Re: Civilixed play

John Carr (JRCARR@grove.iup.edu)
Wed, 30 Sep 1992 07:46 EDT

> Now I know Dr. Pain is going to laugh his ass off to hear this from me, the
> ultimate Olympian pacifist, but I personally feel that in many ways Olympia
> was too civilized. Now, I feel that there is a place for people to keep

I agree with the above statement.

> the peace, specifically that specific large cities would develop a society that
> prevented killing inside the walls, and I think Rocko was a great example of
> this - he maintained a safe haven in the beginning, and also developed a bit
> of intrigue and animosity. However, by the time Olympia ended (except for the
> last 3 turns), most of the land was at peace, and I at least felt that everyone
> would band together to destroy any major warlord.

>What I would like to see is the opportunity for banditry, murder, and fear to
>dominate 75% of the lands, with people banding together to form outposts and
>being overrun, and generally more chaos, more danger, and of course more
>opportunity to reap the untapped resources or ambush the resource-tappers.
>Yeah, a few towns should be made safe-havens (by the collective agreement of
>the local populace), but making most of the known lands peaceful havens for
>farmers and miners to go unprotected takes much of the fun out of it.

This can be done by having more mindless hostile NPC units. Perhaps a little
time and effort may be applied to give units some personalities. I'd be happy
to volunteer some of my time and programming skills to obtain this goal.

>So, some specifics. First off, if one side kills or captures another side in
>combat, that person should recieve no information about what happened or who
>did it - there's no units to report this back to him. Obviously, this also
>means no automatic death notices in the times. If a person flees from combat,
>he'll find out what happened and who did it, and any bystanders will also
>know. In fact, I'd suggest that if a unit is killed or captured during a month
>then no reports will be recieved at all from this unit. Thus, if I enter
>a province with 3 seperate stacks and wipe them all out, noone is left to
>tattle on who did it.

This sounds great. I remember posting a new skill (but not to the internals
list) called AMBUSH, which provided the above results. It would be better
though, to keep combat reports secret and only post them to the victors of the
combat or perhaps the survivors, excluding prisoners.

>In this way, if you succeed with an attack, you get away with it. If you don't,
>then someone can post a report to the Times demanding retribution. Of course,
>I'd also like some mechanism such that a determined victim can find out who did
>the attack - perhaps a tracking skill to track from the scene of the battle, or
>a high-level magic (costly in casting time or materials needed to limit the
>usage). In this way, wrongs could be avenged, but only by a determined victim.
>So, 90% of attacks would go unpunished, but many strange disappearances in one
>location could eventually be dealt with.

You could also attempt to track a specific unit number, if that unit was
captured instead of killed. Rumors would propagate like they should! It would
be a blast!

>Next, I'd also like a smaller number of people per area. The reason for this is
>that with less people per area, only a few pockets of population could form
>strong enough to make collective defense pacts. This doesn't necessarily mean
>more land - in a companions system with the number of people who played Olympia,
>something on the order of the land area already in the game would be fine
>(though of course the bigger the better!)

No comment.

John Carr
Systems


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