STGOD: A Dead Art? (II)

[rhoenix]

I'd like the web equivalent of a map we can all push little counters around on. No programmed game mechanics, just a canonical map. Obviously secret fleets would only be visible to the owner and the mods.

I'd be happy to implement it, it wouldn't take long. It would satisfy my WWII fighter command re-enactment urges.

That would make things much easier for quick reference - I do like this idea.

So - how does everyone feel about pressing the big red "Press For Reset Into Alternate Universe" button?

[Starglider]

So - how does everyone feel about pressing the big red "Press For Reset Into Alternate Universe" button?

I'd prefer to continue this game if possible. If not, I'd be up for another game, but preferably starting after Christmas.

[Academia Nut]

We definitely need some sort of "game board" and "game clock" of somesort so that we can keep temporal and spatial coherence of the game, which I think was part of the problem last time. Right before things ground to a halt one of the big problems was that it was hard to tell when and where things were happening and whether or not your group was even supposed to know about certain momenteous events yet.

Also, if we do decide to do some sort of reset, can I ask that we do a "Long Time Ago in a Galaxy, Far, Far Away" sort of thing and not have Earth? Again, as was complained about in the previous thread, there was a natural concentration of power that caused the formation of power blocs so that it became difficult to actually act without dropping half the galaxy on your head.

And yeah, no more goody-two shoes. More black ops to fill the gaps while two groups slug it out and you have no good reason to be moving fleet elements around.

[SirNitram]

I had spoken out against Earth, it turned out just like I feared.. And I'm sorry for bailing on your guys. It was going down the exact same path as before, and that was after soooo many promises it'd be different.

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, there were hopes that there would be bastards in the Earth nations willing to sell out their fellow humans in exchange for a shot at finally conquering the damn planet, but aside from the damage to Africa everyone more or less played nice with one another. Probably because no one was stupid enough to look at the fortress that was the Sol system and make a play that could have tipped the balance. Even Nephtys' attack was done knowing that it was ultimately doomed to failure.

Or, more simply, psychopaths are interesting in these games, not power blocs. Especially because intelligent, successful psychopaths are more interesting than stupid ones who die three seconds into the game after doing a Charge of the Light Brigade against the nearest power bloc.

[rhoenix]

We definitely need some sort of "game board" and "game clock" of somesort so that we can keep temporal and spatial coherence of the game, which I think was part of the problem last time. Right before things ground to a halt one of the big problems was that it was hard to tell when and where things were happening and whether or not your group was even supposed to know about certain momentous events yet.

This is an excellent idea, and would help immensely with pacing. I suppose we'd have to come up with some sort of time/date system, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

Also, if we do decide to do some sort of reset, can I ask that we do a "Long Time Ago in a Galaxy, Far, Far Away" sort of thing and not have Earth? Again, as was complained about in the previous thread, there was a natural concentration of power that caused the formation of power blocs so that it became difficult to actually act without dropping half the galaxy on your head.

Yeah, that turned into a giant mess. Perhaps we should institute a "no more than one faction per world" sort of rule.

And yeah, no more goody-two shoes. More black ops to fill the gaps while two groups slug it out and you have no good reason to be moving fleet elements around.

Oh, I disagree - that gives even more reason to move fleet elements around. Black ops just make things more messily fun.

I had spoken out against Earth, it turned out just like I feared.. And I'm sorry for bailing on your guys. It was going down the exact same path as before, and that was after soooo many promises it'd be different.

Well, you had no way of knowing a good percentage of the players would all want to cluster around Earth. But, as long as we learn from the mistakes of this time, it should make this proposed next time far more interesting. As I mentioned to Academia Nut above, having the "any given world cannot be claimed by more than one faction" should solve that.

[Starglider]

We definitely need some sort of "game board" and "game clock" of somesort so that we can keep temporal and spatial coherence of the game, which I think was part of the problem last time. Right before things ground to a halt one of the big problems was that it was hard to tell when and where things were happening and whether or not your group was even supposed to know about certain momenteous events yet.

