quote: Original post by Diodor
If I have a small neighbour next to my empire and killing him off would add another world to my domains, I would do so instantly.

You may not even be aware of some newbie who has setup shop in your very own domain. And if you are aware of him, why kill him? He''s a producer in your dominion.

Take the guy who runs the dominion next to yours. You''re concerned that players will just kill for the hell of it. How are you going to do this? If you want, go to war with him and takeover his dominion. Fine. That doesn''t mean the other player dies. He may just up and disappear and show up on the other side of the galaxy selling wheat for a living.

Causing complete genocide of your enemy doesn''t even guarantee killing the other player. You''re going to have to carefully engineer killing of another player if you want it to happen.

Let me give you three examples: bin Laden, Hussein and Hitler. Winning a war against one does not mean you''ve killed the leader (analogous to the player you''re targeting).

quote: Original post by bishop_pass
This isn''t a video game. Finger twitching skills aren''t necessary. Assasination and spying happens when planning, money and conspiratorial discussion make it happen from outsourcing such jobs.

Oh, Awright that explains it then. In that case no player will ever specialise in any specific task but will always hire or delegate.

Cool. In that case I know have information to make sugestions about assasins and stuff in your specifics thread.

Thanks.

quote: Original post by Diodor
If I understand corectly, you imply that the game can understand who the "king of the data" is. I don''t think this fits with the original idea.

The players obviously make choices that reflect their appraisal of who the "king of the data" is (or at least where they would like their focus to be), why not input that information directly into the system so that it can simulate?

quote: Only the players are supposed to know the political information.

Complicate the model if necessary, but the information should still be something the game can reflect. If the game can''t reflect the information, I doubt whether there is anything to design.

quote: The game only offers a world simulation that allows and encourages both cooperation and conflict, forming and supporting political structures and betraying them. The game doesn''t implement any way for players to vote a king.

"King" is just a placeholder: in a computer game it would be as negotiable as player''s choices from one moment to the next. The crucial factor is that player''s are able to reflect on those changes as they take place. Without closing the feedback loop, a dynamic game structure would not exist.

quote:
I don''t believe in limits for anything, and I think "game balance" is overrated. Some games should be inherently unbalanced, ie some roles in the game should be obviously more difficult than others, but more rewarding upon success.

LOL! but that is BALANCE!...a more difficult path with greater rewards balances with a easyer path with lesser rewards...it wouldn''t be balanced if the more difficult path had lesser or equal rewards then what the easyer path does

quote:
I honestly haven''t thought about aliens. I suppose there could be aliens, and players could even be different aliens, but that whole idea isn''t really relevant to the game concept, which could work in any contemporary or futuristic society composed of humans alone or humans and others.

Sorry, I had seen that the scope of the game seems to be quite vast (i.e. player "owning" planets, etc..) and had assumed aliens would come into the picture...at anyrate, "realistic" aliens...as far as what scientist believe are out there...wouldn''t work very well (how would players control a race that communicates through body heat, and has no relateable human like traits)...but aliens sceen in sci-fi films/TV shows (and aliens often seen in video games) would work well...as they are more or less human like (altho different looking), often with one or more human traits exagerated (Star Trek Klingons are war like for example).

quote: Original post by MSW
LOL! but that is BALANCE!...a more difficult path with greater rewards balances with a easyer path with lesser rewards...it wouldn''t be balanced if the more difficult path had lesser or equal rewards then what the easyer path does.

Why it doesn''t, to me, consitute balance is that these aren''t constraints placed on roles by the game designer; instead, they''re just the products of the social fabric that exists between players. The "difficulty" of roles changes dynamically with the overall nature of relationships between players.

quote: Original post by Diodor
You assume the world starts out as a peaceful civilised society where acts of violence are considered an outrage by the general public.

No, we explicitly seed the world that way (bishop_pass made an earlier post about computer-controlled domains existing purely to jumpstart player interaction). Furthermore, bilateral agreements and cooperation always evolve in any reasonably complex/large society because more can be done and both/all parties can benefit to greater extents than otherwise. If every player is largely antagonistic, the world overall will devolve and fewer services/products will be available to everybody, which lowers everyone''s potential productivity... we don''t need the economics lesson. Cooperation pays, and enough players will be intelligent to explicitly realize that and therefore work to ensure the possiblity of continued cooperation between players.

