Designing a persistent online strategy game - Department of ...

2 Chapter 1. Introduction
players wait. When the first player is done, the next player performs his/her
actions. One turn is over when all players have performed their actions. Soccer is
for example a real-time game while chess is turn-based.
Gameplay: Gameplay is defined by the rules and components of a game as well as how
players interact with them. There are for example different rules and components
for a racing game and a roleplaying game. Because of this the games are also
played in different ways, giving the games different gameplay.
1.2 Background
Strategy games have been around since the early board games (such as chess) and the
computer strategy games today still hold to the same basic principles. The player is
supposed to make decisions to gain a strategic advantage and in the end beat his/her
opponent. Common parts of computer strategy games are the gathering of resources,
building of armies and the manoeuvring of these armies (although there are games that
contain other or not all of these aspects). There are quite a few different approaches to
strategy game. The most basic difference is perhaps the one between turn-based games
and real-time games. Turn based games have a slower pace and thus allow the player
to think through his/her actions more thoroughly than real-time games.
Since a turn-based game gets quite troublesome if a lot of players were to play it (if
there are 100 players and each player has to wait for all the other players to make
their decisions before he/she can play his/her turn the wait would be unbearable) most
online games are played in real-time. Fast paced real-time action is not desirable in a
persistent online strategy game on a grand scale, mainly because too much would have
time to happen during the time a player is logged out (i.e. a player that has a mighty
empire might be logged off for a couple of hours and when he/she returns nothing is
left). Because of this there are several hybrids of real-time and turn-based approaches
in persistent online strategy games. One way is simply to have a slow moving real-time
game where every action takes a lot of time. Another is to give the player a limited
amount of “actions” for a given time frame.
Non-persistent strategy games are usually played on a map where positions have different
strategical importance. To include a map in a persistant strategy game raises some
issues. Fixed positions make balancing difficult since all players should have equal (or
at least similar) opportunities in the beginning of the game. All positions in the game
cannot however be exactly equal since it would take away the strategic aspect of the
positions. A player’s neighbour would also most likely be his/her first opponent and
this can make the challenge uneven for different players (i.e. a new player who starts
the game next to a very aggressive player will have a different experience than a player
starting next to a peaceful player). There is also an issue of the risk of players being
completely defeated. If a player owns a fixed position on a map, there is no obvious
logical reason for why this position cannot be conquered. These problems can affect the
user experience. In present games there are mainly two ways of handling this. One way
is to have the players own abstract land and losing battles thus results in the player
loosing a certain percentage of his/her land. This is very common in non-graphical
games. A similar solution is to allow positions for cities, villages etc., but giving the
position no strategical importance. The other way is to separate battles from the rest