Here's a relevant IM chat I had with Hotfoot:

Code: Select all

Hotfoot    : the existance of a fleet map could be interesting
Starglider : I think it would be fun.
Starglider : Like the map in Masters of Orion, but with the ability to set waypoints that aren't systems.
Hotfoot    : never played moo actually, but cool
Starglider : There would be a slider to view the state at any game time.
Starglider : There might have to be a 'game time advance' slider for mods as well, to stop people retconning their fleet movements.
Starglider : It'd be easy to do that by accident, never mind intentionally.
Hotfoot    : How would you make this program?  A web app or something that could be run client side?
Starglider : Web app. It has to be minimum hassle.
Starglider : I'd make it like a very very simple version of google maps.
Starglider : With zoom and find planet by name and set waypoints for fleets and 'show game time' slider.
Hotfoot    : could work, would you deal with the third dimension in any way?
Starglider : And /maybe/ detection radiuses for radar station equivalents. That was pretty cool in F-19 stealth fighter.
Starglider : Oh and Ace Combat 5's sneak through the radar network missions.
Hotfoot    : hehe
Starglider : I could put the third dimension in the way Frontier and First Encounters did it if necessary.
Starglider : i.e. fleets and planets on stalks.
Hotfoot    : ok, right
Starglider : Or I could just simplify it to 'all planets are on a plane, fleets can go 'above' or 'below' the galactic plane to avoid detection at the cost of some speed'.
Hotfoot    : dunno how necessary that is, of course
Starglider : (because they're on a ballistic arc)
Starglider : The later would be marginally more complicated to program but simpler to understand.
Hotfoot    : could work
Starglider : Plus the attack fleet trajectories would look like the ICBM tracks in Wargames. That has to be a bonus.
Hotfoot    : Haha, yeah
Starglider : I'd probably use this; http://www.walterzorn.com/jsgraphics/jsgraphics_e.htm
Hotfoot    : and of course a "secret move" option so that certain movements aren't shown to everyone
Starglider : People tend to bitch and whine about applets even though they're faster once running.
Hotfoot    : looks decent
Starglider : Ok well I'll look at doing it but it'll probably take a couple of months at best, so one for the next game if it happens.
Hotfoot    : fair enough

For the time progression, to reduce mod workload, I could let players set a personal 'please don't advance time past here' marker, corresponding to their next battle, or conference, or communication or whatever. Game time would automatically advance by a day each night or whatever until it hits someone's limiter. Of course mods could override, and it's just a guideline, players would be free to write about past or future events as long as they're fairly sure it wouldn't conflict.

For comms I could have an option to set a 'big event happened here' marker, then a circle would expand out showing how far the news got, until a day or two later everyone knows and it disappears. And/or just a simple measuring tool that tells you how far a) a ship and b) a signal will take to get between any two points.

All that said, ruthless 'you leave without saying why, your nation is toast' is still needed.

Yeah, there were hopes that there would be bastards in the Earth nations willing to sell out their fellow humans in exchange for a shot at finally conquering the damn planet, but aside from the damage to Africa everyone more or less played nice with one another. Probably because no one was stupid enough to look at the fortress that was the Sol system and make a play that could have tipped the balance. Even Nephtys' attack was done knowing that it was ultimately doomed to failure.

Having two or three shared homeworlds could work. They'd be natural rivals and no one would be too powerful. Two is ideal for a 'balanced' war, three is ideal for diplomatic sneakiness and backstabs.

[Academia Nut]

Well, what I meant really was that there should be more "Meanwhile, back at the ranch..." sort of opportunities when there is a lull for your particular group, so that when two groups start slugging into one another and you have no good reason to have even heard about things, you don't sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting for an opportunity to act without looking like a cheating jerk with miraculous intelligence you shouldn't have.

But yeah, when I meant black ops, I meant more small scale stuff to act as filler while still being exciting.

