Hosting VGAP4 games
Version 1.3, April 2006. New bits in red.
Introduction
This document is intended to help new Hosts understand how to set up VGAP4 games: how to create different types (styles) of game, how the options available at setup affect the way a game is played, and mainly - how to maximise fun. It also contains useful tips on how not to set up games!
It is assumed that you know how to play, and know where to find the online Help files on Tim's site.
If your players want to know how to play, here are some useful links to direct them to:
- The official online Help files
- A How To Play Guide for complete beginners . 6 pages; a step by step introduction with loads of helpful screnshots by Olly Harlow.
- A Simple How To Play Guide by Admiral Quixote's here. (It's a small PDF file.)
- I have also written a how To Play guide myself - here , although it is evolving into a rather higher level strategy guide since the "basics" for complete novices have been covered better by Olly and Quixote.
What is your purpose in playing?
You need to have a clear idea of what you want your game to achieve,
before
you set it up. There are different types of game, but the purpose is
normally
to have fun. Different players find different things fun. For
example,
I find working in teams is hard work (because you never think quite the
same, and co-ordination by email gets tedious after a few weeks) but I
like blowing things up a lot, especially if they belong to Mark C.
Choose a winning criterion you think will appeal to the players. You can then tailor the universe to encourage that style of play. Practise games would have lots of resources and may end on turn 30 with no clear winner. War games are best when there is a shortage of something to inspire competition. Here are some common set-up ideas:
- Winner is first to reach a particular score: there is a Victory Point system, and sometimes people use this as a score. You get an accumulating VP score each turn, with a point per planet with 1 million colonists; points are also awarded for other things, so low growth rate races have other ways to score. It's not perfect but it is OK. You can also configure a game so the score depends only on a subset of these conditions; then you can say the winner is the first player to colonise 100 planets, etc. Another option is to award points for players who control a host-configurable "King of the Hill" planet, encouraging folk to fight over control of this key territory. VP's tend to start off slowly and you think "I'll never get to 1000!", then suddenly (at maybe turn 40) they begin shooting up. One other thing worth mentioning about scoring options: the Host can choose for them to be public [revealed in the "Messages from Host" each turn] or secret. If public, people tend to gang up on the leaders! If secret, people get really paranoid! Something to be said for both approaches.
- Winner is "last man standing", acknowledged ruler by sheer brute force and cunning. This is a favourite winning criterion of many hard core war gamers', because the VP score system tends to encourage artificial playing styles. For example, in some setups you get VP's for colonising planets even if they are completely undefendable.
- Game ends on turn X, winner is the person with the most Victory Points / Kills / Planets / Fuel / some other pre agreed condition. These games are good when you do not want a game to drag on for a year.
- Team games - no treachery allowed; pre agreed alliances
- Some games are not played to "win" in a conventional sense. These may be practise games for beginners, or ones set up to test a particular strategy, or ones where the objective is to prove that you are better than a rival given identical starting races, planets, positions etc.
- Some people play less aggressively than others - they like to role play the Feds, or just build fleets. Although I consider these sheep to be like girls playing with dolls' houses, I have to admit they exist. If you are creating a game for some non-war-based purpose, perhaps a game based on trade or exploration or "winner is first to accumulate 10,000,000 natives", such folk may like differently shaped maps, abundant natives, etc. Perhaps starting with very low population levels and having to build everything from scratch would appeal more to this kind of player. As Drew Sullivan put it once: "This crowd thinks they are playing Civilisation or Sim City". I don't see any reason why a game could not be deliberately set up to cater for such folk. (Drew went on to say: "There is one game now at Drewheads [Hosting site] where no one can attack anyone else's HW's "until you tell people publicly you are ready to be attacked". Boy are those people in for a rude surprise when they play their next game!")
- Kill Thrawn! games - where the objective is for everyone to kill a notoriously good player by whatever means necessary, such as forming a huge alliance against him. NB: "Grandadmiral Thrawn" boasts a lot on the newsgroup and this annoys some folk, so approximately 6 of the best players in the world allied against him in a special game to whip his ass, I think this was early in 2002. Rather worryingly, Thrawn won.
Really clear victory conditions are always a good idea.
Game setup options
Master.exe options
The game setup tool supplied by Tim Wisseman ("Master.exe") is pretty good. Advanced hosts may want to try scripts, these are most easily written using Roger Norris' free tool ScriptZ0r . Scripts allow you to tailor universes very precisely - down to how much stuff is on the starting ships, where Natives will be found, placement of wormholes etc. Here, though, I'm assuming you're using Master.exe.
