Alignment
Yes, the title of this post reminds of role playing games. It has a taste of good / neutral / evil. It has a taste of chaotic / neutral / lawful. It has a taste of player actions leading to a shift in his classification, leading to non player characters changing behaviour towards him. Well it’s a bit the idea, but not completely.
In most games like LegacyWorlds, it is very difficult to reach a good balance between ways of playing. By ways of playing I mean being an insane warmonger or staying put in your corner of the universe nursing your planets, etc. Indeed, some behaviours bring bigger advantages than others. In particular extreme behaviours, in conjunction with very high activity are often more fruitful than casual playing with a good balance between various attitudes.
Moreover the penalties attached to some behaviours are so little compared to what they bring that they end up being interesting to have whereas we might not want to encourage them. I think for instance of attacking young players as soon as they get out of protection, which is “fun” and gives Inflicted Damage Ranking points at little to no cost.
In this context, alignment is considered as a way to classify players according to their ingame strategies. However we don’t want to define a value judgment on behaviours. Therefore the classical alignments with classes like good / neutral / evil isn’t appropriate.
The alignment axes we chose to consider are a bit more complex. The tolerance axis expresses how intolerant or tolerant an empire is and is linked for instance with oppressive or xenophobic attitudes towards the empire population. The war axis expresses how brutal or fair an empire is and is linked with the size of attacked empires compared to the considered empire for instance. The environment axis expresses how mechanist of environmentalist an empire is, with evaluation associated with the use of biological or mechanical devices, etc. The honesty axis express how open or sneaky an empire is, and is associated among others with the use of spies or propaganda.
According to his ingame actions the empire of a player then shifts along these various axes. The alignment of a player is then used to calculate ingame reactions of other entities, topic which will be described in more details in another post.
In your opinion, will this bring interesting features to the game?
Do you think the alignment categories are adequate?
Would you have other axes ideas?
What game parameters do you think should be impacted by an empire’s alignment?
Lemorsa:
I love the idea of having an alignment, but however, having an evil so called alignment shouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. After playing countless campaigns of D&D, Talislanta, Vampire Masquerade (or something like that), and even Star Wars, I have mostly found it much easier to play as an evil character mindset. However, it does create communication problems at times, or sometimes benefits it.
Also, maybe how one’s alignment status is, it will affect his relationship with alien forces…
February 22, 2008, 7:03 pmTSeeker:
@Lemorsa - Re-read the post. The problem is not about “evil” itself, it is about the fact that “good vs evil” is overrated and implies a value judgement on the players, which we are unwilling to make. Instead of “good vs evil”, we have chosen to go for 4 different axes which are more objective. Which means that you can end up being a “brutal, sneaky but tolerant environmentalist” empire instead of a good/bad one.
February 23, 2008, 7:55 amLemorsa:
ah, i see. Long posts tend to confuse me. Well, i still like the idea! Even in role-playing, its not always good vs. evil, in fact, its usually not… I still stand by what i said about alien forces though…
February 24, 2008, 6:09 amju:
@Lemorsa:
That’s the plan (about relations with aliens).
February 24, 2008, 9:39 amCyliis:
With the environment axes, will it be possible to overwork a planet and cause it to lose usability?
March 3, 2008, 10:54 pmju:
There should be a pollution system, similar to the corruption in Beta 5. However it won’t cause a loss of income but a reduction of the planet quality.
March 4, 2008, 7:41 amwiles9:
In your opinion, will this bring interesting features to the game?
Q. Is this ranking type system public? I guess it will be, and if so, cool, i like it. it will be fun looking at all the goodiie goodie players and all the brutal ones. It will make MP making more interesting.
Do you think the alignment categories are adequate? I think the idea of having an axis that then calculates some overall judgement is clever, much better than a single axis judgement.
Would you have other axes ideas? Cant think of any, you covered quite a bit.
What game parameters do you think should be impacted by an empire’s alignment?
Should aliens really be able to understand our ‘alignment’.. I dunno. If yes.. well watching some sci-fi programs, aliens tend to be aggressive? So possible they will try walk over the nice ppl, and something else to the brutal??
I think brutal get a financial downfall as the peoples don’t approve, but they get military boost, and vice versa. Or does this just make a warmongerer stronger, and a civ banker richer?
April 1, 2008, 10:11 amju:
This ranking system won’t be public. It provides too much insight on the strategy applied by each player.
Aliens aren’t all aggressive. Some might just refuse to trade with you because your alignment doesn’t suit them for instance.
On the bonuses / penalties attached, it is a problem we have to consider. Being brutal shouldn’t give you even more means to be brutal in my opinion. However all this will have to be worked out more precisely once we are clearer on the game rules regarding what these game parameters are and how we want to modify them.
April 1, 2008, 1:26 pm