V&V Post-Mortem Discussion

[phonicsmonkey]

Hey Cecil, great idea to start this discussion!

I really enjoyed this game which was my first foray into forum-based RPGs. (enough fs for you?)

I found a few things about it difficult but generally I thought from my perspective as a player that it worked well.

I think the initial civil war was always likely to end diplomatically because at that stage no-one had a stake in the conflict. Contrast with the later clash between the Prinz and Zirn where both sides had personal history and were invested in the outcome. Even that didn't result in a PvP in the end but I thought we didn't lack for drama nonetheless!

My take on why the game didn't 'take off' in the way you wanted it to?

- We suffered from a combination of too few players and too few avatars. At one point we had three people on the waiting list that we couldn't accomodate. As time went by they drifted away..I wasn't in KotR but I guess from its scale that it could accomodate a waiting list like that and not suffer as it had plenty of active players. With so few players (and most of them in the same Duchy which was headed by the son of the Kaiser) there was by definition less potential for discord.

- Turns took too long, for a couple of reasons which I think were too much in combination.

1) The personal finances were what attracted me to the game in the first place and I loved being able to make those decisions. You may have noticed that my character was (perhaps unduly) driven by the motivation of personal profit. I decided early on to play him that way. However it was clearly taking a lot of your time to put that spreadsheet together. If there were some way to automate this it might work better. Maybe a macro driven off the save game file (converted into text format) could work? Another way to implement it might be to mod the game so that the different duchies are actually different in-game factions. Like what Quirl was proposing to do with his Black March game. Of course then you have permanent Duchies and no ability to create new ones or take them away, which would be a shame too.

2) The hotseat function, which presents so many exciting options in terms of manually controlling neighbouring factions, managing their diplomacy, recruitment, buildings etc. is also of course extremely time-consuming.

- The early game was really hard! We completely underestimated how hard it would be and shot off in all directions starting wars with everyone around us. Of course we then quickly realised that controlled by you, these factions were not going to make stupid AI decisions but were actually going to attack us in a strategically reasonable manner. This was nearly the death of us! And by the end of the game we were really only just beginning to restore the position we had at the start. I think to a large extent we got exactly what we deserved, but this also contributed to a 'siege' mentality that meant that, for survival's sake alone, we weren't able to turn on each other like we might have if we were more externally secure. But I wouldn't change this aspect, it made the game a real challenge! I lurked a bit during KotF and it looked like a cake-walk to me against the AI, one of the reasons I never joined that game.

Having said all that, while we didn't have any PvP battles which seems to be a disappointment to you, I honestly don't think we lacked for intrigue and in-character conflict.

We had some lovely dramas in the Diet, starting with Hummel and the Prinz falling out over Hamburg, continuing with the ongoing strife between Herden and the Margrave which soon took in everyone and led to the highly entertaining political skulduggery of the third Diet (the Reichsmarschall!) and then we had the nice conflict between the Prinz and Zirn.

So all in all, considering how few players we had and how few turns we actually got through I think we did well!

In my view the game was a success and I'd play it again.