MoO2 league, newbies, setup, game rules (resp to Activity

How-to and support discussion for game play over internet.
Monococo
Posts:1
Joined:Wed Jun 03, 2009 11:12 am
MoO2 league, newbies, setup, game rules (resp to Activity

Postby Monococo » Wed Jun 03, 2009 12:09 pm

Greetings,

I believe I came on this forum several years ago, trying to find MoO2 internet players. There were some then but I played with no one in the end and went back to other games.

I just came back by chance ( or fate ) because a friend of mine just started playing and for future usage we're looking forward to tweak the game.

Stumbling again upon your forum, I noticed something : in a year or so, several new players have posted on the forum, explaining their problems to have the game work, and then finding online players.

Consequently, there MUST be a quite small number of MoO2 players looking forward to play on regular basis.

Furthermore, I read the post named "Generating MOO2 activity" speaking of using a specific ladder for casual gamers. Several ideas arose from this post but nothing quite solid yet I believe.

Surely, there is a reason why you cannot get more than 8 regular players. And I believe I know that reason. Let me try to explain it to you.

1. Game install mishaps :

Upon joining your forum, guests are asked to install your latest 1.4 version and play the Dos version only, using Dosbox for dos emulation. You made an extensive howto but in my experience, there are often workarounds to find depending on your own PC that will not work on other systems. Add NAT problems to that ant setting up the game to work online soon resembles a nightmare to the casual player.

When setting up to play with my friend, he simply downloaded the game from an abandonware site ( v 1.31 which is the version every casual uses ). Then I sent him my old Kali95 version. We then set-up his NAT and truly, 30 minutes later, the games was starting ( so we needed only 30 mins to install MoO2, Kali and the NAT ). I believe this is the simplest way to play if you want to start playing FAST and it WILL work on almost any PC configuration.

I must add that we only use the Orion95.exe version. It may cause crashes from time to time, there are one or two mouse issues but in the end we manage to play in 4 hours of uninterrupted sessions, without any problem !

2. Player balance

As it is sais in your post, you cannot compare the skills of a casual player to the ones of a hardcore games with hundreds of games behind him. Thus, you DEMAND that newbies accept to loose often.

That I did when I started playing back in 1998 or so. And the 50 first games I played with humans, I lost but I wanted to go further... It was a difficult time for me, and it was seldom fun, being crushed at 1/5th of the game...

I cannot admit that a hardcore gamer would have fun crushing someone who just started playing... Fun arises when there is a challenge, thus when the players are quite equal in force and experience. Even then, there are things like starting conditions that can dramatically shift the odds towards a player, rendering the game quite useless ( let's say a Silicoid who would start with a large ultra rich system with natives ).

When I played regularly, I created a little program that used simple rules to generate Races picking depending on galaxy size, number of players, etc etc...

The most important thing in this program was that each player was able to pick one of two available races for him. For example, in a small galaxy with 6 players, player 1 could choose between Gnolam and Trilarian, Player 2 from Meklar and Human... Races considered too efficient in some scenarios were simply put aside, or all human players would be proposed one.

I believe there is an important challenge there too : when I got to your Irc chatroom, everybody told me that you only played custom races. Therefore, added to your extensive experience, there are surely a number of preferred choices for race design, that will :

a. Render the casual unable to compete
b. Make all games quite alike, since race picks will always be optimized and thus recurring traits will occur almost every time ( like rock eater ).


I firmly believe that fun games should arise from these conditions. Should you make the game simpler to use and funnier to play online for casuals, there would be plenty willing to play.

Needless to say that on top of the game, there needs to be tools available to make things possible to happen :

A dedicated community website for MoO2 online games including:
1. Software setup howtos
2. InGame setup rules and assistants.
3. A utility to swiftly and simply find an opponent willing to play.
4. A ranking for completed games between members.

I have extensive web-development capabilities and could easily make the website.

There lacks only the will of your team to "open up" to new players...

