Number of players in a game

[Matija]

I find 3 player games to be the best. There's a nice balance of strategy and tactic. And usually one doesn't acquire too many lords to play with.

2 players are good to work out the recruitment tactics, but the number of lords tends to be very high, and it takes too long to play a turn.

4 player games tend to be a little chaotic, and much is left to chance - one might hit the right direction of recruitment and one might not. And the game might already be decided if one is lucky in his choice.

Actually, I think 5 or 6 player games might prove to be more 'stable'. One would have no option but to recruit in his neighbourhood. Then gather his forces in a group or two and head for the enemy.

[ladyhawke]

I agree. I would love to try a 5, 6, or heck! 8 player game.

[taeorn]

I am curious as to wether this game allows for
PC as well as NPC movement and battles?
That is too say, can I start a game with a foul player
and a fey player and can there be an NPC faction acting too?

Or are all factions immobile until recruited by players?

[Matija]

They're all immobile.

[sparrowhawk]

NPC's are something that I've been pondering over since before the first alpha release. The problem is that I have very little understanding of AI techniques and so if I were to implement NPC's they would probably act very simplisticly and probably very predictably, which would detract from the feel of the game.

However I am aware that we have several coders/mathematicians/statisticians/etc in this forum and also on the wider Yahoo forum, so maybe in the future they will make an appearance if people are able to help out with algorithms.

Not until after v1.00 though.

[sparrowhawk]

LadyHawke said:

I agree. I would love to try a 5, 6, or heck! 8 player game.

This would be fairly easy to do as the code wherever possible uses data driven parameters. There are a few hard-coded places which would need doing properly, for example the New Games 2 Page, but that was mainly due to my lack of understanding of Javascript and PHP when I started this project.

I've always seen changing this as a low priority simply because of the delays inherent when many players play. These games are most likely to become stalled as people are off sick, on holiday, etc.

The next release will be the last Features release prior to release 1.0, although there will be a few more bug-fix releases and the website needs some tidying up too (the registration page and process need a complete overhaul for example, as they have not been visited since pre-alpha times).

So any player-number change will be post-1.0

[merlin]

The said:

NPC's are something that I've been pondering over since before the first alpha release. The problem is that I have very little understanding of AI techniques and so if I were to implement NPC's they would probably act very simplisticly and probably very predictably, which would detract from the feel of the game.

However I am aware that we have several coders/mathematicians/statisticians/etc in this forum and also on the wider Yahoo forum, so maybe in the future they will make an appearance if people are able to help out with algorithms.

Not until after v1.00 though.

Remember the AI in LOM is simplistic but affective. And could be added to MU pretty easily.

But also if you looked at all the techniques being applied by the PC characters you'd find they are very easy to code.

However, I wonder if SQL and Php is the best language for doing that kind of thing in. Imagine the number of lookups being used for an NPC to work out where he is, what he can see, possible places to move to... etc

[sparrowhawk]

But the LoM AI is geared to a specific thing isn't it, ie doomguards racing along waypoints to shimeril, xajorkith, etc.

In the more random world of MU, would this model be appropriate?

[merlin]

The said:

But the LoM AI is geared to a specific thing isn't it, ie doomguards racing along waypoints to shimeril, xajorkith, etc.

In the more random world of MU, would this model be appropriate?

Is it more random? What does everyone do... rush to all the waypoints to recruit lords!

And then head to all the waypoints to attack citadels...

Added: I think the nuances are in why people make decisions... how many times do you hear... "I gambled and send [lord] straight to [here]..." this is the extra level of AI needed, but that needn't be hard to code.

[sparrowhawk]

Easy for you to say! ;D

Anyways, I'll ask for assistance when/if I get around to NPC's.

A while ago (almost a year I'd say), a Yahoo group member sent me a really good treatise on modelling NPC's according to animal behavioural patterns, with the NPC's "learning" about their enemies as they go along. Probably too sophisticated for the current MU environment, but fascinating nonetheless.

[sparrowhawk]

Merlin said:

However, I wonder if SQL and Php is the best language for doing that kind of thing in. Imagine the number of lookups being used for an NPC to work out where he is, what he can see, possible places to move to... etc

It's one of the fastest combo's that I've used for web developments. And of course it's free, which is very important from a MU sustainability point of view.

For Win/Max/Linux/etc development, I guess that you'd use something else, such as Delphi/Kylix, VB, C++, etc. The speed gain is not having to cope with Web traffic and also not having to cope with multi-user, multi-player considerations. Unless of course you build a client-server version that uses TCP/IP to play across the Web. That would be nice, but tied into a particular platform. Oh, unless you use Java of course!

Volunteers? ;D

[celebaglar]

I've voted for 4 only because I've had a bad time in all my three player games.

Whether a game turn out good or not still depends mostly on where the participants start in relation to each other.