I've made the "can't give wood to the guy in the inn" mistake twice.
Maybe I'm just an idiot.
>On the subject of seeing inside structures: I don't see any need to
>duplicate the position report to hide/not hide interiors of things.
>What you see in a location is already dependent on who you are, e.g.,
>do you know about hidden stuff, have you done a CONTACT, do you have a
>character that is hidden, etc. So why not extend this to the sublocations?
>This would reduce the size of the turn, it seems to me, not increase
>it.
Good point. If you're in the sublocation, merge the sublocation
report with the province report. Is that workable, Rich?
>As a footnote, I tend to like hidden information games, but it seems
>to me that what Scott proposes (making all province information
>partial and incomplete) is too radical to alter in a running game.
I wasn't proposing that as a change for the current Olympia. Just
saying that I had always favored as something I thought would improve
the game.
>Now to conditional orders. The request for this seems to be based
>upon the desire to do more with one turn.
My original reason for talking about conditional orders was to deal
with the following situation:
I'm sitting in a province with 1 noble and 1000 soldiers. Also in
the province is a 1 noble stack belonging to another player. What I
want to do is "give me 100 gold or I'm going to kill you."
Now it seems to me that's both (1) the kind of thing that fits into
the spirit of Olympia and (2) a reasonable thing to do. But this is
very difficult to do given the current game mechanics. You have to do
some counter-realistic exchanges between nobles, or do something else
entirely (like capture the noble, take his money and release him).
Since I think most of the players *want* to do things like this, and
since I think Rich wants to promote this kind of player interaction, I
am interested in what needs to be done to permit it. Conditionals are
the obvious answer, but I'm open to other suggestions as well.
>Let's take for example, exploring uncharted waters with a ship, a
>problem I have this turn. With a raft of conditionals, such as IF
>forest, or IF ocean or IF city ... I could spend a lot of time coming
>up with conditionals to cope with every possible twist and turn of
>the coast, and probably manage to spend the entire month sailing.
Which is exactly why if conditionals are added to the game (*) they
need to be limited in some fairly serious way. I think everybody
agrees that they don't want to turn Olympia into a conditional
programming contest.
-- Scott T.
(*) Notice that I'm completely ignoring Rich's rather definitive
statement that "no way, hold my breath till I die am I going to add
conditionals to Olympia". We just need to find the one neat feature
that he can't resist, and then he'll crumble :-).