Oh no, full already? I could have a one more team of 3 players. Myself and Krah would be joining, waiting for answer from Rygel.
We pretty much have a set map. Just waiting on a replacement player to take lookupAndy’s spot, and I’ve reached out to someone to fill it. Maybe next time.
Question - I don’t know much about setting up games, but I notice that there are three shapes of each colour - so could the teams have one unified colour? That would really be nice IMHO, to be able to quickly see the overall team’s power and who is allied to who at a glance (not checking starting positions etc to work stuff out).
Certainly make things clearer. Cough, Purple , cough.
Ok Brian, no problems. We’ll try to be faster next time.
I want to be purple 
I’ll concede purple, just throw me a renown point ingame.
2 Likes
So I’ve tried mapping out the color/shape assignments, thinking I could rearrange the order I put them in to force the colors to be together, but they appear to randomize even using the same coordinates in the same order. Which should have been obvious to me from the earlier samples.
@JayKyburz, is there a method to how colors and shape are assigned? We’d like to group teams by color, and if they aren’t random, and I knew how they were placed, I could reorder my coordinates.
Dang, it looks like I’m late to the party. If someone withdraws, I’m in in a heartbeat.
Selkie, we do have a dropout. Let me get back to you tomorrow, as I had offered it to someone that hasn’t responded yet.
I always roleplay my empire.
Who else will role play? Invent a character, have an interesting background, rule your empire?
I previously created a super hero themed game, but only Hulk joined. Good vs evil. I’d like to run it again sometime. It involved starting with max cash but only one star. Your hero’s home world. Your carriers are your heroes. They carry symbiotic microbes that give cosmic powers. S.H.I.P.S. were the measurement of how much power your hero “carrier” would have. It would work for a small game.
Anyway it would be interesting to see how many want to add flavour to this game.
Suggestion - if we can’t get colors, have some sort of team “name” or designation to put into our names to signify what team we’re on.
For example I’d be Kelad-ABC, Brian would be Brian-ABC, etc.
That works but it is better to put ABC-Kelad. It reads better and sorts alphabetically.
Great idea. I think a simple letter designation would be the least distracting while providing the needed info. If at all possible, I’d love to group the colors.
Sounds like Jay won’t be able to get back to us for a couple days, so lets plan on starting either on the weekend or the beginning of next week. Seems like more people chimed in with a preference for Turn based, so we will go 6T/10h to keep it moving and try to prevent too many pauses from summer holidays.
Long post about teams, game settings and house rules. Please read and comment/vote where needed. Thanks
Ok, so I did a quick random assignment to teams to starting clusters. Since the actual game hasn’t been generated yet, there is still a small additional randomness factor in these placements (just so no one thinks I picked the best looking star cluster for myself).
Going clockwise:
NE/1 o’clock - Qwerty, Bills6693, Rubberband
E/3 o’clock - JonBoy, Itsmarty, DiscoJew
SE/5 o’clock - Brian, Infin8eye, MattS
SW/7 o’clock - LDG, TomKat, Maladoni
W/9 o’clock - Myk, Rosslessness,Selkie
NW/11 o’clock - Hulk, Neo, Sekoms
Settings
66% of all stars. This is to encourage a team to actually have a clear victory and discourage a quick exchange of stars within a single team For a suggested end game see the last House Rule below.
Formal Alliances Enabled -see House Rules
Warp Gates - Cheap but no random gates
Map - Custom, 32 Stars per Player, Random Scatter; Medium distance (Close was buggy in several of my test maps, cutting down the star count significantly) Plentiful Resources (as that helps speed up the game)
Player settings - 5 starting stars, 10 ships on each. Standard costs for Infrastructure.
Do we want a boost on the Home World? It would make the game start faster, and each AI Home World taken a valuable prize. And how much starting cash do we want?
Technology- Level 1 starts. There have been suggestions that Weapons and Manufacturing should be Expensive or higher. Thoughts?
Game Time: Turn based 6T/10H
House Rules / Etiquette (one last time!):
-Teams must strive for top 3 places. Formal Alliance will be turned on, but not forced.
-You may only trade tech with your own team.
-Teams may chat and share information with each other, but you are not allowed to switch teams, merge or join another.
-There is to be no tech trading with the AI faction or any other team. No gifting tech to another team because your neighbor looked at you funny.
-You can chat with everyone, and even target other teams together, but remember, only one team can win, and they must take all three spots unless they had a member eliminated, then they must take the top two.
