Events / War of the Cities
When:September 11th, 2008 @ 12:00am TO September 21st, 2008 @ 12:00am
Where:
the City
the World
Activity:
Le Colonial
Enrollment
2/unlimited
Organizer:
Peter Garnett
Description:
War of the Cities:
A feature proposal for the era to follow Everyday Life.
Details below. Some (though not all) of this is already implemented.
Invariants:
1) Each character may designate for themselves a home location.
2) Each praxis may designate for itself a completion location.
3) Each team may designate itself a Local Team by choosing a home city.
Consequences:
1) When a praxis is posted with a completion location, territory proportional to the point value of the praxis is "claimed" by that completion.
2) That claim is then evenly, uniformly divided among the Local Teams of the players involved. For instance, a task completion involving only members of LA0 would give LA0 one claim to the praxis's territory. A task completion in which one player is a member of both LA0 and SF0 (such as myself), or a task completion involving collaboration between both SF0 and LA0 members, would give LA0 and SF0 each 0.5 of a claim to the praxis's territory.
3) Team membership shall be determined at time of submission of the praxis. Change of team later shall have no effect on claims to territory.
4) Each Local Team automatically has 1 claim to the territory within its home city's limits (or a rough, spherical estimate of the city's limits, if the former is too hard to implement).
5) Regardless of the normal square footage of a praxis's territory, any completion of the High Score Task shall have as its territory the whole of San Francisco. Any other City which proposes a High Score Task for itself agrees to the same stipulation.
Conflict:
1) Any point on the map is said to be controlled by a Local Team if its claims to that point outnumber the claims of any other Local Team. For instance, if a particular point were to have three claims from CG0 and two claims from SF0, it would be controlled by CG0. This might occur if:
a) CG0 had completed three tasks there and SF0 two
b) CG0 and SF0 had completed four joint tasks there and the point was within Chicago's city limits
c) etc.
2) Ties go to nobody. That is to say, any point at which the highest number of claims is held by more than one local team (such as CG0 completing a task within an abandoned area of San Francisco) is said to be uncontrolled.
3) Properties of controlled territory:
a) It is considered enemy territory by other teams for the purposes of seeking refuge in it.
b) Any players whose home location is within a controlled territory are automatically members of the controlling Local Team. This means that if they are captured by a hostile team, they cannot themselves repel the invasion because their praxis while controlled also counts for the occupying team. Thus, other Local Team members must task in the area to rescue them.
4) There shall be a high-level unaligned task that reads: "Gain control of another team's home city."
Definitions:
Local Team - a team with a designated home city.
Territory - land upon which Praxis occurs.
Claim - a score which each Local Team holds for any given Territory.
Controlled - used to describe Territory to which a Local Team has the plurality of Claim.
Feel free to discuss. When we have agreed to the form of these rules, a petition shall be sent to SSI that they might be implemented in eras to come.
Possible changes, as suggested in SkypeChat:
- For tasks such as this one, or completions such as this one, it may be necessary to declare more than one location at which the task was completed. So, perhaps it is valuable to let each collaborator specify where they tasked, and then divide up claim strength accordingly. For instance, three SF0 players would each get 1/3 claim at their location, and one SF0 and one LA0 player collaborating would each get .25 SF0 and .25 LA0 at their location.
- Certain players have objected to the idea of a task completed in a city being a task for a different city, as any tasking in, say, Minneapolis is an MN0 task by virtue of the location itself. I can't really argue about this - it is a philosophical question of what it means for a task to be for a city - but in any case it's probably valuable for a particular completion to be able to opt out of the system entirely and use Local Teams the "old way".
Responses
2 Attending
Terms
(none yet)Comments
You asked SSI for a feature, I've proposed an implementation.
If you'd rather not agree to this ruleset, I'm fine with that. I'll submit it anyway, knowing that the fact that you did not agree to it precludes your interdiction of the rules due to the above objection.
