Re: [glob2-devel] Gameplay guidelines

[Andrew Sayers]

> Well, good gameplay currently is setting up a settlement that works 
> effeciently. You can't win if it takes five minutes every time you want 
> to build a new building, and that is quite a plausible situation if 
> you're a bad city designer. I've had situations myself where my Inns 
> were in such locations that the wheat couldn't be reached practically 
> and so units would starve, even when I had twice as many inns as I'd 
> usually need for that population. I think I'll have to modify AIWarrush 
> to take this into account. (On the other hand, a particularly good 
> settlement can upgrade a school to level 3 in under a minute.)

I agree that enjoyable town-building is a big part of the fun of Glob2,
and I think it's something we've not paid enough attention to in the
past.  It's what you spend most of your time doing, so we should spend
at least as much time making that balanced as anything.

<snip>
> Cooperatively, there would nothing to fight, and despite the importance 
> of building, fighting is what actually drives the game. 'Backstabbing' 
> just seems completely pointless to me in this game (it's not selfish, 
> it's spiteful) and teams winning on their own just furthers the 
> 'tacked-on'-seeming nature of the alliance system. I think alliances 
> should be fixed, (i.e. you cannot make and break alliances.)

I agree that the team nature of games should be built up more, but
fixing alliances doesn't make any sense: if that's the way you want to
play, you can just have two players on the same team.

If Glob2 is supposed to be about experimenting with the value of teams,
we ought to give players the data to conduct their experiments.  I love
the statistics you get at the end of each game (even if I don't
understand all of them), so maybe that should be built on.  For example,
if lines were drawn for each alliance as well as each team, and points
in time marked where alliances were made and broken, you could get a
much clearer idea of how the game actually progressed.

Along the same lines, it would be good to give some numbers for (say)
the maximum number of units each team/alliance had and the number at the
end of the game.  To take the idea further, the "Worms" games gave out
awards for things like the most damage done in a single attack - we
could use a similar system for different player behaviour.

<snip - victory conditions>
I think this is something that needs to be decided empirically - we
should try out different victory conditions and see which feels most
satisfying.

> -How easy should it be to know about your enemy?

This is quite an important general issue - exploration is quite
unbalanced in the game at the moment.

At the start of the game, the only practical way to explore your
surroundings is to make explorers.  In a large map, unless you
micromanage them with exploration flags, they will inevitably fly off
and explore a tiny line along the map.  so players need to create a lot
of them, which can be maintained with the meager resources they have
available.

By the time the game is halfway through, players tend to have enough
explorers to see most of the game world, and can easily maintain them.
When they start getting level 3 schools, these explorers turn into a
weapon that I think everyone has agreed is unbalanced.

There are a couple of things we could do about this:

* Since you need to start building warriors early in case of an enemy
  attack, but they tend to stand idle for the first half of the game,
  warriors with nothing to do should default to "explore mode".  Because
  it's better for them to stay near to the camp, but get a wide view of
  the area, warriors in explore mode can scan the horizon instead of
  moving for one turn.  Each time they do this, their range of vision is
  increased by one (until they stop scanning).  So a warrior can move to
  the edge of what the team has seen so far, then after scanning for one
  turn, he sees everything within 2 squares of where he is, then 3
  squares, up to a maximum of (say) five squares.  Then he moves again
  to a new spot, and begins scanning again, starting at 2 squares
  vision, then 3, etc.
* Explorers can't eat.  When they get hungry, they just die.  This way,
  it's possible to create explorers to go and see particular parts of
  the map, but not to build up a great fleet of them to scour the world.  
  This would also do a lot to re-balance their attack ability.  An
  explorer that is created, goes straight into a school, then goes out
  to attack the enemy can pick off weak globs that would be hard to find
  with ground troops, but can't single-handedly destroy a whole town.

        - Andrew