Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Bar » Pre-game alliances (split from: Beginner's Luck 2004)
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| Re: Beginner's Luck 2004 |
Mon, 08 March 2004 11:39   |
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| Taka Tuka |
 | Master Chief Petty Officer |
Messages: 102
Registered: March 2004
Location: Germany | |
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| Kotk wrote on Mon, 08 March 2004 11:00 |
| Taka Tuka wrote on Mon, 08 March 2004 17:30 |
"No pregame alliances" = nice to want, but you can't avoid  So, better to forget such announcements.
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BS. Some players do not cheat by default. Some players cheat if it is not explicitly forbidden.
Finally there are kids who cheat whenever they only can. To my knowledge there are very few of them playing Stars! and they are usually weak players. Stars! game takes some patience and cheaters usually have none.
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I think, that groupgaming players or single players don't think, they are cheating, if they cooperate in advance with a friend, who will enter in the game as well - even if it's at least realy a kind of cheating. You ar right.
"Groupgaming" is unfortunatly not a uncommon feature in multiplayergames, and not in Stars as well. It starts with exchange of information straight on from the begin of a game. Some players may feel themself a little bit more safe, if they have someone in the game, they can trust to. I've seen that features in many different multiplayer pbm-games before. And not used by kids only and not in shorttime lasting games only  So, maybe, it's just human, or what ?  Anyway, it's reality...
Again, of course everybody should play Stars by himself but as a host you can't avoid pregaming alliances, even if you want! You may order the players, not to do so, but at least you have to know, that you can never be safe, if they play in that way, because you have not any tools monitoring private mails and phonecalls.
Taka Tuka
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| Re: Beginner's Luck 2004 |
Mon, 08 March 2004 15:39 |
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 EDog |
 | Lt. Junior Grade |
Messages: 417
Registered: November 2002
Location: Denver, Colorado, USA | |
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Hmmm.
To me, it makes much more sense to develop an alliance in-game than pre-game. Who do you normally ally with? Your neighbors, of course, for two reasons:
1. Your neighbor is the greatest potential threat to you. You keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Making an alliance with a neighbor who is (a) expanding more rapidly than you'd like or (b) ripe for later conquest is a logical proposition. With a notification clause (standard in most alliances), you can extricate yourself when you are ready to take over your neighbor's territory. Or you can prepare yourself for when your neighbor is ready to roll into your space. The alliance gives you both some breathing room and time to develop unmolested. Of course, you make yourself open to a potential backstab, but dem's da breaks!
2. Your neighbor is the greatest potential ally to you. Combat pilots are taught that two planes flying together are five times more effective than one. Two races working together are also much more effective. You can more than double your tech research efficiency (by using wolf/lamb, scrappers, etc.), you can make better use of best-hab planets, and you make a stronger offensive punch (and defensive positioning). Alliances allow races to emphasize their strengths.
Why would you form an alliance with a race halfway (or all the way) across the galaxy? In a pre-game alliance, your ally is likely as not to be a long distance from you. "Local" alliances will be much stronger much faster. The only time I can see pre-game alliances being effective are games with remapping, where pre-game alliances are outlined by the host (ie: Capture the Flag).
EDog
http://ianthealy.com
Born, grew up, became an adventurer
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| Re: Beginner's Luck 2004 |
Mon, 08 March 2004 19:28 |
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| Madman |
 | Officer Cadet 1st Year |
Messages: 228
Registered: November 2003
Location: New Zealand | |
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| Hyena wrote on Tue, 09 March 2004 06:49 |
I've seen it in many game announcements, but I think a lot of hosts don't really care if players have a pre-game alliance. In Stars! games, alliances get formed much more often than not, and whether or not they're pre-game *may* or *may not* make a huge difference depending on the game.
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I would not play in a game that didn't have some sort of rules dealing with the pre-game alliances:
* Pre-game alliances are a _serious_ disadvantage to newer players vs. the people that have been playing a while (actually, this applies to many games, not just Stars!). As someone that doesn't know many people in the Stars! community yet, I'd want to at least feel that I started a game on an equal footing, not risk being wedged between two people that have an unbreakable pre-game alliance, despite my best diplomacy.
* Stars! allows some really effective race co-design if it is done in advance. Another player and I once playtested what an IT-IT combo could do for a team game (starting distance not much of a problem for IT), and such a combination in a non-team game would be seriously unbalancing.
Alliances that get formed after game start don't have the co-design advantage, and however they may advantage some players, they are at least formed based on what is happening in the game.
Having said that, I don't think I'm eligible for a beginners game anymore anyway, so best of luck to those who play.
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| Re: Beginner's Luck 2004 (split from: Beginner's Luck 2004) |
Wed, 12 May 2004 10:26 |
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| vonKreedon |
 | Lieutenant |
Messages: 610
Registered: March 2003
Location: Seattle, WA USA | |
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| Quote: |
There are things that just are "not done" (like playing 2 races in one game), does a Host really needs to write down all that stuff in his game ad ... ?
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Micha - Are you speaking here to starting out playing two races, or are you also speaking to taking the surrender of a conquered race and incorporating it into your empire?
I understand that there is a substantial portion of the Stars! community that dislikes the latter, but I have never understood this objection. Historically empires are not built through utter genocide; empires are built by conquering and incorporating other nations.
If, for example, I conquer an IT and start to play that race as well as my own I gain both a considerable advantage and an increase in complexity. I argue that I have earned the advantage, I not only militarily defeated the IT, but I was diplomaticly astute enough to avoid so alienating the IT player that s/he was willing to surrender control to me. The increase in complexity nicely mirrors the real-world problem that empires have as they expand and offers opportunities for more nimble races or coalitions of races to take advantage of mistakes an oversights on my part.
