Re: The significance of being present at the update
- From: "Tom Johnson" <thjohnson@xxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 14:16:41 -0400
"Markus Armbruster" <armbru@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:871wwbb58v.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Akorps@xxxxxxx" <Akorps@xxxxxxx> writes:
Carl Spackler wrote:
There is no substitute or reasonable way to balance the game between
the attacker who is online and the defender who is at work, playing
with his kids, dropping the kids off at the pool, or just enjoying some
sleep.
Actually there is a way. There is almost always some mathematical trick
you can use to get what you want if you are clever enough.
One idea is to double some of the defender's combat stats if he has
been offline for awhile. I was thinking about that today, say if the
defender has been offline 10 minutes, doubling his combat odds, and
doubling the amount of che generated if one of his sectors is captured.
Other stats could be altered in the defender's favor also if desired.
Of course, this has to be examined for possibilities of abuse, I don't
have a proof it is correct.
John Yockey experimented with a way to penalize connecting to the game
in Ice World 4. He used a different penalty (BTU generation rather
than combat multiplier).
Such a penalty, regardless of what exactly it is, as long as it's
effective, provides an incentive to minimize time connected to the
game.
That's not the same as time spent playing.
You can invest additional playing time to save some precious online
time by preparing moves offline, so they can be executed quickly
online. I'm not talking about strategic planning, I'm talking about
things like scripting routine country maintenance. Instead of killing
a slow hour with shuffling around stuff, you script and test for two
hours, then execute in a minute. Doable and quite effective, in my
experience, if you can spare the extra time and stand the boredom.
Rewarding people with more time and higher tolerance to boredom is not
a direction I want the game to take.
I'm not saying there can be no reasonable way to balance the game
between an attacker who is online and a defender who is not. I'm just
telling you to mind the lessons we learned from John's experiment.
[...]
John's attempts seemed good in theory but had bad side effects. The
limited login time was painful in the late stages of the game where
large countries did not have enough minutes to manage the country
AND wage war. This forced players to manage their countries via
scripts developed offline and caused even more time to be invested.
The 'BTUs generate only when offline' attempt punished players who
were being attacked and prevented them from defending themselves.
The defense bonus idea can be constructed to avoid these problems.
Rather than making it granular to the minute or etu which would
encourage off-line script building, it could be made very course.
An example could be: any amount of online time (1-180 minutes)
in a 3-hour block of time in a 24-hour-update game would have the
same effect. This could be implemented on an etu-block basis to
make it more server friendly. Then a sliding-window approach
could be used that only looks at the previous 60 etus (for a 60-etu
game).
Tom
.
- References:
- Re: The significance of being present at the update
- From: Carl Spackler
- Re: The significance of being present at the update
- From: Akorps@xxxxxxx
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