Longturn Forum

wieder wrote:The scoring system is currently unmodified. I'm not exactly sure how to do that and while there are some issues with it, going with the vanilla scoring is at least a step towards a game where fighting wars is not the only objective.

With the number option 7 this should be a possibility and disbanding and building more units would at least risk the security of your nation since you would lose the promoted units.

If someone has the changes to the ruleset for making the proposed changes I see no problem with adding them to the game but I'm not confident enough to do it myself

/**************************************************************************
  Return the civilization score (a numerical value) for the player.
**************************************************************************/
int get_civ_score(const struct player *pplayer)
{
  /* We used to count pplayer->score.happy here too, but this is too easily
   * manipulated by players at the endrturn. */
  return (total_player_citizens(pplayer)
          + pplayer->score.techs * 2
          + pplayer->score.wonders * 5
          + get_spaceship_score(pplayer)
          + get_units_score(pplayer));
}

wieder wrote: 4) space race victory where the nation launching the space ship will need to declare the winners on the forum one turn after the launch of the space ship. Without doing that only that one nation launching the ship wins.
7) (perhaps my favorite this time) n number of alive players win based on score. With 30 players this could be 10 and if the winners want to make sure someone with a good score will not win when the game ends that player should be eliminated, made to have a lower score or forced to give up victory on the forum.

wieder wrote:The hard limits for end turns were not that popular in the past but if people want those I see no reason wny they couldn't be impossible.

"- spaceship is built and reaches its destination (unless the game ends automatically; if that is the case, I'd lose the SS altogether and create one big wonder)"

Why to lose the SS in that case? Once someone launches it there is still time to stop the space ship from reaching the target. That is done by conquering the capital of the nation launching the ship. With a one big wonder it would be possible to end the game in one turn by building a huge stack of caravans and then using those to build the wonder just minutes before the TC. I probably missed something there?

Gone are the strict limits for the number of winners and it should be possible to make better alliances.

LT36 is also not going to have tech trading so the veteran players can no longer simply destroy the newcomers by not trading with them. I think that worked reasonably well on LT34 - at least until the late game.

wieder wrote:It should be easy to understand who would win if the game would end at any moment.

Building the wonders feels like too complicated to me and also too sudden since those can be built instantly and even with multiple wonders it's not really that easy to understand when the game might end. With the space ship the game might end in a week once the ship has been launched and even that's slightly too fast. The SS victory feels like the same as a rapid conquest victory. Both can happen really fast.

Here is an example of how complex the winning rules should be at the most complex level:

"If the game is ended with the space ship scenario the TOP 5 alive nations from the scores list will win no matter what. In addition to that the nation launching the space ship can name up to 5 additional alive nations winning the game. The nations must be named on the forum and this must happen (at the latest) the next turn after the ship has been launched. The top scores will be counted when the game ends. If one of the nations named to be a winner dies before the game ends that nation can no longer win and it can't be replaced with another nation."

The winners are all players with score > (1-X)*top_player_score.

X, and consequently (1-x), is determined before the game, based on the number of players and equals sqrt(number_of_players)

So, for example, if the winning player has 1000 points:
in a game with 16 players winning score is 750 (or 3/4 of the top player's score),
with 25 players winning score is 800 (4/5),
with 36 players winning score is 867 (5/6)
etc.

The catch here is if you're at the limit of being a winner, you won't be sure until the last moment because maybe the top player will increase his score in the last turn. But that would be a part of the fun: there is no guarantee for anything.

Game ends when THREE of the following conditions are met:
- three players research all technologies (+5% score for those players)
- all wonders are built
- world population reaches X*
- spaceship is built and reaches its destination (+10% score for the player)
- Y* cities are built
- when two players reach population W* (+5% score for those two players)
- when two players acquire Z* square miles (+5% score for those two players)

* - to be determined based on map size and/or number of players before the game starts

Something like that will probably require some explanations but it should be understandable for the casual players. Counting scores or wonders may be tricky for a casual player or for a newcomer.

"If there is no tech trading, then tech conquering and tech stealing must be hardened because otherwise conquest will become a 100% win strategy"

This was already done for LT35. With LT35 the teams had just a 5% chance of stealiong techs when conquering cities and a 2% chance when stealing with spies/diplos. With LT36 this is currently 10% and 5%. How do you feel about that?

"What about map wrap? How about a X-only, for a change?"

It's a possibility but let's see what kind of maps we can do with the generator. The problem with x-only is that some starting locations may become unfair. Yeah, they may be already unfair but more unfair..? Let's see the maps.