From: Emlyn (onetel) (emlyn@one.net.au)
Date: Mon Jul 17 2000 - 00:19:38 MDT
It sounds really cool; similiar to Utopia. Looks like they stole a time
machine, came forward and saw Utopia, then went back in time and made their
own copy. Or else Utopia is a rippoff.
I didn't see anything about the usual number of players per game. This power
of having so many players was the gist of my previous posts.
I get the impression that people run little (relatively speaking) games of
empire all over the place. I really must try it out sometime (no, no, bad).
However, Utopia is a single game (actually two games now; they had to split
the game for performance reasons, looks like their code isn't so scalable).
It's entirely web (html) based, I don't think it does any client side stuff
beyond using cookies, so you can play it from wherever you can get onto the
net.
Utopia is not a great game. It's fairly mediocre in my reckoning; it's full
of clunky fixes to try to retain game balance, each such resulting in rule
changes so that each round, the rules have been changed to stop an
unbalanced tactic from the round before, and which invariably introduce
their own new problems.
But it is 60,000 players, and an entirely simplistic abstract geographical
model (if you want to think in terms of a map, it is as if you were adjacent
to every other player), that makes the game incredible. It is just soooo
many people; such a game is qualitatively different from any small scale
game. Strategies that work for 2 adjacent opponents, or 4, or 20, do not
work for 60,000; new strategies emerge which are innapropriate in games with
smaller numbers of players.
--- I loved this quote from the Empire description: "To prevent the more fanatical Empire players from staying logged on all the time, Empire places a limit on the amount of time you may be logged in per day. This limit is settable by the deity, usually 1000 minutes. If you run out of time, too bad! You can't log in again until the counter resets itself (usually at midnight). " If you use 1000 minutes in a day, you are in serious, serious, serious trouble!!! I don't think I've racked up that much time on Utopia in a day - too often. Emlyn ----- Original Message ----- From: Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net> To: <extropians@extropy.org> Sent: Monday, July 17, 2000 1:49 PM Subject: Re: Games reflecting life [was Re: No AI for Nano/No Nano for copyloads] > "Emlyn (onetel)" wrote: > > > I'm too much of a baby to know what Empire is; details, anyone? > > Take the advice of your elders Emlyn, dont go there. Save yourself > while you can! World conquest simulations are just too much fun to > resist. spike > > >
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