1. The biggest factor on how the game is played is the choice of players. Some are experienced, evil types who will attack on turn 5 without warning. Others prefer a more leisurely, honourable style of play. Some are complete sheep who just like building things, but that's OK if you know it and they don't get upset when someone kills them. The main problem with sheep is, they give an aggressive neighbour a free 2nd empire to exploit as he wishes (prisoners, or force them to give him their hull plans, etc).
People new to Planets 3 or 4 may be surprised
to learn how long the games are. Often up to a year in real time. A
typical
game in my experience lasts 70 turns, by which time a winner is usually
obvious, and the players agree there is no point going on for another 3
months to prove the inevitable. Games I play in usually run twice a
week
at first, then around turn 15 drop to once a week as each player's side
gets too complex to run twice in one week.
This means the players have a huge investment of time in the game - a
couple
of hours or more times 70 - and tend to get emotional about: cheats;
allies
who betray them; people who drop out of a game half way through; lazy
Hosts
and allies. You may have to keep an eye on flaring tempers from players
who feel hard done by, and remind them that it is important to keep in
mind that it is, after all, a game.
I would advise against mixing the following kinds of players: students
and working people - because their holidays are out of sync, and
everyone
has to pause whilst the students are away from college and have no
access
to email! Also, students tend to disappear quite often. I think this is
sometimes because they are thrown out of college for playing too many
games
and getting poor exam results... students are good in rapid-turnaround
games though, as they have plenty of free time to play when they
DO have
email access.
Another mix of personality types that tend to fall out with each
other, are: people who prefer to stick to alliances and play as
completely
trustworthy allies, and folk who think "well I can no longer help
my ally so it's every man for himself!". The first group of straight
players think the Machiavellian types are treacherous scum, whilst the
second group of people with a "relaxed attitude to RealPolitik"
may feel bad about it, but would be bored in a game where there was no
behind the scenes diplomacy and no uncertainty about a backstab. In
general
I think older players enjoy the paranoia of expedient villainy whilst
younger
players prefer an honourable war.
Time Zones can cause a lot of problems, because if you are trying to
run
a game twice a week and someone's email suddenly stops responding, it
is
a bit expensive to ring transatlantic to find out what the problem is.
And co-ordinating with someone 8 hours away is frustrating. So rapid
turnaround
games (1-2 days per turn) should avoid mixing e.g. Europeans and North
Americans.
I have played in games with up to 11 players. Less than half the
players
finished these big games. Many players drop out when they
feel
they have messed up their position or are bound to lose - particularly
younger / inexperienced players. This unbalances the game for the
remaining
people because the drop out's nearest neighbours can grab his Stuff.
Fortunately
Tim has coded in a decay rate for unplayed Empires, they gradually fade
away if left unplayed for several turns, but their planets remain with
their resources (natives, contraband, minerals). (If you see a power
vacuum
next to you, get in quick and loot as much as possible before anyone
else
notices!)
My advice for beginning Hosts, is to run small games of 4-8 players who
live locally and can be easily contacted in case of problems.
2. Next major choice is the type of map.A large map leads to a long slow game. A large map favours fast races (EE, Privateers, Rebels, Centaurs, Borg and others). A large map allows people to hide or run for a long time so it is difficult to achieve a complete military victory. For this reason, most people are using more compact maps with fewer stars than the standard "Echo Cluster" supplied with the game. Try this Mini-Yale map by Peter Chambers - a round map with about 250 stars, suitable for 4-8 players, spread in a circle of diameter 1100LY. It is based on a true map of the sky, Peter compiled it from some Yale University astronomical data. It adds flavour to use real stars. It might disadvantage the EE and Privateers slightly to have a galaxy where normal races can reach them quickly, but it will ensure a fast, snappy game with plenty of action. For more players, try his full size Yale map which is about 2000 LY in diameter and has ~1000 stars.
I'd like to reinforce this. Long games lead
to tedium. A few winners spend ages doing their moves, and people
who
are losing have months of boredom (often they drop out). One way to
guarantee
a fast, action-packed game is by using small maps, say 25-30 stars
per
player. This is why no one uses the Zeta Map: races with
conventional
drives would take 32 turns to cross the Zeta galaxy, so it would take
"forever"
to conquer the entire galaxy. I don't know of any games in the Zeta
galaxy
which ever finished. The only way a large map is usable is with
built-in
wormholes or jumpgates to reduce its effective size.
