Forming and Breaking Alliances ...

[Alastor]

With what may be the first discussion of 2006 here, I would like to offer up the following idea ...

Current Ally statuses are limited to Ally, Neutral, and Enemy ...

A fellow Starlord can essentially either do nothing at all except ignore or attack one's world or can buy and sell ships there and pick up and drop off ICs and RMs ...

The purpose of *this* discussion is to see what people think of the current set-up, which permits a Starlord to revoke an Alliance without notice ... the results of such revocation can be devastating to a position - and the 'without notice' part actively encourages treachery (with no current downside for treachery) ...

So - an idea ...

Proposed - that, when one decides to change a status from Ally to something else, one orders the Status Change during Turn x ... the recipient of the impending Status Change receives notification during Turn x+1 that it is about to happen - and, during Turn x+2, the Status Change actually happens ...

For simplicity of programming, I would suggest that Status Changes that are improvements in Status - from Enemy to Neutral, or from Neutral to Ally - be allowed to take place as currently ... and that Status Changes that are deteriorations be subject to the 1 Turn notification 'delay' to allow the recipient/target to plan moves accordingly ...

Constructive comments and suggestions ?

[Logical Player]

First thoughts: I prefer the normal way to change diplomatic status for many reasons:

- a pre-anounced betrayal has absolutely no fun!
- a quick downgrade in diplomatic status from neutral to enemy is necessary to protect yourself quickly from an invasion doubling forts ambushing;
- a quick downgrade from Ally to Neutral also is necessary to avoid a total piracy of your resources!

- If an ally can be sure he has 2 turns pirating your resources before you can remove him his status, he will fly with all your credits(!!!), pick some more on next turn and he won't get ambushed for 2 turns... that's 8 jumps flying with your HW treasury...

I suspect this will remove the fun of the surprise and the "robbery" will be larger and easier.

On another side, this change won't affect the betrayer firing and destroying your fleets because he can very well fire at an allied fleet and destroy it.

Shortly, "well" used for evil, this change doesn't protect your fleets and it increases the ease of taking away your resources... the small unique "benefit" you receive is that you won't get ambushed by an ally quickly changing your diplomatic status...


LP

[Cozy]

Alastor, repeat after me:
"IW is NOT a team based game."

I've said it many times and I'll say it again; game needs to be developed towards one holy graal, user-defined veriety. Where one can choose from myriad of differently set up games. Where number of RMs Trader can haul is not some static number in some table but rather an interval to chose from at game creation. I would even go as far as to define said graal as complete set of both numeric variables/rules and interaction/calculation scripts than can be compiled together at universe creation.

Then, majority of games will gravitate towards one or two predefined setups while we'll have many very interesting "places" floating around.

[Alastor]

Cozy - If ImpWars isn't a "team-based game", then how come so many of us enjoyed the 4-team Universe that ran a while back - and probably kept more of us involved to the end of that Universe than ANY other Universe I have played in ?

Yup - it's not ONLY a team-based game, but that doesn't mean it cannot be, some of the time ...

(rueful grin) So far, it looks like ImpWars is a 2 player game (Logical Player and Alastor) with supporting characters ... and I think that both LP and myself would like to see it become at least a 16-player game ...

LP - so leave Neutral to Enemy transition as-is ... that works ...

While betrayal is "fun" for some, what I am proposing doesn't prevent betrayal - it just means one would have to be more creative, more subtle, more devastating, since the 'target' would have one Turn to prepare for incoming ...

And, like Alastor, I strongly suspect that Logical Player would prefer to beat a skilled and well-informed opponent rather than some innocent and defenceless cannon-fodder ...

[Cozy]

Originally posted by Alastor Cozy - If ImpWars isn't a "team-based game", then how come so many of us enjoyed the 4-team Universe that ran a while back

Because IW is a great game when played to its full potential?

- and probably kept more of us involved to the end of that Universe than ANY other Universe I have played in ?

You're still young

But if you read the rest of my first reply, all I'm saying is there should be as little "hardcoded" game rules impossed on players as possible. Your suggestion should be nothing more than maybe a check box and a drop-down on universe creation screen.

