[Fwd: Re: XConq playable intermittently?]

[Stan Shebs <shebs at shebs dot cnchost dot com>]

Some thoughts about an extension for network games...

Stan

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: XConq playable intermittently?
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 10:23:07 -0700
From: Stan Shebs <shebs@shebs.cnchost.com>
To: Duane Morin <Duane_Morin@scudder.com>

Duane Morin wrote:
> 
>      I'm looking for a game that my team of developers can play during down
>      periods at work.  Something strategic, rather than twitchy, so Quake
>      is out.  Ideally I'm hoping ofr something where everybody involved
>      doesn't have to monitor the game constantly in order to play.  Empire
>      seemed a good candidate, but I hear that it's a nightmare to setup and
>      get going.  I would like to try out XConq, but I fear that "turn
>      based" means if I have 5 players and player 3 has real work to do,
>      that the game cannot proceed.  Is this the case?  Could such a game
>      work with only 4 out of the 5 players playing?

Hmmm, interesting problem.  Xconq supports two user-selectable
modes, the first of which is sequential, where players move one
at a time during the turn, and simultaneous, where all move at
the same time, and the turn only ends when everybody is done.
You can save and restore multiple times during a turn too.

However, both modes do require that every player participate
before a turn can end, on the theory that you don't want to
miss a turn, and have your country trashed because you didn't
get a chance to scramble your fighters when the surprise
invasion started.

On the other hand, there is a fair amount of automation available
to players, plus the AIs can be enabled/disabled at any time, so
it's conceivable that one could work up a scheme where your units
will keep busy even when you're not available.  You'll be at a
serious disadvantage, but the best automation is still no match
for a human player targeting you.

It also occurs to me (as you can see, it's an interesting problem)
that one could have a sort of "extended sanctuary" a la Empire,
where you declare your side officially neutral, which means that
it can't interact with any other side's units.  In conjunction
with automation for construction/deployment, the neutral side
will keep pace with the others, indeed it may do better because
it's not wasting units in combat.  Then when you can participate
more actively, break neutrality and go forth to conquer!

All this would require some hacking, but since you have a
development team, that makes it easier :-), plus I can help
with figuring out how to fit it into the Xconq framework;
most of the infrastructure for this kind of thing exists
already, so it wouldn't need a lot of new code.  I think
something like this would be of general interest for Xconq
players too; it allows the game to be more interactive than
PBEM, without requiring everybody to be active all the time.

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