That said, if you want to make offhand criticisms (which might surreptitiously sneak into the proposal), I'm okay with that too.
Here are my two main thoughts. First of all, I want people to use this awesome territory marking system more. That means there needs to be some incentive to do so. Perhaps simple statistics and looking at a fun map is enough. Maybe we do need to invoke city-competition. I like the one-upmanship implied by the "combat" system, but the phrasing may need reworking to fit the SF0 atmosphere, which SSI has put a lot of thought into cultivating. That the best Journey players have taken up travelling to other cities inspires me, and encourages the notion of senators, ambassadors, and almost olympian celebration through competition. Then again, MIT and Caltech do plenty fine just trying to compete for the sake of it.
Second, with lots of circles, you get overlap. I want to encourage overlap, which brings players together, and highlights past tasks. Picking locations can become an ever more important part of tasking, particularly with travel, which there has been a lot of lately. If we go through the trouble of calculating areas of overlap of these circles however (which is non-trivial from a computing perspective, or even a purely mathematical one), there needs to be some added function or use for this effort.
The combat system is a simple approach -- whoever has the most circles overlapping an area "claims" that area for their city, and players in that zone are now members of both cities. Call it capturing for competition, call it ambassadorial appointment to foster the gesture as a positive thing that people might wish upon themselves. I am unsure which is better.
If you follow either, here are my suggestions for implementing the maths, to keep the complex scenarios fair (as Garnett addresses). Suppose Lincoln, Tac, Loki, Doktor Harmon, and The Architect all collaborated on some task. If they like, they should each be able to designate a location that they tasked at, which will all be marked on the map.
Say the task has earned 300 points.
Lincoln did his part of the task at home LAØ.
Doktor Harmon didn't make a place on the map, because that'll happen sometimes.
Loki and Tac did their parts at the same place in CGØ.
The Architect did his part in a field in Nebraska, for some reason. Just bear with me.
I suggest each point chosen by a player have a circle sized to the full 300 points. However, the "strength" of each circle is weaker because of the collaboration. Here is how:
Three cities are represented (I assume), SFØ, CGØ, and LAØ. Each city gets an even share of the sway. 1/4, 1/4, 1/4, 1/4. LA has two collaborators, who must share amongst themselves the bounty afforded to LAØ, so they each contribute 1/8th of a task's worth of claim strength. So here is what happens.
In LA, Lincoln's circle is 300 points big and 1/3 strong. That little area in LA is now claimed by LA at 1.125 times, meaning even a full task by an MNØ player nearby, which would usually counteract the default 1.0 LA claim over home turf, would not overpower the 1.125 claim Lincoln had set up in that circle. That would be useful for defending some key strategic location, like maybe a Team HQ, or another player's home, if we go that direction.
I don't know what to do with Dok's claim. Maybe it just defaults to cover his home base. Maybe we allocate a some out-of-the-way region on google maps, like Microsoft headquarters, and all unmarked tasks are placed randomly over that area, making a funny battle-ground that avoids this stuff going to waste when it could be entertaining. If we ask SSI to do this, it better promote tasking and entertainment in my opinion.
Loki and Tac picked the same location, in CGØ for their contribution. Loki lays down a circle with a 0.25 claim for SFØ, and Tac of 0.125 for LAØ in the same exact place. Neither of these cities overtake the CGØ home-turf default, but with more tasking it might just make the difference.
The Architect lays claim to a 300-point sized circle of empty field, with CGØ the only claimant at 0.25 unit-tasks of strength. This is likely a valid strategy to grow your City-Zeroes territory quickly, particularly if mutliple collaborators for the same city all lay down size-300 circles at different places with the same task. This, however, exposes these areas to much easier recapture by another team, which to me promotes even more travel and tasks that play off of one another. Doing another 300 point task in the middle of a field may not be easy.
