Questions about hosting games...

[Griefor]

Having never hosted a game before, I've got some questions about it before I attempt to.

1) If I just randomly contact llamabeast or Ich about hosting a game, will they oblige 100% of the time? They're both really cool because they host all these games they're not in, but I wouldn't want to gather a group for a game on the presumption that they'd host my game for me just because.
2) What exactly do I need to do being the host of a game? As far as I can tell the majority of the labor for a game hosted by Ich/llamabeast is done by the server itself.

Yes, I know Ich's server is down ATM, but for the sake of answering my question let's pretend it's not.

[lch]

Griefor said:
1) If I just randomly contact llamabeast or Ich about hosting a game, will they oblige 100% of the time? They're both really cool because they host all these games they're not in, but I wouldn't want to gather a group for a game on the presumption that they'd host my game for me just because.

llamabeast and I do this for the Dom3 community, and we're happy to host games for people that can't do it themselves. There are lots of other hosters, as well, like Velusion, Gandalf Parker (whose servers I lately used myself) and a lot of other people. It isn't really a hard job at all, but you'd need some experience with the game and your system. You'll probably want to host a "dedicated" text mode server, so you should have a look at the Dom3 command line switches.

Griefor said:
2) What exactly do I need to do being the host of a game? As far as I can tell the majority of the labor for a game hosted by Ich/llamabeast is done by the server itself.

For a networked server, you need a box that is reachable from the internet, preferably 24/7 and preferably with a static IP address, otherwise you'd best use some Dynamic DNS service. Setting up a server isn't really described in the manual, you'd best have some experience in it from LAN games.
Alternatively, you might look into hosting PBEM games. The hosting itself is usually done manually (unless llamabeast's automated approach) and is more or less the same as playing a hot-seat/regular game. You will need to send emails to all the players that are playing in your game with their turn files, every turn. You need to receive their turn orders by email again and put it into your savegame directory to host.

When I started hosting, I used shell scripts that Gandalf Parker had been posting on the forums here, tried to understand how they worked and then started writing my own scripts. You probably should do the same so that you don't need to invent the wheel again. I am more than willing to give help on hosting games, but there hasn't been an extensive HowTo on this yet. This is your chance...

[Griefor]

It seems that there is a small misunderstanding here... I'm not really looking to add a hosting server to the list.

Maybe I should have said admin a game or something. When someone gathers people together and has them play on your server, they have to take care of some extra stuff, correct? Like ensuring everyone sends their pretender in, etc. That's really what I meant.

I could *probably* manage coding scripts to automate the hosting process, but I do not have a box to host it on and like you said: it's already been done, anyway. So I do not have any aspiration to so at this time.