As Phaidros said: "I hate games [with large maps] where your
early ships play no part in the game, because first combat engagements
with neighbours start only after having reached already mid-tech to
late-tech
ship levels."
Andrew de Boer: "In the early game, when fleets
and tech levels are low, tactics and strategy play a much greater role
than in the end game when everyone has a huge economy and can afford to
simpy throw man-of-war type ships at the enemy with out any real
thoughts
about strategy."
Admiral Quixote: "my main concern would be the number of planets (not
the size of the map). Having played on maps with lots of planets (and
managing
empires of many hundreds of planets), I refuse to play in any game with
more than 500 planets. This is just a personal bias on my part,
but
I find all the fun (without the micromanagement) in games with less
planets."
There are various map making utilities around (listed on this site's main
page ), and some very tricky maps have been created for specialised
games, such as clusters linked by scripted wormholes. But that's beyond
the scope of this article. If you look at the game descriptions on the
Drewhead server, you can get an
idea of how weird things can get.
3. You might
think
that Resource levels of minerals, natives, food etc affect the aggressiveness of a game. If
everything is abundant, there is little reason to fight for a long
time.
Ha ha ha! That's what sheep say. It's a war game, remember? In
practice,
games with abundant minerals are even more aggressive, because people
progress
to high tech levels and huge fleets quickly. Warning: this is not
good.
The greatest fun is when you are struggling up the tech tree,
and
you need to make agonising choices about what to spend your hard earned
money on!!! Once everyone maxes out, the game is often won by the
person
who can devote the most time to organising their massive empires of
ships,
minefields, bases, etc. So I recommend going for a medium level of
mineral
resources of all types.
|
Many people think these 3 types of Natives are "too powerful":
Ghips, Amphibians and Amorphs. Drew Sullivan: With
enough Ghips and Amphibs I can overwhelm much bigger economies. For
starters,
any game scriptor with any wit will keep the max amount of natives on
any
one planet relatively low. Maybe there should be a statement in the
docs
"Don't have more than 20,000 (or 50,000) natives on any one planet
if you want the economies of the players to count for anything" ?
Part of the problem here is that, some
races
(especially Rebels) can target planets they spot with many natives and
scoop them up with Native Dustoff ship devices on low tech hulls before
anyone else can get them in the normal, slow way. If there are large
lumps
of natives around they will always end up with these races.
4. I recommend starting games with homeworld populations of 2-5 million or more. 500k makes for very long slow games with stagnant contraband markets. Also, with a population of 500,000 other players might never be able to catch up with the Borg, whose population grows much faster when played well; I figure 1 million plus will equalise other players with the Borg. (It also leads to contraband prices rising earlier in the game which gives more consistent results from game-to-game.)
5.Check out other peoples' opinions on races before allowing any into your game. Some, like the University Alliance, are well balanced. Some are arguably not, though the situation has got a lot better since Tim stepped in and personally tweaked 3rd party races if they appeared to be unbalanced. However, I would consider very carefully the race mix in your game, and check out the table at the start of the races page on this site for an idea about whether some races would be at an unfair advantage or disadvantage. Personally, I am deeply suspicious of the Rebels being overpowered, but it's best to get a spread of opinions (on the newsgroup, say) rather than take one person's word for it. Otherwise you just hear 'race X is overpowered because it beat me last game.'
Tip from Jon Nunn: 5 million starting colonists has been reported by multiple players to make the Rebels' Cantinas too powerful while at 1 Million they are nicely balanced.
HConfig options (in Host.exe - see screenshot)
Scoring
The things to consider are:
Do you want a Victory Point system active?
If so, do you want a King of the Hill planet to encourage fighting?
Do you want scores to be made public?
I would leave the other things at default.
Settings 1 screen
This allows you to tweak some of the maths which Host uses to
calculate
combat odds and stuff. Unless you are Tim Wisseman himself I would leave
this well alone!
Settings 2 screen
Similar to Settings 1 screen - leave alone. You may possibly
wish to set "maximum number of buoys" to zero.
Settings 3 screen
The following two options are used to make Food something to fight
over.
If you lack food stockpiles, your population will not grow at maximum
rate.
"High rate of food consumption" means "1 food per 100,000
colonists". In general, I would leave these alone, but some Hosts
tweak them -
- High Rate of Food Consumption Active Yes / No
- Set food stockpile level - default 100 turns' food for max population growth rate.
