> (I think SWEAR is actually reasonable,
Swear isn't. The problem here is that NPs are supposed to be different
from gold -- and a limiting factor for successful players. If you can
swear one noble per turn, then players with lots of gold will be able
to buy plenty of nobles from new players or poor players. At one noble
per turn, if it's oath-1, then you can buy NP's 16 times faster than
you get them naturally. Even if you could only swear once per
game-year, that's twice as many NP's as you earn naturally.
> * bribery
> Expensive and chancy.
Yes, although it's still possible to attempt to buy nobles by having
the seller form a contract noble, and have the buyer try to bribe him.
Since the chance of the noble becoming unsworn is pretty small, and
you can capture them to prevent them from escaping, this works
uncomfortably well at the moment, surverting the design purpose of
NPs.
Bribing an oath noble is cheap but improbable. That's fine with me. If
you are willing to spend an average of 750 gold and 50 game-weeks of
labor for 2 NPs, have at it.
> Last I heard, though, there was no restocking
> of creatures - once all the initial captives are rescued, there
> won't be any more.
I don't know if anyone KNOWs that. Rich hasn't said anything that I
know of. Wandering monsters weren't even added in the alpha-test until
midway, and perhaps the restock rate was small enough that nobody noticed.
> Who wasn't in the playtest, so I may be missing something, but you
> seem to be forecasting a problem in Oly II based on problems in Oly I
> most of which were fixed!
Er, the alphatest showed overly-large noble growth for a couple of
rich players. I believe they got most of them by bribing unsworn
nobles left over from players who dropped out, back before Rich
started removing such nobles. So yes, this particular hole is
definately closed, but NP growth in general is an issue that is very
important, since that's the brake on growth that prevents the game
from becoming a runaway like Atlantis.
-- g