(February 20th, 2014, 08:06)Catwalk Wrote: I'm up for coming up with another one in maybe a month or so, and I'm thinking something to do with either Final War or Espionage. Possibly both.
Yay! I'm hoping to hold another Imperium in between as well, but that will depend on whether anyone else offers a map (possibly with a variant) or what my health permits if they don't.
(February 20th, 2014, 10:34)Catwalk Wrote: Lastly, how was the overall difficulty level for this one? It looks like we had about a 50% victory rate among experienced players (RefSteel would most likely win and I have a slight chance of winning) which is pretty much what I was aiming for. If I host another one I might put up a newbie version and a veteran version, if there's a demand for that.
With the possible exception of Imperium 37 (maybe my favorite ever) in which everyone played on the same map, but the option was available to ignore a tough variant, I don't think my few attempts to offer two games for the same Imperium went very well. This might just be poor implementation on my part (I do think I got it more nearly right for Imperium 37, after all) but I think in general it's best for everyone to play the same game. If I end up creating Imperium 41 myself, I'll probably make it a gentler game, with either a scoring system or something quirky for veterans to play around with, before your next extreme game ... but we'll see.
As for overall difficulty, I don't really to target a victory probability/percentage. You can get 50% by flipping a coin, and I don't think that's the goal really. I think it's best to come up with a game that'll be fun an interesting to play, and even if 100% of the players win, or 100% lose, or something in between, if everyone has a good time with it and there's some basis for comparison between games, you've hit the mark. And in spite of my after-the-fact realizaitons about things like events and our disagreements about early war, I think you did a great job with this game!
As for early war, also: I think my health may be coloring my picture of that too. If you read some of my old Imperium reports, you'll find my griping about warp 1 transports isn't consistent with my historical game play: In Imperium 13, for instance, I recall coordinating a massive multi-source invasion at significant range with Warp-1 transports many of which were passing through a nebula! If I had the patience to do that sort of thing now, I might well have considered early war in my playthrough, and even profited from it. The trouble with pain is that it can make that kind of patience - and accurately double-checking calculations, as I learn to my cost with respect to the Guardian - difficult to achieve. So take my opinions on all this stuff with a grain of salt; I could be wrong about a lot of it.
Even more than usual, I mean.
