants have control over their own base.

A party's strength would partially be determined by the production and income of the bases under command of it's members

[Maniac]

Re: Next DG Discussion

Originally posted by Drogue
Since Tass' thread's been occulted, here be a replacement.

What happened?

[binTravkin]

Yes what happened with Tass?

And regarding parties:
Before the game starts we should form the parties and count how many people each of them have.
The biggest party would get the first CP, the second biggest - the second and so on until all the parties have at least one base.
From that point on it would be the party who owns all the built CPs in it's own base (and of course the bases resulting from them) as well as units and facilities.

What do you think?

[Illuminatus]

Re: Re: Next DG Discussion

Originally posted by Maniac


What happened?

As I already explained to Drogue and Method, Ming erased Comrade Tassadar's posting history (to make him appear as newly registered settler), which also resulted in deletion of all threads he started with that login. They cannot be recovered.

It should be of interest that turn tracking thread and his CMN rulings in past ACDG are also completely gone. This doesn't apply to threads he didn't start.

[Drogue]

Last time we elected mayors of towns (or first governors of regions). But until the faction is big enough for that, I'd favour a central government. The parties power came through voting for positions, in terms of which parties had members in office.

Originally posted by binTravkin
Before the game starts we should form the parties and count how many people each of them have.
The biggest party would get the first CP, the second biggest - the second and so on until all the parties have at least one base.
From that point on it would be the party who owns all the built CPs in it's own base (and of course the bases resulting from them) as well as units and facilities.

What do you think?

I think that removes the democratic aspect of parties. It's an interesting idea, but I think it splits the faction too much. The idea is to play as a team, but have parties with different agendas competing to hold the helm of that team. Not to have different parties sabotaging other's bases (by putting theirs next to it) or some such. I'd prefer to keep it as competing for control, for votes, for power, but co-operating on running the faction. As it is in real life - different parties believe different things are better for people in that faction, and try to run it that way.

[Kataphraktoi]

hey that could be interesting politics though-unions of players putting their stuff together,bickering....the faction would be as helpless as it would be in real life situation like that

[Hercules]

Originally posted by Cataphract887
hey that could be interesting politics though-unions of players putting their stuff together,bickering....the faction would be as helpless as it would be in real life situation like that

Well it was more fun than that. There were some long discussion threads that more or less covered the evolution of society and the different ideologies from 4000BC to the present day. Meanwhile the playing of the game continued fairly regularly, in 10 turn SP chunks.

However the missing element was the sense of danger/risk. The game was played at Talent level so was quite forgiving of errors of judgement. There was no question who would win and in the end the game fizzled through lack of interest. No challenge remained, our faction was totally dominant. (It was the challenge aspect that led to the current MP ACDG games).

My view is: we need our own modified faction to allow a range of SE settings that can be debated about, so that we could go fundamentalist, for example, without too great a penalty. Or we could be a strong faction (Uni, Drones?) against several beefed up AI.

The longer the 'challenge/chance of defeat'. aspect is maintained the longer there will be interest and debate.

A key question is: do we want to have the possibility of defeat present. For instance, I am in a Darsnan designed MP game, where three strong AI, with key SP benefits have dominated the game (from the power charts) from the start and the turn is at 2156. Darsnan has indicated there are all sorts of surprises to happen on.

This adds excitement and danger. OTOH, if every decision to be made is important, to stay alive, then the scope for RP, regional governors and city mayors and error could be limited.

[Kataphraktoi]

yes i understand theres a tradeoff between interestingpolitics and the result probs and cooprerative gameplay in the face of danger.

life without some danger gets pretty dull...

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Hercules
The longer the 'challenge/chance of defeat'. aspect is maintained the longer there will be interest and debate.

"A society under stress reveals its most basic nature". The thought of subjugation (or extermination....) of your Faction could definately lead to some very intense inter/ intra factional debates.....

Originally posted by Hercules
A key question is: do we want to have the possibility of defeat present. For instance, I am in a Darsnan designed MP game, where three strong AI, with key SP benefits have dominated the game (from the power charts) from the start and the turn is at 2156. Darsnan has indicated there are all sorts of surprises to happen on.

I'm not sure if its a good thing or a bad thing that I don't know exactly what game your talking about here, Herc. Regardless, I would of course opt for a beefed up AI.....