Now, for some house-keeping questions it would need to be decided if there was a required margin necessary to claim territory, as between the top claimant and the next strongest claim, or do some heavily contested areas remain neutral until there is a clear victor. A full point? Do you need to have a section that is 1.0 in strength before it is claimed at all (meaning The Architect's field claim is not enough to win that territory for CGØ?) or only when there are two competing claims within 1.0 of each other (so Loki and Tac are both successful in reverting their claimed section from CGØ territory to neutral status?)
For players who have multiple affiliations, I would propose just splitting their personal claim yet again between the cities. If Tac were playing for both LAØ and AUØ say, then his circle would be for 1/16th of a claim for LAØ, and another 1/16th for AUØ. All of these fiddly little numbers likely don't matter, but they add up to the same even amounts as if all the players picked the same location, which is presumably the norm for most praxes with collaborators. Moreover though, if Tac were later captured by CGØ, only his contribution to the divided collaboration would be subverted towards the CGØ score, and his other collaborators would still hold a majority of the claim from that praxis for LAØ.
I hope I have not confused the issue, but instead can serve as a benchmark from which to build upon, or tear down this idea at a nuts and bolts level.
Some thoughts.
1) The math no longer adds up when you add multiple cities per player - you changed Tac to be 1/16th LA0 and 1/16th AU0, meaning that AU0 does not have the "equal share" mentioned in your first part (nor does LA0). Was this intentional, in order to avoid a player from having an unbalanced point allocation from multiple teams? Which is more important: claim per team per praxis, or claim per player per praxis?
2) If a person does not pin a location for their claim, it should be evenly distributed among the other locations. This also means that if the task takes place in only one location, only one pin is necessary.
3) Control of a player's home location should never affect the territory of previously submitted praxes. To do so can cause annoying chain reactions, where a single player switching sides will take down a city.
I see nothing wrong with competing against other cities to be the highest scoring city in the game, but I'd rather do it in a fun peaceful way, being a pacifist. Seeing CGØ at the top of the charts makes me want to task more for LAØ, which is good for everybody.
But when I go to Austin, I will task under their flag, and when I go to Chicago, CGØ will get the points for my tasking. I think it is impossible to complete an LAØ task on MNØ soil. If I'm in their territory, I task under their flag.
In the case of collaborations, I would like all cities that collaborated to get full credit for the task. In the case of the Diluted Flash Mob for example, I would like to see all cities getting credit for the task. SFØ, NYØ, NFØ, TXØ, BRCØ, and UKØ. Even though there were many players in San Francisco, I think it only gets counted once. Since there were a few dance patches in that city, each location should be marked on the map (the ability to mark multiple locations on a map for a praxis would be very very helpful and would see it used more often). But all of the division of points and fractions and whatnot is just way too complicated for too little purpose or gain. At least in my mind.
I agree with you Lincoln. The math, while doable, is not transparent. We want people to have ownership of the process, and not understanding it and how it is "balanced" will turn people off. One alternative is just that every circle counts as 1, and lots of collaborators means lots of territory on the map, straight up.
As to the city flags, I'm happy just letting people mark territory. My only concern is still in the overlaps -- how do you display them nicely, and make them matter, if not by giving one color of circle priority? If we don't use it at all, we are asking for just multiple points per praxis mapping, and some way to keep track of which areas on the map are owned by which city zero. Is that enough?
I'm with Lincoln on this one. The competition between cities is the most complex and interesting when it is undefined - the structure that exists does not preclude collaboration, and in fact makes the collaboration/competition distinction awesomely nebulous.
Thanks Peter, though, for giving your best toward providing a workable mechanic for intercity competition. If you had not described it such, I would not have been able to understand that it is not what I had in mind.
Don't dabble in pacifism too often, or you might just get bowled over.
Whatever the mechanics, some of us are already rallying under the banners of the SF0 Foreign Legion to resist CG0's threat of invasion.
Apply for position in the SF0 Foreign Legion today!
I refuse to play any game where both combatants agree upon a set of rules.