Idea for an "SP Challenge" game

[sansanjuan]

NT,
That would be the cat's pajamas if you could set things up for the SP challenge. Your mod skills are well known and will be indispensable. I would be happy to assist in anyway I can (even if I'm just waving pom poms most of the time). Given enough participation it might be statistically significant to measure the relative strength of different nations more meaningfully than is currently possible. I would like nothing more that to see Nief/TC/Ermor's aggregated scores eclipsed by a brilliant strategy by a supposedly weaker nation. I would predict that scores for fewest turns would generally get much better as new players absorb AARs and fine tune strategies to attack the map. This is all good stuff. My second prediction is that MP participation would rise as some SP only players might become emboldened by the "DOM on a server" experience.

Note: I'm not saying SP-only players are wall flowers or anti-social. Only that some may perceive multiple barriers to MP play where one such barrier is setup and playing on a hosted DOM server (really quite easy). I Know I was quite hesitant myself at first being an older guy with zero PBEM experience.

Victory Conditions on the large map sounds very interesting and now makes sense to me.
-SSJ

[Gandalf Parker]

sansanjuan said:
I would eventually like to take a crack at hosting an "SP Challenge Game" on your server. Having never hosted before I'm curious how we'd run such a game(s). Would we create a dozen clones of the game on the server (game1,game2,game3, etc) and have each player assigned to a specific cloned-game where the game would act exactly like an MP game except all nations would be AI (except the player's of course)? Is there a way to do this with a single game and behind the scenes each games would save in a subdirectory named the specific username of the player? e.g. a filesystem redirection based on the user's submissions.

-SSJ

Dominions is very efficient at being a server. Having multiple instances of it running is not a problem. Especially if its not on Windows (in this case Linux which is also very efficient for being a server)