Brad
Perhaps I better clarifty what I meant by a level playing field. I accept that different nations have different strength and that is one of the things that make the game so interesting. What I refer to as a level playing field was that each person has the same opertunity. Differencies in experience, thought or simple perservence as well as luck allow players to display their abilities. However the implied suggestion was that the rules were deliberately vauge and in some cases inaccurate which means that a player may be handicapped simply by being decieved by the rulebook, rather than tricked by another player, two totally different things.
Steve
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Message: 3
Date: Sun, 03 Oct 2004 14:23:38 -0000
From: "kingoftherill"
Subject: Re: Game construction and design
Haven't posted here in a long while; but in reading Ed's post and
your comments I believe that Ed is saying there are supposed to be
dirty tricks in this game. Not a formalized use of agents in some
kind of ritualized stalking and killing of enemy or neutral or
even "friendly" characters. After all in Middle Earth while the free
did eventually stand together, there was a lot of mistrust and even
bad blood between the eventual allies. It is more a case of the enemy
of my enemy is my friend at least for awhile kind of thing.
I think what Ed is saying is that it is the use of orders in an
unexpected way to acheive goals that is not wrong. In other words if
an action is not specifically forbidden by the rule book it is a
legal action and that the gray area to operate in was deliberately
left in the rules to allow that. This is not a level playing field
issue as Steve wrote. There are clearly nations that are stronger in
almost everyway to other nations. This game is not and never has been
about a level playing field. It was originally designed so that there
could be only one winner. We have now evolved to playing for team
wins but that was not the intent of the game designers.
I am currently on the receiving end of the devious mind of Ovatha
Easterling and his allies. It is the process of trying to out think
them that makes this game exciting. I don't want the game to lose
that gray area and become too mechanical or too defined it would lose
the challenge that way in my opinion.
Brad
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