There are two important options in this screen which are often deselected by Hosts looking for a particular style of game. (They default to "selected".) These are
- Alien Hull Trading allowed
- Alien Hulls have problems with combat, scanning and repair
These were intoduced because players were beginning to trade for and depend on each others' hulls - the racial distinctiveness of each race was disappearing as everyone used the same 3 or 4 hull types to fight with, everyone had access to all devices etc. So some hosts forbid the trading of alien hull plans. The second switch makes alien hull types more or less unusable in combat. Be warned: Scavengers, Borg, Privateers, University, Rebels and Peeps can still use alien hull plans even if Trading is switched off. If you are considering changing these switches from default, check with more experienced Hosts about the likely consequences (and tell me your conclusions, because I'm not 100% sure I've been clear and accurate in my description of their consequences. I am a bit unclear about which races can do what, for example.
Other things worth adjusting:
- "Set max number of allies a player can have" - I recommend "1", but this is largely a matter of taste. If you have no limit on the number of allies, 3 or 4 people (often a close group of friends from previous encounters) will team up and steamroller the disunited players. The point here is that if the limit is too high, you can get large groups of players ganging up on loners or unpopular players or smalll groups, in a series of grossly uneven wars which are no fun for the bullied. The winning mega-alliance then gets more territory / resources and the remaining victims become successively more outnumbered. You want at least 3 evenly matched power groups to keep a game from stagnating. Side benefits: This forces players to choose their allies wisely. It also teaches people who are bad at co-operating, that they need to work at being helpful, or no-one will team up with them. ("If I can only have one ally, I want someone I can trust / someone who will not assume I will do all the work.") Some games get a lot of tension because people feel their allies are using them - you usually find lazy players wait to be told what to do by the alliance leaders, which means lots of extra work for the leaders, and frustration when the lazy ones don't send their turns in on time etc. Another reason for Hosts to forbid big alliances, is that it makes the games very complex for players in those alliances (lots of co-ordination), and whilst this is exciting for a few turns, it reduces the fun in the long term.
- "Create wormholes (stable / wandering)" - stable wormholes means a ring of wormholes at a radius of about 800LY from galactic centre. There are about 20 (10 pairs) of them, two-way, and they allow a pseudo-wraparound effect so you can more easily atack people on the other side of the galaxy through this "back door". I think wraparound is usually a good idea. Every player has to get involved - because no one can hide in a corner. It also means that anyone stuck in the middle of a galaxy is not disadvantaged (~4 borders to guard instead of Rim empires' 2 or so). Otherwise whoever moves into the middle of a galaxy, or has a homeworld there, never has time to build up, and gets overrun! (Sun Tzu would call it the "Crossing Ground".)
- "Virgos burn for first 20 turns" - I suggest you leave this on. It ensures that the Colonies of Man starting Virgo is heavily damaged and unrepairable for the start of the game. This prevents them knocking out neighbours on turn 3 with their free tech 10 ship.
Miscellaneous tips:
- The AI: This
is a crude computer player which can play a move for someone. It is
host-side. You enable it in the "Host.exe" main screen. It can take
over for someone temporarily, but it will play completely differently
to a human so personally I would not want it to play my moves! For one
thing it does not recognise alliances: it simply attacks anything
nearby. It's a good training guide if you want to practise in a solo
game.
- Registered players have a huge advantage over non-registered ones in the long term.
- People sometimes submit stale turns. So, there is a very useful feature in Host: a checkbox which you can tick before running Host. This does a dummy Host run. You can then look at Host.log (which is displayed in the text window in host.exe for convenience), to confirm there are no problems with the files before running Host for real. You can also hit the "Scan TRNs" button to confirm there are no problems with the TRN files people sent in.
- Drew Dowling did a statistical analysis of the games which run on his "Drewhead" server and found that the length of games tends to vary with the number of players. This holds true up to 11 players, after that there's no correlation.
- Clear winning conditions like VP's incentivise people to band together against the leader. Without clear winning conditions, games can stagnate.
A couple of tips from Al Evans:
- I think one needs to do the scrut work and run several iterations of the game, once the script or settings are decided on. It is bad to find major flaws after fifteen turns. For unusual setups, I agree, especially with scripted games or ones with very weird maps. Some races can be unexpectedly crippled by e.g. the use of large maps. - PH
- If possible some matching of skill level amongst players is really a good idea. A bunch of newbies vs. a couple of sharks is no fun for anybody.
Dropouts
- A big problem for Hosts (and players) in games is players who leave before the end of a game. This used to lead to various problems:
- Sometimes people left games, but their races continued to attack enemies with Spy attacks, which is irritating to the remaining players if that guy was effectively "defeated".
