Metaverse

I'm not saying that time not is a success-factor, because it often are, I just want to probe it's importance



I have anotther reflection too regarding this...in Civ3 for example my way of playing is a good working solution for some missions but for other missions a catastrophy.

I can imagine a future where it's possible to hook in mission-packs/campaigns into GalCiv. Where the starting situations are different with different goals to achieve for success. There time is probably a bigger success-factor.

Have you considered those kind of addons? With your way of wanting user-interactions it could be useres creating scenarios/campaings/missions...if the tools are available. Sure - probably not for the first release, but in a distant future? It'll bring deapth in another level...just evolving/growing is not the big issue, it could be so many other things.. It could also bring in gamers that like shorter goals to achieve than world domination. A regular GalCiv-game could take a _very_ long time to play, a mission-by-mission play could be easier for some, perhaps.

Just some thoughts...

I'd like to back Fredrick's thoughs here. I hope there will be no 'winning' style of play for metaverse success.
Galaxy size should be ok. I usually like playing on smaller galaxies so that I can complete a game in one evening. Obviously this will score much lower than someone who plays on the largest galaxies. I assume the fact it takes less time means I can get more games in which would balance the situation.
Style of play is what has me slightly apprehensive. How will you balance a military / economic / diplomancy / research victory. The military victory can be quickest while the research is probably the longest. Will this be reflected?
Also how heavily will the difficulty level affect the scoring. I often find with strategy games that above a certain difficulty level the game just isn't fun and so don't play. This can often mean not getting high scores for fairly similar time frames of playing.
I'm sure you've already though all this true and come up with good solutions.

Paul

One thing I want to say up front is that because we're independently funded, we have a luxury few games have:

We can make radical changes during the course of game development.

This means that we can change the rules on metaverse scoring best on play testing. That's why we're going to get it in as early as we can (the basics of it) so that we have lots of time to weigh in feedback.

we want to reward the people who play in depth, long scale games, not lots of tiny games.

Brad,

I agree with your philosophy here. As a case in point, I am about to toss Civ3 out the window because it is
suddenly looking like it is geared to small worlds and I like to play large worlds. Civ3 has some severe
flaws in how it calculates corruption and waste that make large worlds unplayable. It also looks like you
can't complete the Alpha Centaury goal of the game with a small world. After checking their QA site it looks
like this is all intentional, which is very discouraging.

It is most gratifying to hear you state that GalCiv will NEVER suffer from such woes.

Thanks,
Jack

Well we hope it wont' have such problems!

But in our case, we're simply leaving things open so that we can make significant changes based on feedback. I personally don't like the corruption mechanism in Civ3. You canc hange that behavior with Civ3's included editor (which is what I did).

If we had been in that situation, we would have added a bunch of buildings that, while expensive, would vastly reduce corruption so that you CAN have a huge civilization if you want, it just costs.