Victory

[GrimFinger]

Terry, over in the Computer Moderation thread you said (emphasis mine):

Our style of games required a critical mass of players. SuperNova regions had a minimum of 150 players (I think) to start a game. Victory had a game setup processed at exactly 40 players, etc. To be an epic space conquest game you needed to have a lot of people to form alliances, bump into each other, etc. If the game was to live for years and years it required a lot of people to start with ([since few wanted to join if they are years behind the original players in technology).

I was wondering, from a game design perspective, what were some tricks designers used to alleviate those issues? If we look at modern games, mainly MMOs, we see they use a ladder of "levels" to climb until reaching some level cap, where everyone is more or less equal. Of course then they run into the problem of creating enough content to keep the top levels interested.

From what I've gathered from reading about these games, it seems that they (SN, SNROTE, Starmaster, etc.) didn't employ an artificial cap; that is, a position could grow unbounded. Obviously new positions couldn't be near older, more established positions, so were newer players just destined to be forever behind and forever alone in a relatively unpopulated portion of the map/galaxy/universe?

I'm not sure what SN:ROTE does. They definitely don't have enough players to create new galaxies and older players don't want to lose their stuff or edge, but the game wants newbies to play. Usually in this case they just put them in some corner of the galaxy and hope they expand enough with fellow newcomers that they turn out OK. A lot of times you can have them find technologic advances on alien planets that help them catch up. Since the older races can find those same items but they aren't very useful to them those items can be scattered around and help to narrow the tech gap a bit.

New players don't want to be 20 years behind someone with no chance of catching up.

The way that I approached the technology divide in my old, small scale PBM game, Starforce Battles, was that as I added each new player to the game, I would let them design their empire using a set-up sheet, and then when I sent them their first turn's results, I would multiply the largest number of turns that the most progressed empire in the game had went through, by the new player's empire's homeworld's mining results, and place that amount of resource points into their empire's account. They would then have one turn to spend those resource points on whatever they wanted, including exceeding the normal limit of not raising their technology by more than one level in a given turn.

Thus, if the oldest/most active empire in the game was on turn # 20, then a new player's empire would be assumed to have existed all along, and could possibly close the technology divide right from the start - provided that they invested the bulk of that resource stockpile into technology. Their empire would still tend to be less powerful than older empires, simply because the older empires had gone on to seize control of new planets. Plus, the exploration gap between old empires and new ones remained intact.

The distinction, of course, is between an empire being new to the universe, and a player being new to the game. I didn't penalize the player's empire for the mere fact that the player, himself, was new to the game.