Re: Okympia: New Subskills

Joel Rives (jrives@tridom.uucp)
10 Jul 92 15:33:36 GMT

In article <1992Jul9.170357.19755@aero.org>, srt@aero.org (Scott "TCB" Turner) writes:
|> Why not eliminate the parent skills? Or at least hide them "in the
|> background" as Rich likes to say, creating hidden complexity? It's
|> not clear why you should have to learn, say, "Ride Horses in Combat"
|> in order to later learn "Tame Wild Beast". Other examples are
|> similar.
|>
|> Just have a big list of skills and let anyone learn whatever they want:
|>
|> 2157 Ride Horse in Combat
|> 2984 Use Sword in Combat
|> 3174 Bargain
|> [.etc.]
|>

But Scott, what you suggest plainly makes too much sense. I mean, it's too
straight forward and easy to understand. :-)

|> And while you're at it, why not eliminate skill levels in the skills
|> as well? Or at least knock them down to something like 3 levels
|> (Novice, Veteran, Expert). It seems to me that trying to accomodate
|> 10 levels stretches Olympia in some undesirable ways.

You could be right here. I do feel that some differentiation in levels
is valuable (the three that you suggest seem reasonable). No harm is
done by keeping a finer granularity and simply mapping to a coarser one.
For exmaple:

Novice = levels 1-3
Veteran = levels 4-7
Expert = levels 8-10

The finer granularity will allow the player to more acurately gauge their
unit's progression.

|> Of course, if it were up to me, I'd also eliminate omniscient
|> learning. You'd be able to learn some basic skills in any city, but
|> anything else you'd have to be taught by another unit, or RESEARCH it
|> at *considerably* more time and expense than being taught. But this
|> practically begs for NPC teachers, which may be too much to implement
|> at this time.

I agree completely.

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Joel M. Rives                           INTERNET: jrives@eng.tridom.com
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