There''s also an even more self-centered motivation at work here: players don''t want anyone to get comfortable thinking they can attack others without repercussion, or they might end up the victims of the antagonist becomes sufficiently powerful.

quote:
Being used to control empires with many star systems, I find the idea of controlling one planet adequately modest.

It''s not the ambition of the idea that bothers me, it''s the lack of substantiating arguments for its plausibility. There has never been a "world leader" in human history; those who sought utter domination by force have always eventually lost at great cost, and none have been able to acquire it by diplomacy. Furthermore, when players operate on the levels of planets (which are usually fundamentally self-sufficient), what incentive do they have to interact with individuals/entities governing other planets?

quote: If the game mechanics you envision make controlling one planet very difficult in an universe with many planets, that is enough of a limit to me.

I think the difficulties I envision in controlling a planet have nothing to do with game mechanics, and a whole lot more to do with human social interaction.

quote: Again, I can''t think of a game where entities fade away eventually. While I agree this is a good goal for a political game, the game mechanics that insure this are in no way obvious.

Again, this is, in real life, and would be, in the game, a function of human social interaction as opposed to game mechanics. Perhaps the point stands reiteration: this game is fundamentally about putting people into positions of (achievable but unlikely in regular existence) power and allowing them to react. They need to acquire the power, they need to use the power, they need to keep the power. The game does nothing to prevent or promote that other than providing services for the concrete elemnts of power representation and providing interaction channels (and the players are free to use channels outside these - personal email, webpages, etc).

quote: Oluseyi
Military force solves nothing. It never has, and it never will.

quote: Diodor
I am convinced the opposite is true. While history offers plenty of examples for the use of a military force, it is arguable that socio-political power could exist without military backing.

It is arguable whether socio-political power could exist without military backing, I grant you that, but can military power solve world problems? I think not, as evinced by the numerous protracted conflict examples worldwide where both/all sides have gained nothing and lost far too much, or the resurgence of the "threat" in Iraq (opinions on Iraq are unimportant here; all I care about is the fact that military action has not eliminated said threat) supposedly responded to 11 years ago. Yes, sometimes military force is used to "enforce" political agreements, but then those agreements are not borne of conviction or mutual benefit.

quote: The outcome in the average RTS/TBS the likes of Civilisation is fairly predictable. At start, the map is divided between many little players. As time goes by, the little players are destroyed, freeing the land for the larger players, until only one remains controlling the entire map. Changing this state of facts is a tough challenge and requires plenty of game balance. There can be no negotiating, no politics until the physical forces are balanced.

That is completely untrue. What average RTSes and TBSes lack (apart from an inability to shed their "average" status) is non-fiscal, non-military factors like moral convictions. There is no way in any RTS that the opposing force will tell you that if you don''t back off, they''ll start killing their own civilians (which, to you, is a crime of war and a human tragedy). That is a viable and usable tactic in this game, which negates somewhat the effects of severe military imbalance. RTSes and TBSes don''t involve approval ratings of the people; most of them don''t even give that much credence to topology and knowledge of the land (how exactly again did the US do in Vietnam?)

"Balance" is overrated, and serves more to unbalance a game than otherwise.

quote:
Original post by Oluseyi

Again, this is, in real life, and would be, in the game, a function of human social interaction as opposed to game mechanics. Perhaps the point stands reiteration: this game is fundamentally about putting people into positions of (achievable but unlikely in regular existence) power and allowing them to react

As a designer you can''t control anything but the game mechanics. That''s the only thing we can discuss about. The game rules must allow human social interaction. And it is very easy to create rules that rule out the human factor.

quote:
That is completely untrue. What average RTSes and TBSes lack (apart from an inability to shed their "average" status) is non-fiscal, non-military factors like moral convictions. There is no way in any RTS that the opposing force will tell you that if you don''t back off, they''ll start killing their own civilians (which, to you, is a crime of war and a human tragedy). That is a viable and usable tactic in this game, which negates somewhat the effects of severe military imbalance. RTSes and TBSes don''t involve approval ratings of the people; most of them don''t even give that much credence to topology and knowledge of the land (how exactly again did the US do in Vietnam?)

