Longturn Forum

I've been changing my mind about the possible veteran-alliance-restrictions.

They seemed like a reasonable solution, but in practise I'm not so sure now. You'll have a situation where several veterans find themselves on a peninsula, but they're not allowed to ally together. That seems artificial.

The motivation behind it is to help the newer players, recognising that they will probably need a larger goup to be able to compete with the experienced players. But maybe this isn't a very good way of doing it.

I guess if it wasn't so long between games it wouldn't be a problem, you'd just learn from your mistakes and play better the next time. Even though I never thought it was going to be easy in LT33 to form an alliance out of a bunch of relative newcomers, I certainly have a better appreciation now of why it's so hard.

Since it was my first game, I read a lot of the forum before the game started, and so I knew what people had said about Mmm2, but when I found myself directly between him and Edrim, I knew that would have to dictate my strategy.
Sure enough, as soon as the game started he immediately wanted to attack Edrim, get me to attack Edrim, or at least let him go through my territory. And he betrayed me at the first opportunity, capturing my workers.

I tried to keep them apart as long as possible by staying as the neutral zone in the middle, knowing that eventually I would have to takes sides.

But like Wieder said, their alliance was full, so in the beginning I thought if I wanted to have a path to victory in the endgame I would have to ally with Mmm2. I had no choice but to overlook his initial betrayals. But time and time again he tricked me.

So I tried to start a group of non-aligned players. (Bizarrely Mmm2 then suddenly wanted to join that!)

But my so-called 'Independent Alliance' never worked - not at all. And my allies were slowly gravitating towards Mmm2, despite my warnings. It's understandable for Soon though. Still, I'm glad that once it became clear that me and Buggy were going to find ourselves on opposite sides of the trench lines we were able to talk in a friendly way about it. And there's something satisfying in knowing that attacking Nevermind proved to be Mmm2's downfall due to overreach.

In the end my strategy didn't really work - Edrim's alliance was full, but I had been hoping that one of their group might fall and I could take their place.

Naturally, once Mmm2 foolishly let his capital fall I put the neutrality calmly to one side and took as many of his weakly defended cities as I possibly could. I did feel bad though taking the ones now occupied by 'Martians' and 'Atlanteans'. They'd probably been feeling quite at home in their new cities.

Perhaps 'neutrality' is a little disingenuous. I don't think Akfaew's team thought there was anything neutral about allowing the railway through my territory. Maybe 'local neutrality' would be more accurate But I digress...

Wikipedia - Suing for peace

<<Suing for peace is an act by a warring nation to initiate a peace process. Suing for peace is usually initiated by the losing party in an attempt to stave off an unconditional surrender and may sometimes be favorable to the winning nation, as prosecuting a war to a complete or unconditional surrender may be costly.
However, pressing for peace may sometimes be started by the winning faction as a means to end the war for several reasons, such as where additional conflict would not be in the perceived best interest of the winning party. In this case, demands might be made, or the two nations may agree to a "white peace," or Status quo ante bellum.>>

For many of us the 'role-play' aspect is important. You spend months slowly building up a nation and engaging in wars. I know you can look at the game in purely strategic terms, like a board game, so the goal is not so much to win, but to get into a winning position - then you can win. But I think even on these terms not losing points after the end-game is a genuine outcome to aim for.

Obviously my experience in LT33 has influenced my thoughts on this. In my posts I've been saying we should allow bigger alliances, and allow neutrality as a viable option for the endgame. I had the bad luck in my first LT game to find myself directly between two experienced veteran players with a long-standing feud - and thus inevitably two strongly opposed alliances. One didn't want me, or couldn't take me because of alliance-size restrictions, and on the other side I've got this guy wanting me to join the alliance he was 'leading' who says we shouldn't build our cities too close to each other and compete over resources - and then settles right up all along my borders blocking me in, even though there was an enormous stretch of land available because of idlers!
A guy who suddenly attacks one of your units, and then says

'oh, sorry about that, I was being paranoid'.

Probably one of the few times he was actually telling the truth.

At first I didn't know what people were referring to when they talked about RPG / role playing in the game. But I think they just mean the way you identify with it to some extent. The way you come to know the terrain like the back of your hand, or breathe a sigh of relief when those walls go up just in time...

I only wish a rich freeciv fan would hire the programmers to make a multiplayer version without the TC elements.
You never know, it's possible.
I guess the AI players will be better by then anyway so it won't matter.

Interesting thread..
First i thought '..what the heck..do i have to spend one hour to know who is winner who is loser and who is that 'survivor.. shouldnt be more easy for a game to know that?..

But i think now that the subject is interesting and open.

