60 Player MegaGame Discussion Thread - Page 2

DrPraetorious · #11 April 30th, 2007, 05:12 PM

The fact is, nations from different eras are not well balanced against eachother, especially at very difficult research.

You could give people larger starting armies, or you could give people big piles of initial money, more than 1 starting province, there are various things you could do but they tend to reward some nations/strategies and punish others (like having an awake SC God.)

I think a bidding system is the only robust solution - everyone is entitled to their own opinion about which nations are over or under-powered, and to vote with their wallet.

Of course, my bidding system isn't well-tested yet. I'm planning to start a bid-based game as soon as the patch comes out.

Velusion · #12 April 30th, 2007, 05:19 PM

Quote:

solo said:
Otherwise I agree with Meglobob to allow players to select nations, and think first come first served is okay, because many nations have similar versions.

If not all nations are taken, I think it's best to leave out the ones not selected. If only 30 or so want to play, we might consider have each player control two nations instead of one!

Right now I'm leaning to announcing a sign up time(to be a bit more fair to people who don't monitor the forums 24x7) in advance and simply start letting people pick during that time.

Baalz · #13 April 30th, 2007, 05:22 PM

Very hard research sounds good to me.

Dr. P's bidding system sounds interesting, but I think getting this thing organized is already going to be difficult. I second the suggestion to wait for the patch, we can start organizing now.

You probably want to state up front a policy on staling (are you switched out after 3 consecutive stales?, etc). With 60 people, somebody is always going to be staling, people are going to just disappear, etc. Also, you might want to set a time for the game to start if all slots don't get filled "we'll start when we're full or next Sunday, whichever is first"

I don't personally care if Arcane Nexus is banned, but a few of the globals are going to be more powerful than they usually are because of scaling. I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to get 10-15 players (or more) to pool gems for a dispel on anything that looks too threatening. My guess is this will be a self correcting thing. The thing with AN is any MP game that you can get it up and keep it up, you've pretty much won already anyway so it just speeds up the cleanup.

I don't think having people play more than one nation is a good idea. That might be fun in another game but we're already doing something quite different here so I'd suggest doing one thing at a time.

Yeah, it is a bit different with such a potentially long term game. It might be better to do a first come first served approach so that people signing up could pick from what's remaining. The down side is we might have trouble filling in the last few nations that few want to play, but the up side is that the people playing will be more satisfied with the nation they have and more likely to stick it out for a longer time.

Velusion · #14 April 30th, 2007, 05:27 PM

Quote:

DrPraetorious said:
I think a bidding system is the only robust solution - everyone is entitled to their own opinion about which nations are over or under-powered, and to vote with their wallet.

I agree, but I'm not really super-concerned with balance this game (or I would have looked into the CB). I also think that with the more players the more self-balancing (to a certain degree) the game gets. The late game is going to be crazy and unpredictable.

I guess I'm saying that I agree bidding would be a fairer way to distribute nations, but I'm more concerned with starting with little or no hassle. I'd be happy to test your bidding system in a future game though...

Micah · #15 April 30th, 2007, 05:29 PM

No one is going to know how strong a nation will be in this type of situation, so it will be hard to post meaningful bids, especially with the large number of nations available making it hard to be familiar with all of them.

I think putting too much effort into trying to balance something this large/ambitious the first time through is just going to end in frustration. Obviously any glaring holes should be patched up, but a point-by-point bid system isn't going to work outside of giving people the illusion of having control over what they end up with. People who play in this game are going to have to realize that things WILL be unbalanced, and deal with the problem accordingly. Diplomacy will be vital.

As for research - You're going to be stuck either hamstringing research-reliant nations early on or having everything researched very early, and I don't think there's any way to fix that without altering the geometric series equation (so low level things are still easy to research but high levels get really really hard). I think very difficult research would be the best way to keep the late game interesting though, and to me that's more important than early game (if you get blitzed and killed on turn 10 because you can't research the spells you need you've spent maybe 10 hours on the game, total...by turn 50 you've invested a lot more into the game, and since the turns take 2 hours each I'd want them to hold my attention instead of just turning into a phyrric gem-throwing contest.)

Velusion · #16 April 30th, 2007, 05:36 PM

What is the research gain difference between:

Normal?
Difficult?
Very Difficult?

I saw a post on it long ago, but I can't find it anymore.

Here is another question - would it be possible to mod a research level like the one Micah mentioned? "(so low level things are still easy to research but high levels get really really hard)". I doubt it is, but I thought I would ask.

Micah · #17 April 30th, 2007, 05:45 PM

Research costs thread:

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...b=5&o=&fpart=1

And the progression is not moddable afaik, that would have been a change along the lines of adding global slots which would require tweaking things the devs didn't intend to be tweaked.

Velusion · #18 April 30th, 2007, 05:45 PM

Also - I'll leave the Aracane Nexus choice up to the general consensus of this thread then.

I'm pretty skeptical about it being able to "self-balancing" itself in such such a large game, but if the majority here thinks it will work itself out, Its not a big deal to me.

My concern is that in the late game there will be massive amounts of gems floating around. I think it will be much, much harder to get rid of this once it goes up, and I think that the winner will most likely be the on who puts up AN and makes it stay.

Velusion · #19 April 30th, 2007, 05:50 PM

Quote:

Baalz said:

You probably want to state up front a policy on staling (are you switched out after 3 consecutive stales?, etc). With 60 people, somebody is always going to be staling, people are going to just disappear, etc. Also, you might want to set a time for the game to start if all slots don't get filled "we'll start when we're full or next Sunday, whichever is first"

I already do that with all my games! Though I do cut some slack every so often... something that wouldn't be possible here.

Shovah32 · #20 April 30th, 2007, 05:58 PM

I think the nexus should be banned. Even throwing it up for one turn with minimum gems(or however many are needed to overpower existing globals) would get so many gems that you could put it up with a huge boost next turn, possibly allowing you to keep it up for a while and continue to reinforce it.