PlanetsCentral

Hi everyone,

what I distilled out of this longish thread is that some of you prefer games with alliance restrictions.

So, what are the options? There's POneAlly which has been used quite often, which allows one ally and that's it. There's cmlimit to allow more fine-grained control, but I'm not aware of anyone having used it. Finally, it's possible to make games for lone warriors by disabling communication and alliances altogether; as far as I remember this used to be popular on the Blutmagie host.

All of these options need a few rules in the host server. If you allow allies, it makes sense to allow an alliance to win. If you make the game anonymous, the server must be able to hide the players' names from each other. Thus, none of these options is just flipping a switch. In particular the "allow an alliance to win" thing needs well thought-out rules.

So, for the mean-time, you could make use of the "only one player can win" rule. A four-player alliance cannot be too durable. It has to break someday if of the allies one wants to win.

Of course this is less important with the current "about turn 80" ending condition. Probably a different condition would work better, like "own 125 planets for 10 turns". And of course nothing of this is important for "First Steps", which doesn't take part in ranking.

For the shorter term, I'll definitely try to get POneAlly to work. However, I believe this was never standard in any host's "bread&butter" games, and we're still a little too small to have one game that perfectly suits everyone (500/999 ships x no-fuel-movement on/off x ally restriction on/off x PList/standard list x ...) ☻.

--Stefan