[rhoenix]

(snip description of webapp)

That sounds good to me, Starglider.

Having two or three shared homeworlds could work. They'd be natural rivals and no one would be two powerful. Two is ideal for a 'balanced' war, three is ideal for diplomatic sneakiness and backstabs.

I'd argue against this, as it would be too easy to abuse and turn this into an alliance. Let's keep this at "one world, one faction," and see how it goes.

Well, what I meant really was that there should be more "Meanwhile, back at the ranch..." sort of opportunities when there is a lull for your particular group, so that when two groups start slugging into one another and you have no good reason to have even heard about things, you don't sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting for an opportunity to act without looking like a cheating jerk with miraculous intelligence you shouldn't have.

But yeah, when I meant black ops, I meant more small scale stuff to act as thriller while still being exciting.

I see what you mean now - in that case, we are in full agreement.


EDIT: Added reply to Academia Nut within this thread to avoid post pollution.

[Starglider]

But yeah, when I meant black ops, I meant more small scale stuff to act as thriller while still being exciting.

That's always a good idea in any case. Africa was pretty entertaining, though a lot of that was the sheer 'WTF' factor.

Again, as was complained about in the previous thread, there was a natural concentration of power that caused the formation of power blocs so that it became difficult to actually act without dropping half the galaxy on your head.

The problem there wasn't so much the power blocs as the fact that the CON was explicitly trying to police the whole galaxy. The motive for the NGTO was to make an alliance that actually had a hope of cracking earth (the 'oh don't worry we'll fight each other' stuff was never very credible, partly because the game mechanics don't favour it, partly because so many of the more experienced players banded together on earth). The NGTO explicitly had a shit-stirrer conspiracy going on who wanted to invade random people for fun and profit, and could also be cashed in for massive internal turmoil as soon as they were exposed. Third parties could invade each other and the NGTO would not give a damn.

Meanwhile the CON seemed to be 'we will build this bangbus and then sit here, waiting to drive it over the first person who makes a move'. /In principle/ it should be possible to politic your way into getting away with stuff without incurring CON wrath, but that just didn't seem to be working in practice; partly because keeping metaknowledge out of play was proving to be really hard, and partly because no one was consenting to letting themselves be attacked without leaving some proof of who did it (which wouldn't have been a problem if the galactic police weren't ready to go on the first semi-plausible evidence). Obviously we tried framing the heralds pretty clumsily and it didn't work, but I'm skeptical if /any/ such attempt could have worked in that game.*

So yeah, however much sense it makes in-game to set up a galactic police force, it's a bit of a dampner on the fun. My major hope for the current game was that the NGTO would get into a big war with the CON, and no matter who eventually won it would draw off so many forces that people would be able to get away with all kinds of stuff on the sidelines.

* The attack on Poland obviously wasn't in this class; it wasn't supposed to be subtle, just hopefully a surprise - but even if it FUBARed, which of course it did quite hilariously, it was going to get stuff moving.

[rhoenix]

My main problem with the Heralds SNAFU was that as a writer, I tend to build up my characters enough as people so I can simply document their exploits in any given situation - with how things went down, my present faction simply wouldn't engage in such duplicity, being all about such things as "honor" and "harmony" as having higher importance than intrigue.

That's part of the reason I'm eager for a reset - my new faction will be a bunch of evil scheming bastard children of rakshasa.

[Academia Nut]

There is a certain sort of bitter irony in that the event that was supposed to help get shit really rolling helped kill the game. And the CoN was probably the biggest reason why playing a psycho is now so tempting. If everyone and everything is nuts, then there will be no one to serve as police and thus the whole thing should devolve into an insane melee rather quickly.

And yeah, as one of the primary shit stirrers in Africa, I can say that that was just awesome in that everything sort of broke down into fire rather quickly.

