Apolyton Beyond the Sword Pitboss Team Democracy Game

[RobWorham]

I have been approached by the site admins at Apolyton to start laying the foundations for a BtS Pitboss Team Democracy Game. The game will not get underway until the final patch for Beyond the Sword comes out ( last estimate I heard was Q1 2008 ), but I thought it best to get as much of the infrastructure in place beforehand, so things can progress as quickly as possible once the final patch is released.

Beta has very generously stepped forward to be host this pitboss democracy game, and Snoopy369 has agreed to be emergency host should Beta be unavailable for any reason. With some technical assistance I will be available as a third place backup should the proverbial really hit the fan......

Now, it seems to me, the next step is finding a suitable number of teams, and getting enough active participants for each team so the burden of running a team doesn't fall on the shoulders of one individual all the time. To this end, I have already sent out a number of private messages to various members of the Poly community, and I now turn to the public forums to continue the search for enthusiastic participants.

Would you like to be a 'team leader' and set about forming a team? Failing that, would you be interested in participating as a team player for a team that someone else sets up? If so could you please either post your interest below, or respond via email or PM and I'll add your name to the appropriate list.

I hope to see you in what promises to be a thoroughly enjoyable democracy game experience.........

[Qwack]

I may be interested, however is there any thread where I can see the details of how exactly this game will work?

[RobWorham]

At this stage we are just trying to see what the interest levels are for this type of game so we haven't opened a public forum for this particular game yet. However, responses have been good so far, and it looks like we will be opening a forum up at Apolyton this coming weekend to discuss the game in more detail.
In the meantime I can provide you with a very brief description of the Team Democracy Game experience......

A team democracy game is a game played by an entire community as an multiplayer game with the community splitting up into teams, with each team controlling one civ.
Each team has a team leader/leaders who forms the team and organizes its progress in private forums viewable only by their team members. How they organise themselves is pretty much up to them. That's the cool thing about the team games, each team can decide how things work for their team. Each team basically has to play the turn in a timley manner, other than that everything is up to the team to decide. Each different team has a different approach, some go for serious political structures and elections and rotations and so forth whereas others have a more culture based concensus of opinon approach. You also get weird teams who have dictatorships or people ruling over different cities and area and other such stuff.
Most commonly though you'll get one or more leader types and others fitting into roles of domestic affairs, foreign affairs, military guys and a hell of alot more....
Discussions are held via threads and/or live chats to decide what to do and when. Once enough instructions have been gathered, the turn is played in the regular multiplayer fashion and, once all teams have played, the next turn is generated. There's often a fair amount of roleplaying involved, though it's not required to participate.

I hope this helps explain things a bit, I will keep providing updates here as things progress so you can stay in the loop.....

[Qwack]

Sounds pretty interesting and with the team format not too time consuming either.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

I really like the idea of democracy games; in fact I'm member of Epsilon team of the multi-team democracy game at CFC. It *is* a lot of fun in the beginning, but we've made the experience that participation levels drop dramatically over time. We're in the Rifle age by now, and most teams have difficulties to play in a timely fashion already. We're the most active team, and yet even we had to abandon our system of having different positions like minister of foreign affairs etc., and some teams are lucky to have one player left who could play the save...

But that was a vanilla game started several patches ago, so maybe a BtS game with the final patch survives a bit longer. So yeah, I may be interested to participate.

-Kylearan

[TheArchduke]

I could warm up as well, if we get a RealmsBeyond team together.

[RobWorham]

Hi,

I'm member of Epsilon team of the multi-team democracy game at CFC. It *is* a lot of fun in the beginning, but we've made the experience that participation levels drop dramatically over time. We're in the Rifle age by now, and most teams have difficulties to play in a timely fashion already.

But that was a vanilla game started several patches ago, so maybe a BtS game with the final patch survives a bit longer. So yeah, I may be interested to participate.

-Kylearan

Is that a PBEM team democracy game?? Has the game suffered through long delays with the save being held up?? As we are going for Pitboss this will not be the case.

But, in essence, I agree. The trick is to get teams with a good handful of people in each who are known to go the distance in these games.......

[RobWorham]

I could warm up as well, if we get a RealmsBeyond team together.

[sunrise089]

Could someone explain the distinction between PBEM and Pitboss demogames?

[Qwack]

I believe the main difference is in PBEM each player takes his/her turns in true turn-based fashion. Where after a player plays from the savegame, he emails the save file to the next player and it continues going in the same format until everyone plays.

Pitboss however is run on a dedicated server where players can play their turns simultaneously, and if you dont play your turn in the designated amount of time (usually like 24 hours), the AI will play the turns for you.