Your thoughts needed

[Dragon]

While discussing with Erik, I had some thoughts.

Gondor, 5 years ago, was very dynamic.  We had many game.  Some had 30 players!  Now we have had problems keeping players around.
We had players quitting over quarrels (sometimes juvenile, but it happens).  We cannot force people to stay if you get in sentimental arguments! 
We had players leaving because the game was too much oriented on fights.  Some people wanted a more growing game (like civilization).  On the other hand, we had people leaving because the game had not enough fighting!
The main problem, I think, was that the game itself was not publicized enough.  That I cannot help.

Erik is the sole programmer.  He does that on his free time.  The game is free.  You all see the problem here.
Right now he prefers to work on his new game, Cathas, that will be more or less like Travian, which I never played, it looks  unattractive to me.  However, I will try his when the time comes.  But that means he rarely works on Gondor except for repairs.

I got this however: if we come with new ideas that dont require 3 days of programming, he will do them.  So I know you all suggested, in the past, on other forums, ideas to change or improve the game.  Please repost them but keep in mind that it needs to be simple: for example, modifying moves to take into consideration terrain type would require lots of programming!  But suggest anyway.  I'll resume all the ideas to Erik and get him to choose a few .

If somebody knwos a way to publish something, to post the  game on other forums... please let me know or do it!

And, if any of you can do some programming, maybe Erik would consider giving you access to a program section.....

Kepp ideas coming, it's time for a change here.  And I got Erik to agree on this.

[Dragon]

Here are some of the discussion we have Erik and me:

[

Okay, sorry, you're at home.
 
Let's see....
 
We need a few things.
1-Hand me the manual!  You said you had it modified, so it would be important to publish it!
 
2-The t2t site is not attractive.  We need to redesign it, or at least keep it current... last entry goes back to july 2007 on the welcome page... we need an entry page where I can write things!  Keep it interactive... I dont know much about programming.  Show me, give me access to write stuff or let's find somebody to remodel this.
 
3-The game itself.  We need to get rid of useless stuff.  Hero: his abilities are not useful (craftmanship, agility...).  Let's remove them.
 
4-Terrain has no utility whatsoever for now.  What can we do to change that?  Can we make mountain inpenetrable?  Crossing a river cost 2 movements?  If that'S too much programming, forget it.
 If not, can we at least color it a little?  Give a pale blue to water?  Pale green to woods?  Pale beige to plains?
 
5-Can we get the map bigger and put in some icons for temples?  Like a building with a cross on top of it?  A tower for fortress?  A house for city?  To be recognized, of course you have to grow the map a little.
 
6-The messages at the end of your results sheet is obsolete...
 
7-Give a spy order:
 
- spy income 50$: know the tax income of everyone
-spy garrison C999 25$ : know the amount of garrisons present at that settlement
etc.... the idea is to get more use for spying orders.  Good players can use info!  Of course, info can be useless!
 
8- can we do something with the offer gold to your god?  Otherwise let's take it out on the result sheet!
 
 
 
I'll ask players for their thoughts, telling them it must be simple chnages!
 
Keep me posted and let's make this a dynamic discussion!
 

-Seb
 
Let me know if that is too much programming.
/i]

[Dragon]

His first answer

Manual, yes, will do that THIS week. Before next Saturday you will have it. I have to see how

far I was with the new kickstart. I started on one with the test-game we played for it, but I stranded

somewhere…..

 

 

2: True, but that takes time and something I simply don’t have (for now). Its design is to get players

to the account-section. After that, people shouldn’t come there anymore… I can make a simple page in

which you can edit the contents of the message-box below? All you need to know are a FEW html-codes
and you can edit it! Redesign is welcome but we need to find someone for that!

 

3: Agreed. All that remains is speed and health for the hero!

    More suggestions are welcome!

 

4: I’d love to but it’s a LOT of work. Problem is with the algorithms to find the shortest paths.

  I am looking into that for Cathas but its absurdly difficult! You wonder how TomTom

  does it but when you realize its only got a limited number of roads and still takes seconds

   with dedicated hardware you realize its not feasible (for now).

   Colouring the map isn’t difficult but it may obscure the meaning of the items on the map.

   Colours are now used to show allegiance for items and show attacks & allied troops. Colouring the

   map may obscure that again… But you want to remove the characters for desert for example (.)

  and put in a slight shade of yellow. I think that’s not a problem!

 

5: Icons for the map, yes not a problem. A large map is technically not a problems. You provide the icons, I put them

    in, in a matter of days (I think). I tried images once but its very hard to find good & clear images that small and chose

   for a clear map in stead of a nice one L

 

6: Messages can be edited by any of the maintainers. See messages-section of the admin-page. If you want it removed, just leave

a blanc message. You have my permission to alter what you want & when!

