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Battle of Immortals: A Massively Multiplayer Idea
Here's a wacky idea for what a really huge multiplayer game could be like. 1. Take the cap off the number of possible players. So long as there's a city to rule, it should be possible to squeeze another player into the game.
2. Drop the "Ideal City limit" down to ONE. Yeah, that's right, you heard me, ONE. If you want more cities within your sphere of influence, w/o the corruption effect, you have to put another, trustworthy player (from the pool) in charge of that city. Of corse, for this to work, you have to...
3. Attatch a "player pool" to the game. These are potential leaders (players) or possibly even computer entites, who exist within the game, but don't actually control anything. They can, however, be negotiated with by other players (ANY other player, active or not, though with nothing to offer, it's kind of pointless). The chief purpose of this would be to grant control of cities to these "inactive" players, so they can manage it "for the glory of the empire."
Each player would chose a civ (from among any available) to play, which would ultimately be little more than a pair of CSAs (though each would have their time of glory, when their CSU is king of the battlefield). They could customize all the namings, of course. It *would* be nice to add male and female leader equivalants to each civ, though it is possible to simply ignore the pictures. For the duration of the game (most likely until the final date passes), *this* would be their character, and they must deal with it as they will.
If the leader's last unit is destroyed, the leader doesn't cease to exist. Rather, he simply goes into the "pool", his deeds not forgotten (the historiograph still existant). If another player wants to use him for a city governor, they make a deal, the other player grants him a city, and once again, he's on the historiograph, adding to his avarage. Of corse, once there, he's free to honor his agreements (or not) as he sees fit... but I imagine a bad repuation would be bad for his health.
4. Turns may be played in any order (even simultaniously, like in SMAC), and after a specified period of time passes (ideally for me, this would occur twice a day, once a day for slower paced games, maybe once every few minutes for a really fast smaller game), the next turn begins (similar to PBEM, but you can take turns in any order, and if you snooze, you lose).
5. Any time a new player signs up and there's a camp remaining undealt with, the barbarian camp could suddenly acquire a village (maybe half the avarage worldwide city size), a worker, and an equitable number of units, and become the property of the new player
6. Another possible way would be to provide a chance of a city that remains in "Civil Disorder" for too long (maybe more than two turns) to defect to someone in the "Player Pool," assuming it isn't a cultural defection (in which case the usual rules would continue to apply). This would actually serve the purpose of eliminating players that have stopped playing, without having to actually remove them from the game. Even if the capital were in civil disorder for too long (and if that happens, you *know* somebody isn't playing), it could defect to the pool.
7. Since they can alter the naming aspects of the basic 16 (or maybe more) templates, each individual citizen unit would possess the "nationality" of the "nation" that occupied it when it was spawned. This, in a game of the scope I imagine, could produce some rather diverse populations.
The largest game would be the "official" game on a server provided by Firaxis or Infrogames themselves, and this is my vision for such a massively multiplayer game:
I imagine a number of things occuring. I imagine some players forming "empires" which they manage by the fact that they can easily eliminate their "city governors," and the governors don't trust each other any more than their "emperor." I imagine groups of friends forming "federations" in an effort to dominate the game, and others forming counter-federations in response (but the map would be so huge that "federations" would have to be equally huge to actually dominate the entire game). I imagine "feual" arrangements where Builders agree, as a group, to pay a certain amount to Conquerers to maintain an army to defend and expand the holdings of the "Kingdom."
I imagine glorious nations that form when new players arrive, fresh and ready to play. I imagine such nations decaying as things like real life and boredom cause them to neglect their turns. I imagine people playing the Aztecs and Zulus dominating certain areas during the early game (though they can only reach so far, on a "Gigantic" sized map with ideal city size at 1), but then having to practically beg for a role in the game once their CSUs go obsolete, outshined by more modern leaders.
I even imagine someone with a very defensible position holding gold for players that are about to be eliminated. Swiss bank accounts, anyone?
I sincerely hope there's something like this at least in the imagination of someone capable of implementing it, if not actually in the works. Is this sufficiently comprehendable for anyone to know what I'm talking about?
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