PlanetsCentral

Hi all.

I used to play with friends on a private host. I once managed to convince them to play a game with no alliances and no information:

• No alliances and no remote control

• We disabled a configuration parameter to hide how many ships, planets and starbases the other players had. You only knew what you had and you could only guess when the ship limit was going to be reached. I can't remember if that parameter was "ScoringMethod", but I am sure that can be easily checked.

• Although in previous games we played with 999 ships, in this particular game we set the ship limit to 600 or 650.

• Of course we knew each other, so I could communicate privately with my good friend Player1 and try to cooperate with him to attack Player7. But that can't be avoided in a private game of this kind or in an anonymous game in Planetscentral. So we can only trust that the people entering the game are committing themselves to following the rules. Like no communication.

• We invented a new score (we gave it the name EuriScore): it was a mixture of PTScore and Player Activity Score (PAScore). I can't remember the details now, but it was something like this:

  EuriScore = k * PTScore + j * PAScore

  where k and j are numbers you can tweak to please everyone, like k=0.01 and j=2 If j is big enough so as to make PAScore contribution to the EuriScore more important than the PTScore (double or triple), then the incentive for winning the game is to fight (or rob). But PTScore also adds to the final score, so economy is also important but not the final objective.

• One last thing we did was to allow each player to choose whatever race they wanted. If the pconfig is such that doesn't give any particular advantage to a certain race, let's say the Rebels, then the game will take long to start because nobody will want to join as the Rebels, and somebody will be tempted to join with a dummy account to start the game early. In that private game of ours, there were 2 or 3 Lizards, a couple of Privateers, 1 Borg. Maybe nobody played the Robots or maybe 5 players chose the Klingons. But everyone played the race they wanted. In an anonymous game.

• Another possibility, that we never explored, to see who is the best player is to play all with the same race. For example, a game with 11 Colonials. Nobody has any special advantage over anybody else. Just play and try to beat your oponents.

Just a few thoughts.

Cheers.

btw, a game with no alliances should have no turn limit. I hope that everyone agrees that this is a given. if you know that everyone around you is an enemy you will start the game in a cautious way (except maybe pirates), and to expand you will have to make careful steps which need time.

so please, no turn-limit. It would ruin the whole game.