 

7: Good idea, but first lets tackle the REAL problems before adding new ones J

 

8: The offer-gold order is already obsolete. I didn’t find real functions for it so as far as I am concerned it may disappear completely!

 

For now I am alone at this. . Neither is any of the players

I know L.

 

My main hope is to eliminate the text-writing. Create your orders online. Most of the stuff is pretty straight forward. Move armies,

create a list of targets, directions, and done. Click on a village, say: recruit this, build that, that’s all do-able. May take a few days/weeks

to make, but I don’t mind that. But then I crash. The main phase, contains the 90% of the orders and 100% of the problems I

think. All those orders concern spending gold. As finances are determened by the outcome of war, you cannot make a calculation about

what orders will be performed, and which can’t be payed. I can’t even estimate how much gold a ‘build defence all’ costs as you don’t know

how many settlements you’ll have, whether defenses should be rebuild after an attack, etc etc. So order is very important (and part of the charm)

and you must be able to re-arrange the orders and that’s difficult web-based. I am not very versed in dynamic HTML and lack

qualities here. Especially when you can alter your orders later.

 

Say we have several tabs:

 

-          attacks of your armies (actions: attack, defend, join, etc)

-          effectively a tab for most of the phases in the game.

-          main phase split up into several sections to make it understandable

-          move armies (with possible targets etc (is not TOO easy, but doable)

 

When you are done, some of the phases (I think only the main-phase) may be offered to you

combined with a cost-table. I.e.

 

-          Estimated budged: xxx gold

 

Order    Estimated cost                                                cumulative cost

order1   costs and estimated xx gold                     xx

order2   costs yy gold                                                   xx+yy

 

Then you can alter the sequence to do th important stuff first (frontline)

and the less important next (at the back of your lines). This MAY be difficult but again doable.

But now you are finished and the next day you have conferred with your allies and you make peace

left and attack right having to alter a lot of orders in the main-phase. Going through the tabs MAY not

be a problem but keeping the correct order for the orders may be L. What I am thinking about is creating

the tabs 1-by-1 and just see where I get stuck. leaving the orders that cannot yet be done (yet) in text-form.

You can still fill in the orders manually but after a while (hopefully short) you may be able to fill in the orders

completely webbased delting the main obstacle for most (new) players I think….

 

Again, I think webbased orders are the only way for this game to survive (if you think otherwise I’d love to

hear it) so that’s where I want to focus my efforts. The small stuff is good too but in the end I don’t think it

will save the game.

 

Love to hear from you! PS texts above may be posted or whatever if you want to keep the rest informed or

more involved! Maybe someone reading realizes he can do something easily while I think it’s a major obstacle!

 

Erik

[Tigeriith]

I definitely can appreciate the complexity of "minimum path finding" -- tangled with theat one years agon on a mainframe.

I've got a very easy suggestion that would reduce the complexity of Gondor by approximately 16.479% for me -- take that human vs. bot check off the login page.  I ws told it was put there for the online game but until it is active, could we eliminate theextra typing.

As one of the old timers (played in game 2) I still enjoy Gondor because it is well balanced between fighting and building.

I think what we are facing is a generation gap -- am not trying to say somebody is right or wrong just that generations think differently. Old timers who grew up in a PBM (yes, we did play games before the internet - our medium was by snailmail ) think the mechanics of Gondor are fine but the people who grew up in the Inernet age expect everything to be "Point and Click". 

An interesting sidelight that the last paragraph made me remember about "the old days".  When we played Avalon Hill wargames by mail, battles were not decided by a computer program but rather by an external event -- in order to speed things up there were specially published tables that gave results based on a number between 1 and 10 -- when you caused a battle you also sent a date (a few days in the future) and stock for each battle and the last digit of the volume was the decisive number.  This way the other person could resolve battles and use those results in plotting his turn and then pass the ball back to you .

Is my age (69) showing?

[Dragon]

You are young at heart John.  That is what is important.   
I'll tell Erik about the human check.

[Hamakto]

I agree with some of the ideas above... and I could probably add another 20 ideas to the list (some big and small).  I am not going to add them right now because I want to think about them a bit.

But the game needs something new to keep me coming back time and time again.  Right now, I feel I have gotten most of what I can out of the technical part of playing the game.  The RPing and people are always dynamic and fun.  But my game time is limited right now, so I need to budget it for a limited number of games.

I check back in every few months to see how things are going... and I will come back sometime.

Hamakto