Mature players can "imagine" a lot of such features and we proved that more than once. Truth is, we can't hide our head in the sand and develop with assumption this will always be the case.

[Jim DiGriz]

Alastor, any belief that Iwars is a team based game is surely completely destroyed when I sign up?

The whole idea with alliances and betrayals of said alliances is that the majority of what makes up the game with regards this is contained within the metagame aspect. Declaring allies/neutral/enemy is a simple game mechanic to make sure certain things happen in the game but the actual meat of it is all in the roleplaying.

While betrayal is "fun" for some, what I am proposing doesn't prevent betrayal - it just means one would have to be more creative, more subtle, more devastating, since the 'target' would have one Turn to prepare for incoming ...

or it could mean that you're not actually good enough at this game to be able to immediately defend yourself when you suddenly get stabbed in the back (as you haven't done the proper prep work in the game to ensure someone can't irrevocably damage you if they did betray you)? You need a safety net to pre warn you so you have no nasty surprises?

The purpose of *this* discussion is to see what people think of the current set-up, which permits a Starlord to revoke an Alliance without notice ... the results of such revocation can be devastating to a position - and the 'without notice' part actively encourages treachery (with no current downside for treachery) ...

There may be no downside to treachery built into the game mechanics but it is ludicrous to say that there is no downside to treachery. In a full game various alliances and complex relationships all interlink and overlap. Shooting down your current allies main battlefleet doesn't mean that all that happens is that he loses his fleet. You immediately lose an ally and possibly kick off a chain of events where other allies break off relations with you because of your behaviour and it could all come crashing down around you. The decision to stab someone in the back has to be judged carefully in case you ending doing yourself more damage in the long term than you stand to gain in the short term.

I do not envisage carefully planning to pirate my ally's main battlefleet with my much greater force and then sending that starlord a letter which says "Dear Sir, I don't like you anymore and am going to declare you an enemy. This will take effect in two turns. Please don't be suspicious and immediately move the fleet I intend to pirate because it's fairly obvious what I plan to do".

the results of such revocation can be devastating to a position

See my response to Alastor about not prepping your position well enough in the first place

[Alastor]

... for different folks ...

With Universes finishing in 13-29 Turns, a 'stab-in-the-back' from a player who isn't in contention for one of the top 3-5 places in a Universe can take out a player who is in contention for the top 1st or 2nd place ... and then the back-stabber drops his position ?

I just don't see that as a Good Thing in this game ...

If anything, I see it as contributing to the current situations where it is highly unusual for more than 2 or 3 to complete a Universe ...

[Jim DiGriz]

only 2-3 people complete a universe as there must be only 8 or so vets playing these days. It's not fair to put Iwars up for examination until there has been a concerted effort to bring in new players once all the bugs have been ironed out ie not now.

In contention? Make sure you don't annoy anyone enough that they choose to knock you off that pedestal :p and tbh I don't really want to play in a game where if you're leading it's very difficult to remove you from that leader spot; the end game becomes pointless as it is a foregone conclusion. If anything, some of the characters need to be nerfed becuase it is impossible to stop them from winning a game once you know they're about to do it. Houri, raiders and warlords being prime candidates and, if they game were extended considerably, a baron with a good spread of lands would also be very difficult to knock down.

[Logical Player]

Games with 2-4 ending players shouldn't last long sufficient to have a lot of diplomatic strategies as the 13-29 turns range is very far from what is possible (in the range of 10-14 turns). In these cases, almost any character with a good strategy (excepting Philosopher maybe) is unstoppable because you meet him at turn 4 or 5 and, 6 or 7 turns later, the game ends, there is no time to ally and consume the alliance.

With more players envolved (8-12) (allowing a diplomatic game with back-stabbing and betrayals) it is more difficult to have a lot of drops as the game runs well.
Of course you can always have the suicide types like TOP'M in U211 ...

Speaking of TOP'M, I agree with Jim that these games with a low number of players are totally out of the real objective of IW so we don't need to try to "improve" them. What we need is to fix the problems and to recruit players. After using the game for some time in good conditions, then we can think of modifications but until now, I think the game mechanics and balancing is very good.

LP