Why should it be any easier to build castles? I thought that the whole
point of castles was that they would be difficult. Otherwise everyone
would have them! As it is, they're a mark of distinction and competence.
Most of these suggestions seem to be aimed at making things "easier."
However, for me, the difficulty of arranging some things is part of the
game's appeal You have to plan ahead as to how much you can carry, etc.
As to the specific suggestions...there are some reasons why I think it
unlikely that Rich would ever implement them, even if there was a G3.
These are based on the the interviews with him on the Oly web site, and my
limited correspondence with him.
First, a bit of history. Apparently many of the large open-ended PBEM
games before Olympia had a tendency to "blow up." If there was an order to
"recruit character," for instance, then each character you recruited could
recuit more, and so on, and so on. Eventually, in order to do well, you'd
have to write thousands of orders for hundreds of characters, and it
stopped being fun.
Rich's innovation was the concept of the NP, a completely finite resource
(except for some mistakes in G1, which have now been fixed). A player who
has been playing for years will only have a handful more NP than an
absolute beginner. He'll still have a limited number of nobles with a
limited number of days in each month, and he'll still be able to finish
writing his orders in a single evening. Let me say right now, that any
game where I have to write thousands of orders to be competitive will not
be one I stay in long. (That's why I look at anyone who suggests an
IF...THEN order with undisguised horror...but I digress.)
Anyway, this concept of limited NPs is related to another fundamental
philosophy that governed how Rich put Olympia together -- I guess you could
call it tidiness. Rich wants the amount of man-man alterations in the
universe to be directly tied to the number of nobles. When I first started
playing, I wrote him a letter asking why you couldn't walk away from your
tower and lock it, so you could be sure it would be there when you got
back. His answer was, briefly, what I wrote above...namely, that the
amount of gold, men-at-arms, potions, wood, etc that you could have in the
game was essentially infinite, but that he wanted to keep a few things
finite...namely, the number of nobles, and the number of buildings.
The much-maligned savages, in fact, are put in for precisely this
reason...to make sure that Olympia does not become filled with abandoned
buildings. Seeing the effort he probably put into coding them, it's
unlikely that he would make it possible to garrison interior locations to
wipe out their function.
The tidiness principle is also why it's unlikely that we'll ever have
caches -- they would also allow your position to grow regardless of how
many nobles you had. Just as a world with no savages would lead to a
clutter of buildings (just think how nice it would be if you had an inn in
every province in your territory, so that characters could nip in wherever
they happened to be!) so caches would cause the world to become littered
with unwanted stone and wood. Also, you could cache your claim wood and
gold, quit, and come back as another faction to recover it. None of these,
I think, would improve the game.
Finally, don't be too hasty to encourage the arrival of G3. G2 was only
started when it became unavoidably obvious that the rules were broken in
such a way that a small faction would eventually be able to take over the
entire world. And once G2 started, G1 pretty much folded up (there
are...what...a few dozen players left?) I see no reason why G2 wouldn't do
the same thing if G3 started, and I for one have a bit too much invested in
it to want to see that happen.
Now, if people really do want to discuss ideas for G3, I'd like to see
ideas for things that would be totally new and different from what we
currently have, not ways to make the current game easier. Things like new
skills, or new classes of spells. I have a pet dream of adding rivers to
the map...think how that would make settling a continent follow historical
lines more closely! But that can come another time...
The Midnight Carnival