-Please no AFKs or rage quitting, you only hurt your own team. When you AFK, and become an AI, you share all tech with the AIs. We will have to agree on sanctions if you gain ‘black market’ tech from an AI or another player. Maybe you will have to pay to transfer that gained tech to one player from every team that doesn’t already have it, and just cash to those that already do.
-Death bed team suicides into another team while vacating stars for a different team is unsportsmanlike. If your team collectively wants to bow out, All of your team should collectively Concede. AIs have gotten significantly more difficult to steamroll, and will do a respectable job in your absence.
-When a single team reaches 75% of the map, and controls the top leaderboard spots will all remaining members, we can collectively declare a winner, and concede rather than spending a week or two while they swap stars.
So a couple final points to debate: Home World starting values. Starting Cash and Research costs (I want to leave most research at Normal, so we don’t slow stuff down too much). Is everyone okay with the House victory conditions? Since there is no team victory (yet) there isn’t much point to playing for a week or more after one team has taken 75% of the galaxy.
Did I miss everything? I’m excited to get started! I’ve played with/against over half of you, and look forward to a friendly yet challenging game.
2 Likes
Weapons and manufacturing high. standard homeworld set ups. Starting cash 750. everything else looks good.
Weapons should absolutely be more expensive than normal. How expensive is up for debate.
Are we going be assigned team names, or should we start brainstorming them now?
Sounds great Brian - in response to your request for comments:
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Positions sound fine and I trust 'ya that it will be random and you won’t just generate maps until you get a “good” one. This really is a nifty design because all three players can be engaged early on … rather than the middle one not doing much initially.
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Bummer “close” versus “medium” messes up the test maps - did you look at 24 stars/player?
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Would you consider Expensive but Random gates?
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I have a preference to play GREEN SQUARE, but only if that is super-duper easy to do.
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Weapons (and Manu) are too strong … make Manu expensive and Weapons Crazy Expensive!
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You didn’t explicitly say it, but I assume no cash transfers inter-team too?
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Totally agree with teams strive to place 1-2-3 rather than abandon stars to push one to the top … but I think you can do 50% stars for the win condition.
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How about starting out at $1,500 cash and maybe do 10/10/2 on the Home World - i.e. make it truly valuable!!!
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I still think 6/12 would be better than 6/10 … just give people a few extra hours for coordination IF they need it.
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I’m assuming (?) the AI players start up right away … or does Jay need to force that?
Ditto what Brian said that this should be a fun challenging game - thanks for organizing.
P.S. Sekoms: I’ve been told you are a kick-a** player … glad to have you on our team.
1 Like
Hulk,
I’ll play with it a little more see if I can’t get around whatever is causing the problem. I was hoping to get the Close setting to widen the gaps between the side clusters, to force early expansion to the center. I kept having it build maps that cut the total star count in half, which then meant everyone was isolated with moderate range gaps even between teammates.
I’m okay with random gates, I guess expensive would be okay given the plentiful resources.
I have to wait for Jay to let us know if there is a way to assign the color/shapes. Not sure it will be worth it if he has to create the game, as that may eliminate the ability to administer the game. Which means no pause or reinstating AFK. If possible (via very specific coordinate ordering or the power of JAY) you can have Green Squares. I guess I could just keep generating games until one of that cluster is a Green Square…
I worry about making research items too expensive, as you are only ever going to have 3 players working on them without the ability to trade.
Sorry, missed specifically mentioning cash transfers. No Teams may trade anything (tech, cash, ships, food stuffs, smokes, dirty magazines, etc.) with any other teams.
If we get a collective agreement beforehand to an agreed 75% collective Team star count, the actual victory condition won’t matter. I worry about setting it any lower in case a team has a break out player that does most of the claiming of stars.
I’m all for lower starting cash and a strong home world to start. With a 10 star start, Standard Resources and $1500 I was able to buy 38 Econ. I wouldn’t mind doing $250-500 with a home world of 30/10/1 or even 30/20/1 to make the AI starts nice prizes. I did see Rosslessness voted for $750 with standard homes. I’m still open to a majority opinion.
I feel 6/10 is a reasonable compromise between Real time and Turn based. Infin8eye requested the 10h from Jay, who will add it when he gets back. We do generally want the game to keep moving, so we can finish in a reasonable amount of time.
The AIs start immediately after a Force Start with empty slots. I just tested this to confirm.