- It is unfair to players on one side of a galaxy when someone drops out on the far side, and only players on the far side benefit from a bonanza of undefended planets, free prisoners and so on.
- So what happens now is: if a player misses 10 turns in a row, they start to die:
- All races become an enemy and all data sharing is turned off.
- They stop Spying, and
accumulating mana.
- Bases do not grow and
their remaining
population dies
off at 10% per turn. (So they take an infinite time to completely die
off.)
- All ships take 10%
damage. (Tends to result in a massive destruction of the abandoned
fleet on the 20th missed turn)
- This is hard-coded into Host.exe as a last-ditch kill-off. However, it is usually preferable to find a replacement player before this happens. I have seen experienced players take over an abandoned race and win, though this is usually difficult. Hosts should count on, say, 20% of inexperienced players dropping out in a game. I have seen dropout rates of 60% when there was a mix of new players and experienced cut-throats, which demoralised the newbies. Therefore, ask players not to use password-protection of their RST files. (Passwords can be placed on files, under Options in the player client planets4.exe). If they feel they must use passwords, make sure they deposit the password with a trusted 3rd party (like an ally) whom you can ask for it if they disappear.
- Recently (early 2006) Tim introduced a new option - the AI. This computer player can be set, by the Host, to take over a vacated player slot. It will automatically switch off all alliances and expand aggressively into the area around it. It's not too good, but it's way better than nothing. It will at least ensure neighbours have to work to pacify that border. To switch it on, open Host.exe, click on the 'Players' button, select a player, then tick the box labelled 'AI Program ON'
- The best way to avoid a fairly high dropout rate at the end of a game, is if the players are a tight knit group of friends who know each other well. This is because the endgame can be slow (ie one move a week by email is dull if you are losing) and it can take take hours to do your turn if you have a big, spread out empire (if you are winning). It is a good idea to impose strict time limits on doing a move, to encourage perfectionists to get their move in - after all, real life generals don't have time to organise every last detail; the players with big empires will begin to make mistakes, giving the losers a good reason to carry on. Smaller maps, about 50 stars per player or less, accelerates the game and encourages conflict. Another trick to speed up the gameplay is to position players in a fairly tight ring round the galactic centre. This however is not fair to some races which are vulnerable in the early stages, so I used to recommend about 300 - 350 LY between homeworlds. These days I tend nearer to the extreme camp who argue the distance should be 100LY! (That's a bit too close though.)
Basics of running a game (but you probably know this bit!)
- Download the beta package from www.planets4.com. This is often slightly out of date but contains all the files you need.
- Put the package in its own folder
- unzip it
- Install it (this Registers the program's DLL's etc)
- Download the latest version of Host and unzip it to
overwrite
some of the files with the very latest ones.
- Set up a universe with Master.exe - simplest way is to accept all the default settings. You can set up simultaneous games in up to 12 slots.
- Finish the master run. You only need to run master once.
- Now execute the 'host'
- Send RST (Result) files to players.
- Once they return their TRN files, run Host and send the next turn's RST files out. Repeat until game ends.
Running Host for the first time:
The Beta files keep getting updated every couple of weeks. And
people
sometimes submit stale turns. So, Tim has added a very useful feature
to
Host.exe in Upgrade 10: a checkbox which you can tick before running
Host.
This does a dummy Host run. You can then look at Host.log
(which is displayed in the text window in host.exe for convenience), to
confirm there are no problems with the files before running Host for
real.
You can also hit the "Scan TRNs" button
to confirm there are no problems with the TRN files people sent in
The advantages of using a Robo-Host:
Ie Drewheads, etc (see Tim's website, the
Links
section, for a complete list):
- It's much easier to run. I would never attempt to run a big game (10+ players) manually. The administration, email messages to the Host etc get very time consuming. I think all of the huge 30-player games are done by Robo-Hosts. And as Al Evans pointed out, replacement players are much easier to recruit and replace given the large user base these sites already have.
- No arguments about schedules. If someone is late, the Host.exe program runs. No one blames the guy who set the game up.
- If the Host is playing in his own game, people don't complain about cheating.
- Players can look at the online status reports and see who's late with their turn. Instead of ringing you up all the time and saying "why haven't we run yet?"
- The administrator of the site can re run turns for you if e.g. someone is hit by a major bug and demands a rerun - a messy job.
- If you are handling the game locally, keep in mind you are
committing
for months of being reliable, keeping system, email etc. working and on
schedule.
