Victory

[Victory]

I just did a quick look and found this article about StarMaster. KSK Concepts was the company that bought Starmaster back from Schubel and this article is apparently from someone who worked there.

http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com/200...games.html

Ah! This is Joe (the article author), he is actually playing in the game of Far Horizons that started today. I don't think he has created a forum account yet, but I can send him an email asking for the fellow's name if walter cannot remember.

I dug through a couple boxes and found some of my old stuff. It appears that I might have left the vast majority of things at RTG, but I found some newsletters from 1981-1984 or so.

Richard Lloyd was the man who took back StarMaster.

I scanned a few of the items since people expressed interest in StarMaster and Galaxy Alpha. So I scanned the initial StarMaster advertisement as well as the intro to KSK Concepts. I also scanned the first Galaxy Alpha newsletter as well as their ad trying to lure players away from StarMaster.

I tried posting this to an image hosting site, but they are too large it appears.

One that made it is at:
http://imgur.com/qguN1
http://i.imgur.com/2cA78.jpg

Five are at (but it appears one got cut off):
http://imgur.com/a/jPQlo/all

In any event, if anyone actually wants any of these send me a PM with an email address and I can send them your way. The scans are 2-8 MB in size.

[Ramblurr]

Wow! Those are awesome. As someone who missed that entire era, it is interesting to get a glimpse of how things operated back then.

So KSK only ever ran a few turns of Starmaster after those announcements?

Was this before photocopy machines? Did the GMs have to manually type those newsletters over and over?

From these newsletters and other pbm archives, I just can't get over the scale of these games. There just doesn't seem to be anything similar these days. They truly were the first MMOGs.. err, MMOfflineGames? I was hoping Mark's Galactic Empires would make a comeback, but that is looking more and more unlikely.

[GrimFinger]

In any event, if anyone actually wants any of these send me a PM with an email address and I can send them your way. The scans are 2-8 MB in size.

Oh, you know that we want it all. It sucks connecting to the Internet at 16.8K, right now. I am going to have to go to someone else's, just to download the things.

But, you know that we want them. I especially am interested in Galaxy: Alpha from Intergalactic Games. Do you recall much about them, Terry?

[Victory]

Wow! Those are awesome. As someone who missed that entire era, it is interesting to get a glimpse of how things operated back then.

So KSK only ever ran a few turns of Starmaster after those announcements?

Was this before photocopy machines? Did the GMs have to manually type those newsletters over and over?

From these newsletters and other pbm archives, I just can't get over the scale of these games. There just doesn't seem to be anything similar these days. They truly were the first MMOGs.. err, MMOfflineGames? I was hoping Mark's Galactic Empires would make a comeback, but that is looking more and more unlikely.

I'm not sure how many turns KSK ran. I didn't think it was many, but that blog I linked earlier made it seem like more.

Photocopy machines were around (but expensive), but the type set of newsletters and such was pretty bad. I'm not sure if every PBM company had photocopy machines or if they took things to their neighborhood printer. RTG printed off rules and such at Kinkos, but we had a copier in the office. It wasn't cost effective to do many big runs on our machine though.

---

In any event, if anyone actually wants any of these send me a PM with an email address and I can send them your way. The scans are 2-8 MB in size.

Oh, you know that we want it all. It sucks connecting to the Internet at 16.8K, right now. I am going to go to someone else's, just to download the things.

But, you know that we want them. I especially am interested in Galaxy: Alpha from Intergalactic Games. Do you recall much about them, Terry?

I don't recall much about Galaxy Alpha. If you want me to send the original scans of that first newsletter just send me a PM with your email address and I'll send them to you. It looks like only two of the four pages for the newsletter got uploaded for some reason.

Most of the box I found is old Schubel and Son newsletters and such. Not much more for Galaxy Alpha (sorry).

Thanks for giving me the incentive to dig those out. It made me feel young again for a little bit remembering what it was like to be in high school and checking the mailbox for a turn.