Actually, if we really want to be nuts, might I suggest a "Fall of Rome in X" sort of campaign? Where the X will most likely equal space, but if we don't want it that grand it could be some other thing. The mods would each control a faction of a large, corrupt empire in competition with the others, while the players would each control a barbarian group invading from the outside while infighting eats away from the inside. The barbarians would fight with each other just as often as with empire, either squabbling over their spoils or as mercenaries hired because the imperials are too lazy/paranoid to expend their own troops protecting the core worlds.

Enough of all the "after the fall stuff", let's do the actually fall where we can all gleefully be assholes!

[Starglider]

Enough of all the "after the fall stuff", let's do the actually fall where we can all gleefully be assholes!

You do realise this means refitting my entire nation with black leather pants and perpetual evil sneers?

[rhoenix]

Enough of all the "after the fall stuff", let's do the actually fall where we can all gleefully be assholes!

You do realise this means refitting my entire nation with black leather pants and perpetual evil sneers?

...Except for those of us that don't wear pants, yes.

I'm awaiting word from others who've expressed interest in this game to see how they feel about the new game, but I'm already eagerly fashioning my faction. Hah!

[Academia Nut]

You do realise this means refitting my entire nation with black leather pants and perpetual evil sneers?

And that's a bad thing how?

But when you think about it, that was another facet of the game that was inherently weak. We were supposed to be expanding outward, trying to re-establish trading routes and such from the way we set up the fluff, so RP wise the rise of the CoN was in some sense inevitable. While not necessarily a bad thing, it quickly turned into NATO (and the NGTO inevitably rose as the Warsaw Pact to counter it, unfortunately creating a cold war when we wanted a hot one) when really it would have been a lot better if it had been more like the League of Nations: ineffectual, corrupt, and without power to actually effect change. If the game is already set up where the major powers are old and weak and decadent and ripe for the plucking, then conflict will be inevitable.

EDIT: Oh screw it, I'll stop being coy with my faction idea and just explain it so that no one steals it.



Roving metal bands in space. Sound might not carry through vacuum, but awesome can!

[rhoenix]

Actually, if we really want to be nuts, might I suggest a "Fall of Rome in X" sort of campaign? Where the X will most likely equal space, but if we don't want it that grand it could be some other thing. The mods would each control a faction of a large, corrupt empire in competition with the others, while the players would each control a barbarian group invading from the outside while infighting eats away from the inside. The barbarians would fight with each other just as often as with empire, either squabbling over their spoils or as mercenaries hired because the imperials are too lazy/paranoid to expend their own troops protecting the core worlds.

I think this is an excellent idea. Mods? What do you think of this scenario for the new game?

But when you think about it, that was another facet of the game that was inherently weak. We were supposed to be expanding outward, trying to re-establish trading routes and such from the way we set up the fluff, so RP wise the rise of the CoN was in some sense inevitable. While not necessarily a bad thing, it quickly turned into NATO (and the NGTO inevitably rose as the Warsaw Pact to counter it, unfortunately creating a cold war when we wanted a hot one) when really it would have been a lot better if it had been more like the League of Nations: ineffectual, corrupt, and without power to actually effect change. If the game is already set up where the major powers are old and weak and decadent and ripe for the plucking, then conflict will be inevitable.

You're right about the cold war aspect of the present game, which is half the reason it stopped being as fun as it was. It almost seemed as if everyone rushed toward a stalemate, and then...made feeble attempts after that.

Your idea for the new game sounds delicious, actually. It would imply much more activity and fun, and as long as we were (as players) careful about pacing, this could be immense fun for everyone.

[Spyder]

A simple idea for pacing. Have a mod keep time.

Start with "Week One" have everyone post their actions and dialogue, then when it settles the mod comes along and says "Week Two." Then we kick off for the second week.

Or do it in months perhaps. I think weeks would mesh quite well with travel times though.

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, seeing as I don't think Starglider can keep up with the sudden reignition of interest in play a STGOD, mods posting what week it is definitely should be done. Perhaps, as a politeness factor, not only should we have our in game posts headed by where it is taking place, but by a when as well to help keep track of the chronology.