Originally posted by Hercules
This adds excitement and danger. OTOH, if every decision to be made is important, to stay alive, then the scope for RP, regional governors and city mayors and error could be limited.

I'd take the opposite stance in that if players feel that every turn is important to their survival/ Faction's chance for success, then it could lead to more spirited debates!

Anyways, my thoughts on the subject.....


D

[Maniac]

déjà-vu

[Voltaire]

Originally posted by Drogue
No rush guys, there's life left in this game yet! No need to decide things for a while

I agree here with Drogue. We do not need to jump the gun on this one, the current ACDG is not yet over, and the number of people contributing to the discussion regarding the format of the next ACDG is very limited. As far as I’m concerned our government structure and constitution are also things that are open for political debate, and that ought to be determined by all participants of the ACDG prior to the start of the next game (while we are still on board the Unity). That being said, I think such an approach would permit the constitution to be reflective of all the political interests in the faction; rather than having a constitution imposed upon us from the start, we’d hammer out an agreement between the various parties as to how the government should be structures (this might not seem to matter much in certain cases, such as the administrative structure, but in cases of electoral procedure and government powers there already seems to be disagreement).

[Voltaire]

But to break with my own advice of not jumping the gun, I would like to add one thing regarding the structure of the government. In the ACDG II in the Hive we essentially had a huge bloated bureaucracy that permitted a large number of members to have government posts, this I believe contributed somewhat to all the activity within the Hive. Rather than trying to make the government smaller, I think for the purposes of the ACDG large government is more conducive to player participation. Rather than the majority of members being drones and feeling alienated from the decision making (things such as polls and votes don’t really contribute to a sense of belonging) members could have government posts of one form or another. This makes the players feel as though they have a stake in the process more so than mere voting. That’s just my two cents.

[Mart]

I think the knowledge of CMNing today is advanced enough to make a good design of a singleplayer scenario with increasing level of difficulty. No additional modifications to game files might be needed too. Due to the fact, that factional atributes are recorded into game save, some AI factions may be made very powerful and noone would have to change anything in the game installed files to have it all during the game play. These AI factions power increase (growth of strength) might be also more finelly tuned. It is possible to keep the game challenging at some moderate to difficult level for the whole or majority of the game. Not that it is completely difficult at the start, then there is "breaking point" and the game is sweat and easy afterwards.

I think that there is needed some balance between game being difficult and having room for role-play. I know that for longer time keeping the discipline of excellent efficiency in order to win/survive may be tiring to boring. Having hard moments in game but also more easy and quiet is the best, in my oppinion.

There are CMNs in our comunity having excellent knowledge of the game, its mechanics to prepare such a steady challenge scenario. I have seen, for example, Darsnan, Googlie, Chaos Theory and Rubin preparing excellent scenarios and playing with as much good efficiency. So the question would be what kind of difficulty level (somewhere in the middle, as I wrote above) we would choose for the game.

[binTravkin]

I think the knowledge of CMNing today is advanced enough to make a good design of a singleplayer scenario with increasing level of difficulty. No additional modifications to game files might be needed too. Due to the fact, that factional atributes are recorded into game save, some AI factions may be made very powerful and noone would have to change anything in the game installed files to have it all during the game play. These AI factions power increase (growth of strength) might be also more finelly tuned. It is possible to keep the game challenging at some moderate to difficult level for the whole or majority of the game. Not that it is completely difficult at the start, then there is "breaking point" and the game is sweat and easy afterwards.

QFT and that's what we need.

One of the most obvious things an AI needs to keep up with human is to be able to popboom and it can be "tought" to them with little meddling..

But back to the topic:
1.I agree completely that the more a decision will weigh, the more debate there will be around it.
2.I am all four for beefed AI.
It can be even be beefed up to quite huge levels if human faction is put somewhere out of direct range of first blows, as then the AIs will start to fight between themselves.

I have also had 2 more ideas on the topic, however you might find them a little odd:
1.OCC Puppet game - make human faction as weak as possible, say by running only one city and make 1 AI our puppets (so we have to guide them)
2."Me be a puppet" game where humans have to obey one particular SUPER powerful AI faction's orders and build up until when they're ready for it - REBEL!
I don't know if it's technically possible to rebel against a faction whom you have surrendered to, but if it is, the faction must be really powerful, so we will have to be smart (= have hot discussions) up until the very end.