The one real-world imperial issue that is not present is the potential for rebellion among your new subjects. My preference is that when a player surrenders control the race password be frozen, that the imperial player, or anyone else, is not allowed to change the password. This then opens the possibility for the original player to submit turns or even to publish the password so that anyone can submit turns, resulting in much merriment and a tremendous increase in complexity for the imperial player.
So, anyway, can someone explain the rationale for the objection to true empire building in Stars!?
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| Re: Beginner's Luck 2004 (split from: Beginner's Luck 2004) |
Wed, 12 May 2004 14:15 |
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| Carn |
 | Officer Cadet 4th Year |
Messages: 284
Registered: May 2003 | |
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| vonKreedon wrote on Wed, 12 May 2004 16:26 |
| Quote: |
There are things that just are "not done" (like playing 2 races in one game), does a Host really needs to write down all that stuff in his game ad ... ?
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Micha - Are you speaking here to starting out playing two races, or are you also speaking to taking the surrender of a conquered race and incorporating it into your empire?
I understand that there is a substantial portion of the Stars! community that dislikes the latter, but I have never understood this objection. Historically empires are not built through utter genocide; empires are built by conquering and incorporating other nations.
If, for example, I conquer an IT and start to play that race as well as my own I gain both a considerable advantage and an increase in complexity. I argue that I have earned the advantage, I not only militarily defeated the IT, but I was diplomaticly astute enough to avoid so alienating the IT player that s/he was willing to surrender control to me. The increase in complexity nicely mirrors the real-world problem that empires have as they expand and offers opportunities for more nimble races or coalitions of races to take advantage of mistakes an oversights on my part.
The one real-world imperial issue that is not present is the potential for rebellion among your new subjects. My preference is that when a player surrenders control the race password be frozen, that the imperial player, or anyone else, is not allowed to change the password. This then opens the possibility for the original player to submit turns or even to publish the password so that anyone can submit turns, resulting in much merriment and a tremendous increase in complexity for the imperial player.
So, anyway, can someone explain the rationale for the objection to true empire building in Stars!?
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In Stars there are different species.
You can't compare it to earths history. Whenever war was fought and conquering happened, both sides knew(at least subconsiusly) that they are humans and therefore both sides had a chance to understand each other and find a way beside genozid, like "we let you live, but you pay taxes". Also for the conquerer there was, due to genetical compability, always the option to intermix with conquered enemies and that way increase in numbers, money, power,... faster than alone. Both is true for most conflicts in human history(those few exceptions are mankinds darkest hours).
In conflict with species that are radically different(think of something that survives from - 140 to +140 or AR living in space stations only, both is totally different from human standard), it might be impossible for both sides to understand each other and certainly impossible to intermix and live together. Living in the same empire requires a minimum of understanding.
Realistically the more similar races are, the more easy they can put together a stable empire. But differences between races realistically not only depent on race wizard selection, but also on otherwise unimportant aspects like culture, languages, culture,...
Maybe an example for human behavior to other species are neanderthals. They lived for hundred thousands of years across several continents, then homo sapiens sapiens appeared and neanderthals vanished rather fast(ten thousands of years). I don't know if that was realy caused by bloodshed or by other reasons, but its very likely that there was a lot of conflict between both species with our ancestors getting upper hand. It might be that neaderthals were extincted by our ancestors because differences were to great.
I think if today aliens would attack(and turned out too stupid to win immiediatly), it would take days to end any conflict on earth(just as long till everybody realized that aliens are not a fake made by evil (insert your preferred bad guy) to get control of world) and only some intelectuals would protest if someone would take 10000 nukes and blast aliens HW back to stone age and beyond(unless humans want that world to live on). A war between specie
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[Updated on: Wed, 12 May 2004 14:23] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Beginner's Luck 2004 (split from: Beginner's Luck 2004) |
Wed, 12 May 2004 14:57 |
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| vonKreedon |
| Lieutenant |
Messages: 610
Registered: March 2003
Location: Seattle, WA USA | |
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Carn - It may be has you say, that all theoretical alien species are too xenophobic to be willing and able to be incorporated into empires of other species. But then again we have no idea, our only experience is with different races of humans and while there certainly has been varying degrees of xenophobia it has not kept human empires from incorporating a variety of races.
Further, to take this to the purely Stars! level, the different player races are capable of a great deal of harmonious interaction, trade (tech, product, mineral and even planet), cooperation, and alliance, so I don't see why it would be implausible that the races would be able to accept incorporation into an imperial administration that was led by another race. Sci-Fi postulates such situations with regularity, why should we reject it?
Your point does dovetail with my point that it is a matter of rewarding both good military AND good diplomatic execution for the conquering race to convince the conquered to surrender rather than either fight to the last or simply drop from play.
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| Re: Beginner's Luck 2004 (split from: Beginner's Luck 2004) |
Wed, 12 May 2004 16:59 |
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IMO, pregame alliances are an obvious cheat, and I could easily profit by them even if I start far away from my ally and don't tune races ahead of time to work as a team.
If we had a community of thousands of players who were randomly dumped into games we might be able to limit such a cheat, but here it is more of a question of honour/ethics. It is still possible to beat cheaters. (For example it sounds like Greg V. would have lost Summer)
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IMO real life different species could get along, form one empire. We have examples in SF (Star Wars, Star Trek) where people imagine getting along. As part of a game, different races cooperate from tech trade to coordinating fleets. In real life, we have lots of cooperation between for example man and dogs, or llamas and sheep.
In a game, I think that is more a matter of agreed on rules, etc. Playing with 2 different races would require 2 different serial numbers which not everyone has, so it may give an unfair advantage to some.
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Re: Beginner's Luck 2004
. It would really be great, if most (all?) Stars-players agree and don't speak with friends about joining a game for cooperation, if no pre-game alliances are wanted 
