zzz@mit-eddie.UUCP (Mike Konopik) (10/26/83)
One word of warning to those setting up games: Avoid having a competitive game
(one in which there is an expressed desire to conquer other countries) in
which one of the players is a superuser. The opportunity to arbitrarily go in
and "fixup" stuff leads to an unpleasantly tense air to the game (especially
when you think about attacking such a country and ponder that they'll get
pissed off and lob a gigaton nuke into your front yard ...)
Also, be careful to get a deity (if the person's playing, too) that is not
overcome by the same temptation to cheat. I did in the first game, and the last
two games were scrod by cheating, too. Sure, it's fun making all your ships and
sectors 100% efficient with 127 mobility -- but it really sucks when you
stop and realize that you didn't really play the game. I saw this after I
made liberal use of empfix in the first and second games, and now I request
to never be allowed to be the deity anymore, since such behaviour just
spoils it for the other players. And it's ultimately more fun to look at a
successfully-planned country and know it was legit. Oh well.
Just thought I'd toss it out for consideration of new empirers.
-Mike
ps: and now we have a deity that *never* cheats -- not even while being
nuked to glowing blue.
genrad!mit-eddie!zzz (UUCP) ZZZ%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC (ARPA)jj@rabbit.UUCP (10/26/83)
I have a better way. The deity should never, NEVER, play an active country at the same time. That way, the deity doesn't have any reason to cheat, unless he/she/it wants to do some Machiavalian manuvering. Trantor forever! -- O o From the pyrolagnic keyboard of ~ rabbit!jj -v-v- \^_^/ (pyrolagnic- from pyro<=>fire and lagnic<=>eating.)
tjt@kobold.UUCP (T.J.Teixeira) (10/26/83)
But cheating is part of empire! The manuals are full of hints on how
to get the deity to do this or that for you (the deity can *never* have
too many icons).
On the other hand, you should make sure that the deity cheats "within
the rules of the game". This works best if you can find a
disinterested third-party to be the deity. We did this in one of our
games and it worked quite well, up until the deity granted a favor that
was deemed by one of the combatants to be against the spirit of the
game (in this case it was divine intervention to support further
aggression rather than defense). This prompted a "takeover" of the
deity (Yes! God is dead! Long live God!) by the disgruntled party.
I don't remember if this was done using super-user privileges (which
virtually all the participants had anyway), or a more classic password
cracking approach.
In any case, the new deity did *not* cheat, but controlled more than
half the world anyway, so why bother?
--
Tom Teixeira, Massachusetts Computer Corporation. Littleton MA
...!{harpo,decvax,ucbcad,tektronix}!masscomp!tjt (617) 486-9581eric@aplvax.UUCP (10/27/83)
In the games here, I have played the Diety. I did have a country, but it was understood that my country was strictly for me to try and play with the logistics of the game. I created the country as an island, with only one entrance, and was pretty much left alone. Of course, the 3 war canoes might have had something to do with it. The game lasted a fairly long time, until the players grew bored with it and nuked me, setting off a rather elaborate chain reaction. No new games have been since started, the general feeling being that it took too much time and effort. I am waiting to see the next version. One plea to psl, please make the god interface a little friendlier. It should at least have the same power as the normal interface. Empfix is particularly burdonsome if one wants to do a little modification to the world before starting the game. -- eric ...!seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!eric
dudek@utcsrgv.UUCP (Gregory Dudek) (10/28/83)
I disagree stongly with your claim that the diety should not play too. I have run several game as diety & played as well, and have had no real conflict of interest problems. This may have been partly due to the fact that I have played a very passive diety. Of course, one still has to resist temptation, but cheating as diety would take away the glory of victory. (The small of napalm.. ). Re. starting up, I've found that it helps to place a bunch of LONG (20-30 sectors) random rivers on the globe (without looking where eg. des 0:30,5:7 . ?des=- ) to slow down the rate of encounter and expansion of countries. Otherwise the borders turn out to be too big too fast, and people end up getting creamed by surprise. (ie. Their neighbors have to much opportunity to sneak up.) Greg Dudek ..decvax!utzoo!utcsrgv!dudek
zzz@mit-eddie.UUCP (Mike Konopik) (11/03/83)
In response to the question of making the database only selectively modifyable, it isn't bloody likely that this can be done the way things are laid out in the game. For one thing, it is TRIVIAL to su to the deity's uid and run it without ANY way for the program to tell the difference. The empfix program is compiled with the uid of the deity in it, so this is as close to protection as I can see. Passwords can be found, unless you want to make a separate one for empfix and crypt it (so using "strings" on it won't spit one out). But that would open the possibility that the deity might forget it and then the game would truly be scrod. Empfix is the back-door to fixing up the world when, say, the deity types a CRLF in confirmation to the "Country number? (number 6 is free)" question in the ADD command, when the program takes it to be 0 (no # was typed) and he has just overwritten the deity in the empnat file... We did that once and saved the deity only because we could run empfix (couldn't log in as the deity to fix (which runs empfix, btw), 'cause the country was gone). Anyhow, I think you get the point (this is MUCH too long, so I'll shut up now). -Mike genrad!mit-eddie!zzz (UUCP) ZZZ%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC (ARPA)
rigney@uokvax.UUCP (11/09/83)
#R:mit-eddi:-84900:uokvax:14100001:000:476 uokvax!rigney Oct 30 14:45:00 1983 With regard to superusers getting in and screwing around with the world, couldn't the database be encrypted so that the deity alone can modify it, even if the su logs in as the deity? Of course this doesn't prevent the deity from cheating, but at least the systems people could play without everyone getting nervous. Also, any chance of getting a copy, either executable, source, or even just documentation (i.e. rulebook)? From the naive keyboard of ..!uokvax!rigney