TBS Snowballing, Map Painting, Blobbing: Solutions

[MoLAoS]

Id be happy with just a game that focuses on one nation only. Sort of like Centurion.

Trying to cure blobbing with a ton pf AIs doesnt sound feasible yet

The problem there being that such a game wouldn't match the scale goals. Its the size that is at issue rather than the setting. You can still blob in a single nation game or even an economic game like Patrician or the Guild. Blobbing being an issue of becoming to strong to die regardless of the theme of the game rather than being specific to map painting.

 

[Norfleet]

Blobbing being an issue of becoming to strong to die regardless of the theme of the game rather than being specific to map painting.

I dunno, though. Blobbing might actually be realistic now. Nowadays if you blob enough, you'll be declared Too Big To Fail and the government will prop you up even if you screw the pooch.

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

It's small scale tactics, so not really what you're talking about in the blog, but EA's Space Hulk and its sequel Vengeance of the Blood Angels had an interesting system, which could be described as 'real time with limited pause'.

The bar in the bottom shows your available pause time, when it runs out, you're forced to real-time. It also fills back up slowly during real-time. Of course you can get a proper pause (for taking a shit or whatever) by going to main menu, but then you can't assess the situation or give any orders. It did add a nice "TIME IS RUNNING OUT! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?!" feeling to the game.

 

[Destroid]

MoLAoS I just remembered another way to achieve your goals: Rather than give a player a real time restriction on how many actions they can take, impose an action point system of some sort. I believe Master of Orion 3 had originally intended to try something like this (called imperial focus) but it was abandoned when the game underwent a severe overhaul. You might try looking up some old dev diaries for it.

Eclipse (the boardgame) uses a similar system, each additional action you perform costs you an increasing quantity of money.

 

[MoLAoS]

MoLAoS I just remembered another way to achieve your goals: Rather than give a player a real time restriction on how many actions they can take, impose an action point system of some sort. I believe Master of Orion 3 had originally intended to try something like this (called imperial focus) but it was abandoned when the game underwent a severe overhaul. You might try looking up some old dev diaries for it.

Eclipse (the boardgame) uses a similar system, each additional action you perform costs you an increasing quantity of money.

I think Imperia does something like that, but I think its just too hard to do well.

 

[Destroid]

MoLAoS I just remembered another way to achieve your goals: Rather than give a player a real time restriction on how many actions they can take, impose an action point system of some sort. I believe Master of Orion 3 had originally intended to try something like this (called imperial focus) but it was abandoned when the game underwent a severe overhaul. You might try looking up some old dev diaries for it.

Eclipse (the boardgame) uses a similar system, each additional action you perform costs you an increasing quantity of money.

I think Imperia does something like that, but I think its just too hard to do well.

Do you think an imposed turn timer will be easy? Thinking about it quite a lot of computer games have used an action point system for turn based games, usually of the life sim style where you plan the day of a character. Obviously those games don't have an awful lot in common with 4x, the main difference being those games are usually based around routines, something I think you should try to avoid in a 4x game.

 

[MoLAoS]

MoLAoS I just remembered another way to achieve your goals: Rather than give a player a real time restriction on how many actions they can take, impose an action point system of some sort. I believe Master of Orion 3 had originally intended to try something like this (called imperial focus) but it was abandoned when the game underwent a severe overhaul. You might try looking up some old dev diaries for it.

Eclipse (the boardgame) uses a similar system, each additional action you perform costs you an increasing quantity of money.

I think Imperia does something like that, but I think its just too hard to do well.

Do you think an imposed turn timer will be easy? Thinking about it quite a lot of computer games have used an action point system for turn based games, usually of the life sim style where you plan the day of a character. Obviously those games don't have an awful lot in common with 4x, the main difference being those games are usually based around routines, something I think you should try to avoid in a 4x game.

Most games using that system have very little going on. Plus I would like the limitation to interact more with the player.

 

[mondblut]

MoLAoS I just remembered another way to achieve your goals: Rather than give a player a real time restriction on how many actions they can take, impose an action point system of some sort. I believe Master of Orion 3 had originally intended to try something like this (called imperial focus) but it was abandoned when the game underwent a severe overhaul. You might try looking up some old dev diaries for it.

Eclipse (the boardgame) uses a similar system, each additional action you perform costs you an increasing quantity of money.

Some KOEI games did that. Genghis Khan 2, for one. You've got a bunch of points per turn and every action cost some.

 

[Destroid]

MoLAoS I just remembered another way to achieve your goals: Rather than give a player a real time restriction on how many actions they can take, impose an action point system of some sort. I believe Master of Orion 3 had originally intended to try something like this (called imperial focus) but it was abandoned when the game underwent a severe overhaul. You might try looking up some old dev diaries for it.

Eclipse (the boardgame) uses a similar system, each additional action you perform costs you an increasing quantity of money.

Some KOEI games did that. Genghis Khan 2, for one. You've got a bunch of points per turn and every action cost some.

Was it good?

 

[fastjack]

Was it good?

I can tell you that I enjoyed those games a lot as a kid. In fact limited action points in strategy games became my default assumption on how such games normally work. One cool thing was that the number of action points you had depended on the 'drive' stat of your leader, and I believe this stat changed as you aged.

edit: also I believe that MoO3 replaced the imperial focus with just a time limit on turns, though I don't recall if this was on by default or if they changed it to an option you had to enable for release. My understanding is that the time limit was supposed to replace imperial focus as a handicap on managing a large empire (which op has never seen in all of his research).

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i don't know why snowballing should be such a problem.
if i put an unbelievable effort into building something magnificent i want to be rewarded. actually, the real problem is the computer not playing to win: too often while i grow to great strenghts the ai opponents are happy with the little lands they have.
take france in eu for example: once it gets all its cores it's happy to sit there and gimp itself chasing colonies it can't reach. russia has enough army to steamroll asia, instead it colonizes all it can and then sits there in the middle of barbaric hordes. the coalitions workaround is not enough, games ais should do like [can't remember if alpha centauri or master of magic/orion] and declare war all at once.
then, a victorious player truly earned his victory.