Anyone willing to play with the terms described above, feel free to contact me at paul.tabet_at_analemme.fr

Hope to fight you all in the stars !

User avatar
Cabman
Posts:235
Joined:Fri Jul 29, 2005 5:58 pm
Location:Zabrze, Poland

Postby Cabman » Thu Jun 04, 2009 7:19 am

( Then I sent him my old Kali95 version..()..so we needed only 30 mins to install MoO2, Kali and the NAT ). I believe this is the simplest way to play if you want to start playing FAST and it WILL work on almost any PC configuration.
It takes less than 10 min to install game, apply patches,install and configure dosbox. AND it works not only on every pc but also on linux and mac machines. If any difficulties the dosbox guide describes every issue, all you need is to read it carefully.
I remind you that you have to buy an account on Kali while joining IRC moo channel is free.
I must add that we only use the Orion95.exe version. It may cause crashes from time to time, there are one or two mouse issues but in the end we manage to play in 4 hours of uninterrupted sessions, without any problem !
Why should one play laggy and bugged win95 version over 1.4 with new features, much less bugs and running smoothly?
Surely, there is a reason why you cannot get more than 8 regular players. And I believe I know that reason. Let me try to explain it to you.

Well I have almost 100 nicks on my irc list ..is that not enough?
2. Player balance

As it is sais in your post, you cannot compare the skills of a casual player to the ones of a hardcore games with hundreds of games behind him. Thus, you DEMAND that newbies accept to loose often.

That I did when I started playing back in 1998 or so. And the 50 first games I played with humans, I lost but I wanted to go further... It was a difficult time for me, and it was seldom fun, being crushed at 1/5th of the game...
There are many players with different skill level on IRC chat . And recently many new players showed up.You wanna play vs vet and learn new features? go on ; you want a more equal game? Feel free and start a game with new player.
When I played regularly, I created a little program that used simple rules to generate Races picking depending on galaxy size, number of players, etc etc...

The most important thing in this program was that each player was able to pick one of two available races for him. For example, in a small galaxy with 6 players, player 1 could choose between Gnolam and Trilarian, Player 2 from Meklar and Human... Races considered too efficient in some scenarios were simply put aside, or all human players would be proposed one.
Don't expect me to play custom races which SUCK.

Gorean
Posts:25
Joined:Sat Jul 04, 2009 2:49 pm
Contact:

Postby Gorean » Thu Jul 16, 2009 12:05 pm

I must say that I had the same reaction as Cabman when I read this. I haven't been playing all that long on IRC, but the community has always seemed pretty large to me. I can find a game if I want to, and I've even been able to find players of a relative skill level to mine.

I do think that one thing that helped me integrate was that I have three friends that I managed to get to play the game, and we spent many months playing it together before we tried anything with the IRC community. I will say, however, that I only started to learn how to play well when I studied the play that goes on on IRC.

About DosBox being a hard time to set up: I disagree. There is absolutely no reason to play the exe version, and too there would be no way to play all of the great mods with it. DosBox might be daunting to those who do not work with computers much, but I was able to get instant help by just asking for it in the IRC channel. The DosBox guide was also helpful.

That said, I'd still like to see more dedicated Moo sites, or at least a site that was dedicated to coordinating games, and helping new players, as was suggested. It really couldn't hurt if someone were willing to start it.

As for my race picks being generated for me, that would be preposterous. Firstly, it has all of the earmarks of babying, which is a horrible way to teach anyone anything. New players would not learn proper game play, or race setup, from this. Secondly, playing in harmony with certain race picks is a big part of MoO2. If I am forced to use race picks that have flaws, then I will be forced to go out of my way to attempt to correct them, and the harmony of my strategies will be destroyed. A four hour game may potentially become eight hours due to the trouble of getting around these set backs. Losing control of race picks is tantamount to letting the game be determined for you, and I abhor a game that plays itself.

Good thoughts, although they were worded a bit strongly.
Vita multis dat nimis, satis nulli.


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