Re: Time beats phases-and-points

Ed Bailey (bailey@hagar.ph.utexas.edu)
Mon, 26 Sep 1994 10:07:50 -0500

> I think of Olympia's map as being nodal. It takes a long time to move
> from province to province, but within each province/cluster, movement
> is fast. Locations are subjectively large, so everyone in a city is in
> the same place. It doesn't take any time to leave a castle in the city
> and get on a ship at the dock.

> Or do the arguments in favor of realistic time suggest having a
> realistic map as well? (Better atmosphere, more complex yet easier
> to reason about.)

No.

Right now, time is on a single scale: How many "days" does it take to
perform a certain action. [Where "days" is 0, 1, ..., to about 10.]

The reason for "zero-time" movement in that situation is simple. It doesn't
take a whole day to "leave a castle and get on a ship". An hour or two, but
certainly not a whole day.

I don't think any action really take "zero-time" -- I just think of it as
taking "less than a day". And there's always time for another "less than
a day" errand. Sort of like the elevator principle: There is always room
for one more person on an elevator.

If you introduce a second scale of time, then you have to start rethinking
how much time all those zero-time orders take. Maybe it takes an 30 minutes
to go to the market and sell your pots, or an hour to find Joe Bob and join
his company. Etc., etc.

> I chose this model [of the map] to make the game easier to play, believing
> that a straight grid or hex map with line-of-sight rules would be too
> fine-grained to work with in a PBEM format with a week turnaround.

I agree completely. That was an excellent design decision.

Ed Bailey, ip9

--
Ed Bailey                | Voice: (512) 471-4198   Fax: (512) 471-6715
Inst. for Fusion Studies | Internet: bailey@{hagar,ziggy}.ph.utexas.edu,
Univ. of Texas at Austin |   u70262@c.nersc.gov, or pnab643@chpc.utexas.edu
Austin TX  78712         | "No pithy quotes.  Just email addresses."


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