About eight years ago, during a visit to Miami, a GSI employee (neither Stuart nor Bill) told me that the number of alliance downgrades were taken into account by the subroutine when a neutral tried to declare. So, get enough allaince nations with "disliked" to a neutral it becomes harder fro him to declare for that particular side. This was aimed at the 'jump in front of the parade' guys.
···
From: "Richard Farrer" <richard@rfarrer.freeserve.co.uk>
Reply-To: mepbmlist@yahoogroups.com
To: <mepbmlist@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: [mepbmlist] Neutrals - A new suggestion
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 20:04:58 +0100I like, but it would have to be combined with some way of stopping a Neutral from declaring your way. Perhaps there should be some modification for the number of surviving nations which dislike/hate a Neutral compared to the number which tolerate/are friendly on a particular side. If disliked by enough nations then it should be impossible to join that side. What a shame for the poor Harad player who has managed to take out the Corsairs early on and build up an enormous position only to find that he can't declare for either side and so can't win.
Richard
----- Original Message -----
From: Laurence G. Tilley
To: mepbmlist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2002 8:07 AM
Subject: [mepbmlist] Neutrals - A new suggestionAt 03:26 15/10/2002, Brad wrote:
>Excellent points. But they don't counter the main problem:
>
>Why should a late-declaring neutral (for whatever reason)
>reap the same rewards as starting players for the hard
>fought victory they did not participate in?Because the game is a simulation of a world which though imagined has many
similarities to the real one, and because of the fact that while the
victorious alliance has succeeded in defeating the openly hostile nations,
they have failed to defeat the parasitic ones. Or they have failed to
recruit potential allies early enough for them to be useful, which amounts
to the same thing.Having thus put it in a nutshell though, a germ of an idea appears:
The finest victory must surely be 10 nations winning even though all the
neutrals declared against them. So instead of penalising late declaring
neutrals, why not reward the aligned nations (in PRS terms), with a
modifier proportionate to the number of neutrals which declared _against_
them, provided that they still won? This, it seems to me, might help to
solve your problem. A confident team approaching the mid-game would have
an extra incentive to provoke a sluggish undeclared neutral.Laurence G. Tilley
http://www.lgtilley.freeserve.co.uk
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