Re: House Rules
I am just about to finish my first PBEM game, which is also a tourney game. In our game two of the general codes listed here have been broken: Surrender and Exploiting a Known Bug.
Either one of the two might not have completely destroyed the fun of the game, but both together have turned it into a walk-through for all sides. Since the game is virtually over, unless a huge God-thrown cosmic fireball comes from outside the known universe, I will relate my experience as it might shed some light on this topic.
Let's start at the moment, the turn, right before the 4th placed player (I'm pretty sure he was fourth) surrendered to the 2nd placed player. [I will refer to them as 1, 2, 3, and 4 now based on their score placement] 1 was eating up 4's empire at an alarming rate, but 4 still had quite a few planets, some of them quite large. At this moment, the alliance of 1 and 3 had a huge gaping hole in their defenses in an out of the way part of the galaxy. Had 4 simply tried to stall the attacking fleet of 1, and had 2 found this hole in the defenses, they certainly would have been able to inflict some damage...possibly heavy damage. From there I can't tell being that the game would have taken a different turn.
Now let us look at it on the turn that 4 surrendered. Suddenly 2 controls a third to a half of the galaxy. His empire is spread out stretching from the far northwest to the southeast. Because of bad warp points and long distances, 2's empire cannot be consolidated. I suppose, that after the surrender, the galaxy is virtually the same except for one key point and that has to do with the Intel bug. Even with the Intel bug, a two on two intel battle would have been more or less fair. Not only that, I think, I may be wrong, but 4, before he surrendered, had a jump start in intel on the rest of us. For a year maybe, I was getting hit by intel almost every turn. Change that to a two on one intel battle, and you see the problem. As it stands, for every planet we glassed, we stole using intel or glassed using his own ships we stole with intel, 1.5 to 2.
Honestly, if 4 didn't surrender and we didn't exploit the intel bug, the chances that the game would have turned out different aren't so great. This game was almost completely determined by the location of the players on turn one. The only differece would be the fun factor. I think my empire (not my skills as a player) was the key to the game. I started sandwiched in between two other players, with no room to expand. I had to side with someone. I think I knew that on turn 5, so whoever I sided with had one up on the other two. If I had been taken out of the mix, there would have been three equal empires each with the ability to populate a third of the galaxy uncontested.
I guess the conclusion is, I really see now, how a few events, like surrendering and bug exploitation can trump everything else in a game, making for naught the finer points of empire building, ship designing, strategizing, and tactics. All of your resources being stolen through intel because of a bug is different than the same happening because you failed to start building intel facilities till turn 100. One you cannot control...the other you just didn't think through.
I think it could make for an interesting senario, that may never happen again, if a game decides to forbid the use of intel, until the bug is fixed, but not forbid the building of intel facilities. Do you hope to gain the advantage by building extra research facilities, or do you pre-empt and build a bunch of intel facilities, that as soon as the bug is fixed, you can devastate the enemy with intel? Hahahaha!
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