Any other commentary from the noob brigade being lead by Starglider, rhoenix, and I? Thoughts on my "Fall of an Empire" story suggestion?

[Starglider]

Yeah, seeing as I don't think Starglider can keep up with the sudden reignition of interest in play a STGOD,

I'll try and have that map tool done for a January game. If we're restarting the current game now, Spyder's idea is good. I'm afraid I'll have to stay out for now if you want a new game right away; but then again it'll probably take a month plus for everyone to retool OOBs and background descs, and create a new map, appoint new mods etc anyway.

Perhaps, as a politeness factor, not only should we have our in game posts headed by where it is taking place, but by a when as well to help keep track of the chronology.

Definitely. A little X-Files style timestamp / location line at the top of each post would be cool. Tagging posts with the 'game threads' it covers might be a good idea too (e.g. 'Polish Sneak Attack', 'Herald Border Situation', 'Invasion of the Sun Monsters' etc), to mitigate the 'how am I supposed to read all this' complaints.

Thoughts on my "Fall of an Empire" story suggestion?

Sounds good in principle. The 'competing empire factions' idea might be kinda complicated in execution. Mods having no stake in the game seem to work better.

[Academia Nut]

Well, the idea behind having the mods have control over competing internal factions of an empire is primarily for metagame reasons. Because they are mods, they are presumed to be intelligent and skilled players, and more so, they are unlikely to get pissed off because their nation is always getting beat up. They are the mods, they already have unlimited power, so there is less likelihood of them going nuts with what will be by definition the most powerful faction in the game. Sort of why you let the DM control the dragons in D&D.

I suppose to add to this dissociation idea would be that the empire at the heart of the conflict could be built collaboratively so that there is no way for anyone to get pissy that their favourite creation is getting ganged up on.

[Starglider]

I suppose to add to this dissociation idea would be that the empire at the heart of the conflict could be built collaboratively so that there is no way for anyone to get pissy that their favourite creation is getting ganged up on.

Ok, but that's going to drag out the setup time even more. Even if you start now I'd be impressed if you got it going before Christmas (noting that lots of people will be unavailable around then due to holidays and family visits).

[Academia Nut]

True, it will drag set-up time, but then again, you, I, and rhoenix seem to be the biggest force pushing for a new game, so depending on how many people are still interested we might end up with a lot fewer players this time, decreasing set-up time considerably. I suppose the next few days will show how interested people really are.

But yeah, when I mean group set-up, obviously the nitty gritty would be left up to the guys in charge of the empire, but I was thinking more along the line of everyone hammers out the rough cultural trends in discussions like this. Like, if this is a supposed to be a corrupt empire, are they politically corrupt? Religiously? Economically? Some combination of all three? Are the competing internal factions economic guilds, noble houses, religious sects? Etc. etc. The sort of things that will tend to set the tone of the game.

[rhoenix]

Though I have nothing substantial to add at this point, I am glad that things appear to be moving forward, at least with the three of us. I'd like to see what others have to say; with time constraints what they are, I say we wait a day or so to let others see that this thread has grown with our discussion, and get additional input.

However, this has me excited so far, and I feel this is and will be well worth the effort we put into it.

[SirNitram]

My only complaint about a fallen empire far from Earth is it again prevents me from putting in the Enclave.

Aw well. I'll give it a go, though I don't think I'll be up to moderating. Though I should once again speak the unspeakable suggestion: There are some people who just shouldn't be allowed into STGODs because of patterns of behavior, whether it's intentionally bad, or just a string of bad luck of vanishing off the face of existance whenever they are doing stuff.

[Dahak]

Well, it was sad that it suddenly...stopped. I would like to try a restart or a "new beginning".
The idea to have this "The world is ending" scenario is tempting, but then everyone should be known to everyone, given that this fall would have been going on for some time. And it would reduce the "Hi there, I'm new here, glad to meet you"-posts.