As I see it, there are really 2 issues here:
1. VPs reward players for playing certain nations (Noldo, Corsairs, WW,
etc.)
2. VPs reward players for anti-team play. (Keep the Noldor out of the fight
altogether. Build up Character ranks, a huge treasury, and lots of
artifacts, and just before other players win, take some points from other
highly placed players on your team by challenging their chars, stealing away
gold, or taking their pops.)Your system discourages #1, but if anything, encourages 2. It means that
players interested in winning as the noldor need to score SIGNIFICANTLY more
points than the norm for a nation who normally comes in first anyway.
Same old arguments against VP's PERIOD. Here's the same old counter: you play
like that, especially as a FP, you lose, you don't win, take your 2500 VPs to
who was that? right...mommy.... With a NEW way to measure that, it makes it
HARDER for the Noldo to do so, and EASIER, relatively speaking, for other nations
to actually have hope to compete. The average system DISCOURAGES #2....that's
the whole point.....
Better might be a running talley for points scoring in current categories,
like:
Current # of soldiers + total number of enemy soldiers slain.
Current character points + total points of enemy characters slain.
Current treasury + total amount of gold/resources given to allies.
Current pop center levels + total enemy pop center levels destroyed + total
levels of pop centers given to allies.
This type of measure would be fascinating, but has the same results as the
currently slanted VP. The Eothraim will score more Army Destroying points in the
first 5 turns than the Woodmen will for the entire game. Similar problem with
character based actions. Those nations who have the better characters will grab
millions of those points, the weaker nations would do nothing....
In other words, this would be a programmers and administrators nightmare, but
would not acheive the desired results: measure the Player, not the Nation.
With perhaps extra points awarded for other team contributing activities
(like points for locating enemy characters with ScoChar, to keep QA and
Woodmen from being run over by nations actually doing the assassinations.)So the winner would be the nation who was most effective in fighting the
enemy. Then maybe a standard deviation system such as the one you suggest to
keep the scales balanced. Make the noldor and other top nations race to be
first into battle to kill as many enemies as possible, and give all their
spare gold away to allies in need!
Hey, agree with the team issue. With an even scoring system in an uneven world,
the abilities of the players can be measured instead of the predilictions of the
nation. Yes, give away MT's to keep allies in the game, but the better players
will inevitably rise to the top. An effective measuring tool will show that.
And en effective measuring tool that rates the Players, not the nations, would,
as far as I can see, actually promote good team play. Playing as a team is the
only way to win, only the team that wins has an individual winner, and eveyone
has a shot (if they play as a team and win..keep repeating that) to actually be
THE winner. Why play as a team and work your tail off with this miserable nation
with those miserable characters, when all you get is stomped on and no matter
what, somebody will waltz off with the glory regardless of how effetive they
actually are?
Remember, it's based on standard deviation. If the Woodmen end with an extra
150 VP's may be equal to the Noldo ending with an extra 1500. Think about it.
Winn Keathley
Brad Brunet
ยทยทยท
On Thu, 08 March 2001, "Winn Keathley" wrote:
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