[walter]

Richard Lloyd was the man who took back StarMaster.

Yes!
That was the guy! Hmm, maybe I can trye to find him on the internet. I am sure he has an interesting tale to tell us .

Anyways, I did play Victory! in the past. I really liked it. It used to run in the Netherlands by Paul Hartmans Pbm Express. Oh man, I really like playing games with that company! The Pbm Express still exists as a game company, I think 99% of the workers over there dont know they are working for a former playbymail company

[Ramblurr]

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?

[Victory]

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?

SuperNova solved this problem by waiting until we had 150-200 players ready for a game. Then we set them up in a galaxy and off they went. When we got another 150-200 players organized another region was created.

In SuperNova when a given region whittled down the players enough it was possible for them to create a wormhole into one of the newer regions. This wormhole could only transport a small amount of material (ships, troops, colonists, etc) and the empire could then move into a new region as an Elder Race. They had an advantage in technology (usually only 6-12 months) but a horrible lack in their production capabilities. They could then form alliances with the powers that be in that new galaxy or just try to invade it.

StarMaster separated the galaxies on XYZ coordinates. One galaxy (the Central) was at 0,0,0 and another (NorthEast) was at 200,200,0 (for example). If ships could travel 9 parsecs a turn an unlimited supply of ships could eventually arrive in that galaxy for an invasion. This was more troublesome.

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.

In general in these big PBM games the problems were solved by starting up new regions with oodles of players. This doesn't happen anymore and is tough for the GMs to deal with. People who have been playing BSE for decades don't want to lose everything when Phoenix starts up. New players don't want to be 20 years behind someone with no chance of catching up.

This was one of the selling points in Galaxy Alpha in that flier I linked to earlier in this thread. Old StarMaster players can join GA and keep some of their tech.

StarMaster had a lucrative niche selling existing empires to new players. When someone was going to drop they instead sold their position to someone else (who either plundered it or saved themselves years of work). I know of empires that sold for hundreds and thousands of dollars. This same thing goes on today in the online games and there are chinese companies that just farm for resources to sell to players in game as well.

[GrimFinger]

I started playing StarMaster back in 1981 and that is where I met one of my future partners at Rolling Thunder. I remember battling with Robert Bunker and his alliance in StarMaster (a race of reptile creatures if I recall correctly). That game had so many special actions and unique gamemaster related things in it that made it fun and sparked the imagination. It has been so long ago that I can't even remember what the names of my empires were though.

I don't know Robert Bunker, and I never played StarMaster, but I would very much like to hear more about the race of reptile creatures that you fought, the ones led by Robert Bunker to which you refer.

I also want to know more about StarMaster, itself. Praising the special actions and unique gamemaster related things is all fine and dandy, but for those of us who never had the opportunity to play it, it doesn't really tell us all that much.

[GrimFinger]

This was one of the selling points in Galaxy Alpha in that flier I linked to earlier in this thread. Old StarMaster players can join GA and keep some of their tech.

StarMaster had a lucrative niche selling existing empires to new players. When someone was going to drop they instead sold their position to someone else (who either plundered it or saved themselves years of work). I know of empires that sold for hundreds and thousands of dollars. This same thing goes on today in the online games and there are chinese companies that just farm for resources to sell to players in game as well.

I recall paying $75 for a 12th generation empire in Galaxy Alpha, in addition to the fledgling empire that I had just started the game out with, not long before. I didn't play it very long, but long enough to attack someone, and then they and some allies laying the hurt on me.It's funnier now than it was back then, when I pause and think about it, today.

My view at the time was that it would take a lot more than $75 to reach 12th generation with my 1st generation race. The 12th generation position that I took over was called The Empire of Screams. It was already named that, when I took it over.

[Ramblurr]

Interestingly, it is not uncommon to sell characters in modern MMOs. In WoW it is a black market enterprise, along with gold selling. But in EVE Online there is an official channel to sell/trade EVE characters.