Re: Ultimate Goals in Olympia

Scott Turner (srt@sun-dimas.aero.org)
22 Jan 1995 22:19:57 GMT

cedman@princeton.edu (Carl Edman) writes:
>If you have a Big Mouth(TM), you need to be able run very fast or
>have military strength and as recent history teaches us, sometimes
>even both are not enough.

I'll not sit idly by and let Dr. Pain be slandered like this.
Although he is dead, he is still the ruler of vast tracts of land and
not a corpse to be messed with.

>What we want to do is make the routine killing of small bands of
>nobles sufficiently much hassle for the powerful armies that they
>won't do it unless they have a really good reason to.

One problem I haven't seen addressed in this discussion is the
following:

Because a single noble can fairly quickly turn into a fairly powerful
fighting force, a ruler cannot let even single nobles of doubtful
loyalty wander around his areas. There's too much of a danger that
he'll raise a couple of peasant mobs and start taking out garrisons,
or some other such tactic.

This goes back, I think, to an earlier issue, which is that Olympia
lacks a mechanism for player-player control. I can build a castle and
garrison a continent, but I can't prevent any random noble from
landing a ship, getting out, recruiting my peasants into his army,
sawing down trees in my forests, etc. As a result, rulers have to be
very harsh about letting any noble at all wander around, which leads
to some attacks that would probably otherwise not be needed.

Maybe something like "PREVENT" could be implemented, where you could
tell your garrisons to prevent nobles from executing certain orders.
If the noble had a cooperate flag set, he'd cooperate by not doing the
order. Otherwise the garrison would attack. Thus I could tell a
garrison:

PREVENT "RECRUIT"

and it would warn off any noble who tried to recruit in that province,
and attack any noble who ignored the warning. Something like PREVENT
"MOVE c91" could be used to implement border control.

Obviously you'd want some rules for ignoring allies.

-- Scott T.