I have been working on a semi-cooperative space empire 4x type game for some time now. A central element I want in the game is a political module where players would need to work together (an interstellar Senate) for the best of the entire group while still having their own individual goals. To get more of a concrete idea of what I envision, please see these posts:
http://www.bgdf.com/forum/game-creation/design-theory/ideas-cooperative-...
http://www.bgdf.com/forum/game-creation/mechanics/sci-fi-4x-cooperative-...
After play testing the game, it became apparent that there were a couple of problems with it:
1) The core engagement (part of the game that appealed to my play tester) was not the Senate phase but the part of the game involved with exploring, colonizing and so on.
2) The open nature of the Senate phase where players could offer proposals did not work. My play tester would always take a selfish approach and never collaborate for the good of the entire group of players. For example, when an enemy was attacking my colony I tried to pass a motion that required all members to help out. He voted against it even though he recognized if it destroyed me, it would go ahead and attack him. His attitude was he was ok with this as long as the enemy killed me first.
This incident attests to the difficult beast of semi-cooperative games where players will always choose themselves over others if there is not proper mechansims in place to prevent it.
In short, I am looking for a concrete set of mechanics that greatly encourages collaboration and serves the core engagement which is players collecting resources, colonizing, building units and so on. Ideally, this would be framed in a context of each player representing a different faction with different political agendas where voting is used to push through such agendas.
One hint I have gleaned to make semi-coops work is that any reward or punishment needs to effect the entire group.
The best example I can find of a semi-coop that seems to work well is the "Dead of Winter" where Crisis cards indicate what goals the survivers must meet together or otherwise suffer a consequence that effects all (lowering of morale, for example).
Drawing some inspiration from this, here is a brief outline of my thoughts so far.
1) Two types of cards, Event Cards (for example, a plague hits a planet, or a super nova explodes) and Faction/Senate Objective Cards (an objective to discover a new technology, an objective to colonize X more planets, mine asteroids and so on) have a collective reward or punishment.
2) A collective punishment could effect a happiness rating which applies to all players where a failure to fulfill the requirements could result in the collective happiness going down which could result in strikes and so on.
3) The collective punishments or rewards would be specified on each card. Besides harming or awarding all players, it could also individually benefit some players more than others (to also increase competition). So, for example, in a collective project which requires research to find a cure for a plague, the player who contributed the most reseach would gain a special extra award.
4) Event Cards would be generated in a fairly random fashion (never know when a plague all of a sudden hits).
5) Faction/Senate Objective Cards need to be generated on every game turn or round to set the stage (like revealing a Crisis Card at the start of a Player turn phase in the "Dead of Winter.").
Within this brief outline I want to fill in the details and especially flesh out part (5) on how the Senate Objective Cards are generated.
Obviously, the Senate Objective Cards could be drawn randomly but I do not like this idea. For example, you could be approaching the end game and a card shows up that talks about colonizing which does not fit the current state of the game. It would be nice somehow the cards are tied to the state of the game. For example, in the beginning of the game, the Senate Objective cards would be more on exploring and colonizing rather than the end game involved with exterminating.
I would also somehow like to tie the cards with each individual faction and some sort of Senate voting mechanism. For example, each player's faction has a preference for some sort of activity (industrialists like building, militarists like attacking and so on) and each player would pick a couple a cards corresponding to their faction's preference and select one to try to push in the Senate to be voted upon.
Any ideas to flesh this outline out and suggest some concrete mechanics towards that end would be appreciated.
Thanks.
--DarkDream
Guys,
Thanks for your responses.
- Streamline the aspects of the game that you don't want to have as the core engagement. Automate some parts of it, based on decisions/aspects of the game connected to the Senate deliberations/debate you want to emphasize. In this way, you make the effect of the core engagement significant to the rest of the game.
Good suggestion.
Yes. A mechanism that incentives collective play is essential. This is one way of doing it.
Yes. I have the "Republic of Rome" and have tried to mine its treasures. I think the key of how itworks is that you continually are having to face game-ending challenges, and if they are not adequately addressed, will cause the game to end very quickly. It thus forces players to collaborate; if they risk too much individually, they end up all loosing. I will maybe have to look at it some more.
Yes. It is a difficult problem. I have some ideas on a possible new approach (see below). Tell me what you think.
Yes, bringing more varied goals and reducing gameplay you don't want focus on is good advice.
Is there anything in the game which would have allowed you to convince him to help you out? If not, maybe there need to be more concrete ways for players tonegotiate.
Yes. I could have paid off my brother offering money or resources. Those type of things may be an option. However, I felt even then a player could just be selfish without sacrificing anything. With a theme of a Federation of Galactic Senate I want to be able to reduce that type of behavior to a certain degree.
One interesting suggestion I have had, is players loose or win separately. So at the end of the game all can loose, all can win or some can win and others loose. Now the interesting thing is that in order for an individual player to win, he or she must attain at *least* a certain amount of points to win.
Idea behind this is that an action can equally harm and help *all* players as a group. For example, destroy an invading space amoeba and all players get +10 points. If the space amoeba kills a population on a planet in the republic then all players suffer -10 points.
The only problem I can see with this suggestion, however, is that even with players trying to reach at least X amount of points, a player who is way below that threshold of points to win may start trying to sabotage things so to stop the other players winning (idea is if I can't win I will make everyone else loose so we are all equal).
The reason a player may want to do this even when they have individual points is that points awarded to those players who are near reaching their goal are of greater value than the player who is far behind (most likely not reach the goal to win individually) and thus will want all others to loose. If that sabotage player has the ability of easily tanking the game for all the players, then it will most likely happen.
I think all these problems can be mitigated by:
1) Making it hard for players to have the ability to cause the game to fail (do not have a collective morale track, for example).
2) Players should have hidden personal goals that individually earns them points or other means of obscuring the total amount of points any other player has at one time. Also possibly not knowing the exact threshold amount needed to win until the end may help obscure the winning status of all players.
3) Sabotage behaviour can be mitigated further by combining a collective award and individual punishment. For example, if there is a plague hitting and all players are required to contribute resources to resolve it and one player refuses to contribute, that player will be individually punished by loosing points while the group of players who finally resolve the plague all get equal awards of points.
4) The player that is continually trying to sabotage can be voted out and not have any say anymore in collective actions.
What do you guys thing?
--DarkDream