PlanetsCentral

Cherek in Re: variable ship limit game:

GhostWriter in Re: variable ship limit game:

cherek: When you say "variable ship limit", what do you have in mind, higher ship limit, lower ship limit?

higher, of course. IIRC, at the present time, the only ship limit options are 500, and 999.

my concept would offer something between those numbers, but not a specific number...

Two minds thinking the same way. Plus maybe a higher number of minefields instead of limited to 500 would be nice.

Technical situation: PHost has an option to configure the maximum number of ships (NumShips, any value between 100 and 999) and one to configure the maximum number of minefields (NumMinefields, any value between 0 and 10000). There also are options to configure per-player limits for minefields (MaximumMinefieldsPerPlayer).

Thus, it is possible to configure a game with 999 ships and 10000 minefields. PlanetsCentral currently has options for 700 and 999 ships, respectively. More than 500 minefields is not that popular because VPA and Winplan do not support it (PCC and EchoView do.).

Rule situation: As we've seen, it is possible to configure fixed limits. Variable limits just need something to update the configuration each turn.

A while ago, I also a simple dynamic approach to the ship limit. Start with a limit of, say, 400. For every turn where there is a ship build queue, add five new slots. The advantage compared to a fixed limit of 500 is that you can have more ships. The advantage compared to a 999 limit is that you cannot have the new ships so fast as you had with unlimited building. It's a lot of work to play 100 ships.

For minefield limits, there's the "mfq" add-on, but it isn't immensely popular.

If you have concrete (and not too convoluted) proposals for a ship limiter, I'm willing to give them a try. However, please keep in mind that games still take some time to fill up, which limits our pace in trying out new things. I definitively want FLAK on this server someday soon. After all, I wrote it :-)

--Stefan

The issue you are talking about with more than 500 minefields is being able to view the 501+ minefields, not lay them, right? I use Echoview for things like minefield plotting, so it was not an issue in the 2 games that I remember playing where the minefield limit was over 500.

The dynamic approach sounds interesting, but instead of 400 ships maybe start at 500 ships and throw in FLAK, you'll have at least one player, even if I'm at my game limit.