In short, having used these sites, I would now always use
them
for a real game. They're that good. I still run test games on my own PC
- it is easier for a quick 2 player game.
A Hosting website needs to know what HConfig options you want, and you
need to send them the map you want to use (and script, if any). They'll
set everything up for you.
How to recover from Host errors, file corruption etc
Sometimes you'll run Host and then realise there's a problem (like, you forgot to include player 3's TRN file). VGAP4 automatically saves a backup of its vital files for you so you can go back up to 5 turns!
The vital file in which Host stores the game data is the .yig file. (It needs no other files, even maps etc, a nice change from Version 3.) The TRN files are stored a .tn1, .tn2, tn3, - these are zipped archives of everyone's TRN files for the last move (.tn1) to 5 moves ago (.tn5).
So if there's a problem with your new TRNs, you can recover the previous move by:
renaming the \univ directory
create a new \univ directory and copy in the .tn1 and .yg1 files
In this new \univ directory, unzip the old TRN files from .tn1, and
rename
.yg1 as .yig.
Re-run Host after correcting whatever the error was before (missing
Player07.TRN
file, new version of Host.exe released or whatever).
If you back up more than one turn, the players
will
find that the old turns are NOT overwriting the info from the earlier,
but higher numbered turns. The solution is: they will need to clear the
game slot of the old data.
Dealing with cheats
How people can really cheat: I have known 1 or 2 ways that people managed to do things which were theoretically impossible, and I'm not going to say how, but Tim (and others) did some work to block those techniques in Host and the cheating appeared to stop. However, if you hear of any cheating using a utility or something, tell Tim immediately so he can stop it occurring in Host.exe .
The usual cheat these days is people playing two races when they're only meant to be playing one. It's rare - I hear accusations of it about once a year. Here is a report from someone whose name I think I'll withold:
"Thought you might like to know, a game at [a Hosting site] that I was in last year [2005] had at least two players that cheated by playing multiple races. I know this because one of them was supposedly my ally, and then turned on me with the other race he was playing while using my "allied" race to get all of the information he needed. I discovered this when he hit one of my cloaked Darkwings in midspace with multiple hyperjumping fleets from multiple locations. When I emailed him and said that had to be more than luck he admitted to playing two races, then made a non-aggression pact with me. He told me that at least one other player in the game was also playing multiple races. I told him I thought that was cheating but he said it isn't specifically prohibited in the game setup, so he didn't see a problem. In the end we were both crushed by an alliance that I know was legit."
You could spot stupid cheaters by looking at Reg codes. Every player should have a different Reg code. You can see them in the host.log file, or, if you are playing, look at the Races screen. It's also viewable in Host.exe under 'Players', it shows the registration and the race number.
However a sufficiently determined cheater could buy 2 Reg codes and use 2 different PC's. Tim might be able to tell you if someone had bought a clutch of Reg codes... but then I did, because it was simpler to get a batch for me and my local friends with one cheque. So it might be perfectly innocent. Note also that I said I hear accusations once a year. Not all are proven. I recall one where the accused let a third party "shadow" his turns, seeing what he was doing. He was simply much, much better than the other players, who assumed he was cheating!
Other things to note from the above report is: there were at least two people cheating. Players tend to join games in little groups of 2-4 people who know each other and have a similar attitude to game style. If you have one cheater, you may have others. Note also that they argued they were not cheating because it was not explicitly forbidden. Make sure you state that playing multiple races is forbidden.
If you are convinced that someone really is cheating, don't react immediately. There's too much risk of slandering someone if you make a mistake. Talk to other hosts (contact me if you want), and discuss what a measured, mature response would be. Other hosts may be able to suggest ways of gathering evidence, or act as stalking horses to entrap cheaters. The only thing that will happen if you react instantly on such a serious matter is you'll regret it later - if only because the game could fall apart for the other players.
Rule loopholes: There are loads of them. Some are there on purpose, others are simply clever combinations of racial powers no one else has spotted. This isn't cheating, but if you think it is getting out of hand you can always mention it on the newsgroup to discuss game balance; Tim will act if it's really got out of hand. Note that we have had about 200 Host revisions - this is a large reason why! An example of one right now is, someone's noticed that they can sell contraband to their Borg ally (which yields double the cash invested) with no negative happiness / crime effects on the Borg... brilliant!
This page was written
by Paul Honigmann with help from Al Evans and Phaidros.
When
this document was written, Host 195 had just been released. There may
be
new options I have not covered since then.