I'll lay randomy some thoughts on that :

1) As i get it there is a resource in the community called the LTPoints (we could put them to a bitcoin-kind chain to made them more cool) and after a game session we take some LTP from the losers and give them to other players. So with 2 players A,B A(LTP)+B(LTP) = constant = 2000 . No points get destroyed. That relation doesnt hold in the current table though . i got a sum of 98883 and not 82 * 1000 = 82000. But as is writen in the rank table not all players are displayed

2) In order to make the game "interesting" we want (as it was said by wieder) to de-motivate large alliances. That sound as an admins effort to create disincentives to the equivalent of anti-competative practices [1] in a virtual game-world. For e.g:
* Dividing territories, an agreement by two companies to stay out of each other's way and reduce competition in the agreed-upon territories.
But that's bread & butter in LT's player modus operandi (from my current short experience though).
So to take an argument shortcut we could say that we want teamless game to 'transform' into a team game by giving the rigth incentives.
(someone else in that thread i think had that feeling also)
The main incentive to force that behavior is that a fixed number of players will get the loser's LTPs. But as other members and wieder accepted the unavoidable truth that befome we get there all short of thinks could happen.

And what is that dreadfull thing that could happen?

I think that is the already mentionted feeling that u'r doomed from the middle game not because your nation sucks or u'r freeciv skills suck but because an 'aggreement' was made from some alliances.

But here we come to another crucial ,to my view of the issue ,point which i call the 'law of the unavoidability of the eurovision effect' or
the 'Collateral damage of the dead's civilizations memories remaing alive in the enforcing of anti-competive disincentives in LT games'

So the only escape route from this effort is to accept that LT is not a game-experience but a an experience of being part or a game centered cyber-community where the pre-memories cant and shouldnt be wiped out because its part of its essence.

As a said in an earlier post : The ""winning"" is not mainly a function of your freeciv skills mainly but it depends also on your involvment in the LT community. Knowledge of pre-memories from previous dead-civilizations and dead-worlds and dead-rulers is valuable to the current alive-world. And LT-fame transcends all those vanished worlds that we figth in. And LT-fame is build above all those forgotten realms we spend our energy in. And LT-fame is invaluable asset to staying afloat in a vibrant LT-world where communication and out-of-game diplomacy is strong.

So to take another shortcut maybe Ladder wars is pointing towards the solution to minimize that dreadfull filling of getting betrayed of the rest of the world and being hopeless with nowhere to hide



[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices

there seems to be a lot of confusion about the terminology. people are still associating alliance size with # winners!??

to clarify: these rules don't restrict at all the size of teams. It only restricts number of winners. you can still have team of 50 players if you wanted, and then it's up to you to decide winning scheme (ie, roll dice, lottery, top scores, etc). And there are actually unlimited number of survivors, because you can launch space ship whenever you want to end the game.

"to clarify: these rules don't restrict at all the size of teams. It only restricts number of winners. you can still have team of 50 players if you wanted,"

Yeah, this is true. The alliance sizes are no limited and you can ally with as many players as you wish. Probably not with playrs 50 on this game since there are not that many players but you get the idea.

"and then it's up to you to decide winning scheme (ie, roll dice, lottery, top scores, etc)."

You can choose the winners, no problem with that, but you will have to kill all the extra players before you can end the game with winners. If you have an alliance of 20 players, you basically have 3 choices.

1) End the game with the space rance and have just one winner. Everyone else but that one player will become a survivor.

2) Kill most of the remaining player to meet the survivor limit.

3) En the game with a tie

There is actually a theoretical fourth option. There everyone should launch a space ship and that should reach the target at the same turn. That way everyone could become a winner. This however is incredibly unlikely but still an option

wieder wrote:You can choose the winners, no problem with that, but you will have to kill all the extra players before you can end the game with winners.

So, what if you have an alliance of, say, 15 people, you become the strongest, and then decide you don't feel like killing off other people. You can decide on the winner easily, but you're not going to play Genghis Khan and you'll let everybody else live. Then what? Play on forever? Game that never ended?

"Then what? Play on forever? Game that never ended?"

No problem. You can end the game with the space race.

"There is actually a theoretical fourth option. There everyone should launch a space ship and that should reach the target at the same turn. That way everyone could become a winner. This however is incredibly unlikely but still an option"

Just make sure that everyone builds the ship and gets it to the target at the same turn. That is the only way you can have 15 winners.

The other option is that you decide that it's a tie.

wieder wrote:"Then what? Play on forever? Game that never ended?"

No problem. You can end the game with the space race.

Doh... I feel a bit silly now

"Doh... I feel a bit silly now big_smile"

I do that almost every day

We have many ways of ending the game and now it looks like that even the veteran players are unsure about what is actually the easiest way to end the game. I don't think that anyone can really know that because LT never had this kind of winning options before.

If other players accept defeat, the game can't end with winners if there are 15 players alive. This is why we have max limits. Space race is of course an exception.