I don''t understand how do moral convictions apply here. Why would I see the death of virtual civilians as a tragedy? I used to kill my own civilians in Age of Empires to replace them with military units (since the total number of units is limited) or bomb enemy planets with weapons of mass destruction in Master of Orion. It''s just a game.

Moral convictions can apply. Lieing for instance is quite an easy thing to do with a text only interface (from a moral standpoint - not necessarily from the logical standpoint), but lieing in a real time audio/video discussion is a lot more difficult and morally challenging.

The killing of civilians may hurt the attacker if they wouldn''t be so damn easily replacable as they were in MOO or AoE. But this is a game mechanic. Likewise, emphasising topology and knowledge of the map or approval of the people are game mechanics (and good ideas).

quote:
"Balance" is overrated, and serves more to unbalance a game than otherwise.

I think we may have different definitions of "balance". In my mind, the point of "balance" is to keep the game world interesting, unpredictable. Many scenarios like "nuclear winter" (complete destruction of ireplacable resources - virtual people for instance), "dark overlord" (one player dominates - even if a player completely dominates a few other players, this makes the game universe uninteresting for those players), "corruption" (all attempts to create more complex power structures fail because the leading players have too many opportunities for unchecked corruption), "civilisation" (all attempts for anything daring like taking over the world are completely hopeless. all players resign to being boringly civil) etc. must be countered.

quote:
It is arguable whether socio-political power could exist without military backing, I grant you that, but can military power solve world problems? I think not, as evinced by the numerous protracted conflict examples worldwide where both/all sides have gained nothing and lost far too much, or the resurgence of the "threat" in Iraq (opinions on Iraq are unimportant here; all I care about is the fact that military action has not eliminated said threat) supposedly responded to 11 years ago. Yes, sometimes military force is used to "enforce" political agreements, but then those agreements are not borne of conviction or mutual benefit.

This thinking may apply in large part today (although perhaps not in the future) but it did not in the past. Think of the Romans. They achieved a high point in civilisation that was not equaled for many centuries after their demise. This was brought about largely through the use of military power to conquer most of the known world. Other cultures in history have been extremely military (eg Greeks) and even today the most powerful country in the world (the USA) incedently has the most powerful military.

quote: It''s not the ambition of the idea that bothers me, it''s the lack of substantiating arguments for its plausibility. There has never been a "world leader" in human history; those who sought utter domination by force have always eventually lost at great cost, and none have been able to acquire it by diplomacy. Furthermore, when players operate on the levels of planets (which are usually fundamentally self-sufficient), what incentive do they have to interact with individuals/entities governing other planets?

You are looking at this the wrong way. No, there has not been a world leader but that would be analagous to a galaxy leader in this game. Because it is in the future and people have managed to settle on many new worlds we are talking a whole different scale and if this were to truly ever happen I think that very soon individual planets would have governments and be very much like single countries are today. There would also still be incentive for trade as some raw materials may be more abundant on some planets and some planets may specialize in providing certain materials (eg food) but more importantly there would be specialization in terms of manufactured goods.

quote: Original post by Goragoth
This thinking may apply in large part today (although perhaps not in the future) but it did not in the past. Think of the Romans. They achieved a high point in civilisation that was not equaled for many centuries after their demise.

Right. And it was military might that built aqueducts and paved roads, columns, sewers and public baths?

quote: Other cultures in history have been extremely military (eg Greeks)...

Funny, the Greeks are most renowned for their conributions ("borrowed" from various other cultures, refined and represented) to science and philosophy. Care to comment?

quote: ...and even today the most powerful country in the world (the USA) incedently has the most powerful military.

And what does it do for them? For all the "world''s most powerful military", their panties are in a knot every time some third world country is rumoured to be nuclear weapons-capable. They''re sitting on pins right now because Saddam is considered "dangerous". And they can''t move against him with impunity, because even their awesome might can''t take on everybody else.

Overrated.