Oh boy, let's see if I can give a short, coherent answer to this...
1) I was spoiled rotten by BSE which I played from 1981 to 1985/6. Those were
REAL good times. I'm still looking for a game that generates the player
interest and enjoyability of that game. OLY looked promising. Legends looked
promising but piss-poor customer service and processing is killing/has
killed LEGENDS for that purpose as has the limit on players per game and numbers
of games/scenarios. Cluster and Orion Nebula looked promising. The former may
still succeed, the latter died.
2) OLY can be played 100% via email. BIG plus in my book.
3) I have always like the fantasy genre. I started playing D&D in 1974 with 1
of the first 500 rules sets off the printer.
4) more to the point of your question... OLY is scalable... you can easily
expand the 'universe' to accomodate however many players decide to join.
5) OLY is basicly a single game. The player base may get diluted due to
boredom but it won't get diluted by players skipping to the next available
veersion of OLY cause thier position isn't a real good one.
6) OLY looks to have the ability to support the lone wolf player who doesn't
really want to compete with other players, he can just go explore to
find new and intersting artifacts, creatures, etc.
7) OLY has a built in medium to role-play the game if you want to and the
mechanics to support some of the role-play as well.
Guess while we're at it, let's give some of the negatives I see so far...
1) The 'size' of a position is too easy to build up sginificantly. Skills are
too easily learned, additional units (nobles) are too easy to obtain, castles
are too easdy to build (given that there is only really ONE size and evenif
that wasn't true I still think they may be).
2) There doesn't APPEAR to be much additional gain for becoming a master at
something. Even if there is, it's too easily attained. I have 1 maybe
2 master archers already.
3) The lack of BATTLE magic is glaring (for me). Look at LEGENDS method of
implementing battle magic. It's not the best in the world but it is one of
the things from that system that works and works quite well.
4) The 'apparent' lack of a troop morale that would effect breaking.
5) The lack of underlying story line to jump start the game. One of the things
that made BSE so interesting was the 'factions/companies' that the game
started with. This gave the gaem some flavor to build on and provided everyone
with some initial reasons for being even if these were eventually changed by
the players and game play (which they most definitely were).
6) Having everyone start in the same location with no easy way to quickly
disperse if they wanted to. A know one-way gate or two in the IMMEDIATE vicinity
of the IC would have helped here with Cities close by on the other end.
7) Having to spend several boring turns just to start up nobles and get a
starting skill set. I would much rather be given XX NPs and XX gold to spend
on a set-up and then go from there. say 6 NPs and 1200 gold. Anything not spent
on setup would go into the claim stuff (which is where these should be taken
from to begin with since I think you starting numbers for NP/gold are about
right). I think implementing this in g1 would be a good way of making newbies
more competative with older players even now.
That's about all I can think of off the top of my head and it's getting on
towards bed time anyway.
Hope you really wanted this missive.
Chip
-- Chip Charnley ac217@detroit.freenet.org ccharnle@ef0424.efhd.ford.com My opinions are my own and do not represent anyone but myself.