Re: where will Olympia be in a year?

Carl Edman (cedman@golem.ps.uci.edu)
Sun, 9 Aug 92 20:46:34 PDT

The Loudmouth writes:
> I make the following predictions:
>

> 1) Every link will be a road. Road building is cheap. If you
> have enough men, it's quicker to build a road and move
> along it than to just walk.

True enough. The realistic solution to this problem is to have roads
automatically decay by a certain percentage every month. 5-10% seems
reasonable. So only roads which someone has an interest in sustaining
will remain. The rest will be gone after a year or two.

That it may be quicker to build a road and then travel the way than
simply to travel is an obvious mockery, but one that is easily fixed
by putting a lower limit of twice or thrice the travel time on road
construction. That is a small addition and seems perfectly realistic.
After all if you want to build a road from Chardia to West Habyn,
you'll have to travel the whole distance.

> 2) Ships will cover the ocean. Ships are very inexpensive
> to build if you cut your own lumber.

As they should be. If you have wood, men and skill why should it cost
you anything to build a boat. If you want to prevent ship
overpopulation, use the same solutation as for roads. Ships
deteriorate by 5-10% every month. Ships which have deteriorated below
20% have a chance of sinking, killing everyone on board every month.

> 3) Guilds will still be meaningless. The most powerful
> players are the ones who engage in many kinds of
> activities, hence have interests in many guilds.

No guilds have only recently become meaningless. Before the recent
changes they were quite significant. In exchange some inconsistencies
in Olympian physics were removed, so it is debatable whether this
wasn't a net gain.

I see few realistic possibilities of changing this now, but if
Olympia is ever restarted, I think it would be a good idea to place a
NPC as owner into every guild tower, and give him a medium size body
guard. This NPC should have quite high skills (level 7-8) in his
guilds base skill and also some skill in teaching. This NPC should
permanently teach and have his attitudes set so that only guild
members can stack. Maybe it should be possible for the guild master
to give orders to these NPCs. This would essentially restore guilds,
but without any funny special physics for guild towers.

> 4) There will be billions and billions of high-level
> characters in every profession, since it is pretty
> inexpensive to train 1 man to a high level.

True. In this case probably the right solution is to drastically
increase the maintenance cost for high level retainers. After all, to
become a 10th level mage takes over two years of continuous training
and costs some 5000 in gold. That such a retainer should demand less
than twice what an untrained peon demands is not realistic. A
reasonable formula for monthly maintenance cost would seem to be:

5 + Sum(for all skills) (skill level)^2
* daily training cost for that skill

This would hardly affect the lower levels, but would raise the price
of a 10th level mage from 25 to 1005 every month. If that isn't steep
enough the exponent could even be changed to three.

Carl Edman


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