(02-09-2021, 11:06 AM)Lugh Wrote: Welcome! What games did you play in the past?
Oh, so many... I think the very first one I ever played was Beyond the Quadra Zone, back in the mid 80's. Monster Island, Swords of the Gods, DungeonWorld, Olympia, many games of Atlantis, a few others that I can't remember now.
Like I may have already mentioned, my main inspirations for my own game idea are the 4X computer game Master of Magic, and a PBeM game called Eldritch, formerly run by Play By Electron Games.
(02-09-2021, 11:06 AM)Lugh Wrote: Nope! Think of PB(e)M gaming as a cafeteria. Those who prefer the old ways (ugly graphics, numbers instead of descriptive text, physical mail, longer turnarounds, etc.) can play low-tech, less user-friendly games. Those who want a more attractive, more customized interface, faster turnarounds, choices in the delivery of results can choose those games that fills those needs. Everyone can pick games which fit with their preferences.
This is NOT poisonous to our hobby. It may indeed be an antidote to the poison known as "stagnation".
My thinking was that this type of game could allow the world to be so much more robust and filled with data and systems than a turn-return type system.
Building in a robust automation/unit order queue system would allow people who didn't want to micromanage everything options to set up operations that they didn't want to fiddle with, giving them more time to dig deeper into the parts of the game they are interested in...
It could allow players to have a turn-based battle mode, though I only think this would be fair against NPC armies. PvP would probably have to be done only via the server, unless there could be a system that allowed two players to schedule the battle and play each other.
This whole idea is of course prone to cheating, so there would have to be a lot of consideration around how the details would go, security, and anti-cheating...
It could allow for a certain level of not-really hidden information; you might know something that turned up in your turn results, but not have to be informed specifically.
In a regular PBM, you know there's a thing in that hex because the turn result told you. In a game like this, there could be information that you didn't know you had access to until you looked for it.
In other words; in a regular PBM, you have info that players have, and info that the server has. In this scenario, there could be server info, player info, and info that the player's computer has that they may or may not know... This is very interesting to me.