by Junts on 13 Feb 2010, 00:26
I might even roll another pc someday if we ever did some of these:
Fix the PR spamming by removing easy things that benefit PR. Make the PR gain from treaties come from actually fulfilling their terms to the end, and give them a sizable minimum length. Increase the PR benefits for releasing captured officers and other generally praiseworthy RP deeds. This will slow the growth of PR further (which is ok, cause its usually a very valuable stat) and remove the methods used to get 'cheap' PR. That way the stat can be left very impactful.
Re-emphasize the RPG aspects of the game. SimRTK used to play like an RPG version of the novel, not of RTKX. If you could think of it, and it was realistic, there might just be a way to pull it off. I was a GM in the v1-2-3 era, and there are numerous instances in those games of rulers or officers coming up with ideas for stuff to do in battle, asking if they could do them, and rules being designed on the spot to permit them to do them (for example, you can see a battle in the v1 archives in which one ruler asked Rob "Is there a way I can disguise my CiC?" .. Rob created an advisor ploy for it, forwarded me the information, and allowed the ruler to attempt the ploy. He succeeded, and the ploy was then immediately entered into the rules. It wasn't announced until then, so that ruler got the full benefit of his ingeniousness (it won him the battle). While that's a fairly extreme example, that kind of stuff drastically rewards creative players and increases vermisilitude. SimRTK is greatest when characters are engaging in situations like Cao Cao escaping Pu Yang and Pang Tong convincing him to chain the ships before Chi Bi. Instead of simply having one ploy version of every major book trick, it's much better to also reward players for creating their own. It can be difficult to balance on the fly, but its not really that difficult: those kind of gimmicks are usually only good once, and the hard-included gimmicks (like the chain ships advisor plot that existed forever) were almost never useful because players were always prepared for their possibility due to their presence in the rules.
The game is more fun when it isn't just about who can best understand a system.
Instead of removing historical NPCs, lower player starting statistics. The poor npcs will still be poor. the mid-range ones will be a little worse, and the best ones will be better. Then drastically increase the rate of statistic improvement. This will mean that people who stick to and sustain their characters will be able to reach higher statistic levels and gain a considerable amount of points, instead of just 3-4 over the course of a game. Having the best genearls start at 83 lead and end at 95 instead of starting at 93 and ending at 96 will encourage players to stick to their characters and do all they can to keep them alive: it might even allow you to remove the death penalty (though i think its better to keep the penalty and instead toughen the costs to rulers for execution, so they generally pay hefty PR costs for doing so unless the player in question is really asking for it). Keeping your character alive for multiple years should be something that's rewarded, and it will encourage 'rational' player behavior (eg, players will have a much more legitimate disincentive to just go down to the death with a kingdom and think about switching allegiences, or more carefully picking rulers who are actually doing well vs those who are not, etc). IMO, the RP nature of the game suffers due to players having a lot less vested interest in the cost of going down with the ship and just making another character. the penalties for doing so are minute, and it leads to irrational character behavior. The generals who did choose death rather than surrender or flight are praised in the novel and the history because they were rare. In Simrtk, that behavior isn't rare: its standard. Players need more reason to think about their own self-interest. It creates more rp, politics, and less reliable ties and alliances, which are very good for the game. The game is best when its about politics and officer loyalty as well as just being about the military system.
However well the game simulates the military system, it will get repetetive because we've all played many an RTK based strategy game, and while the roles of different tactics and the combat systems may change between simrtk and RTK5 and RTK11, it is rare that the basic fundamentals of strategy change: the games are all seeking to simulate the historical military realities, and therefore players will always know that Yizhou provides a smaller and less rich base that is easily defended, that He Bei requires fast solidification but is incredibly rich and populous, that the two capitals are incredibly easy to defend, and that Jingzhou is the Road to Everywhere. A knowledgable player knows just from looking at the map a lot of what people's objectives should be. The thing that causes the game to have more variability and unpredictability is officer behavior and politics. These facets, consequently, should recieve more emphasis and be more heavily incentivized.
IMO, these sort of things are not all things that players or even staffers would necessarily look at and say 'oh, I'd LOVE to do that', but improving a game experience doesn't actually always involve what people think they want; frequently, something that is a bit more challenging or difficult to master is better. A game in which officer loyalty and politics are as important to ruler success as their millitary performance is not something most prospective rulers would welcome: the military stuff is by far easier to understand, master and control (since it is a mathematical system), whereas politics and officer behavior fall under the realm of human inconstance. Nonetheless, putting rulers - both strong and weak - in the position where they must spend more time on that makes a stronger game. It challenges rulers across all spectrums, and it makes even a larger kingdom a more tenuous situation, since the ruler must be juggling power between many more officers, and must actually invest it (via governorships and commander in chief roles, etc) in more players than he is likely to be able to know personally and befriend OOC. Every ruler will have those ties to some officers, but after the 3-4 city stage, it becomes impractical to come up with enough friends to fill those roles without having to trust people.
SimRTK isn't interesting to me as a gigantic multiplayer KOEI game. It was, however, fascinating to me as a monstrous sandbox RPG where I was free to do (and did) creative things, and defeat foes by being more innovative than they.
The extraordinarily ancient Liu Cao of ages past.
<Elysia> I am the simRTK MILF
).
), but I second everything Carpevis said, he made some great suggestions there!
