I started typing this in this thread http://planets.nu/discussion/needed-easy-way-to-give-away-planets and realized we had gotten off topic so I felt it was appropriate to branch to a new conversation.
At some point around 1992, Planets players (along with Tim) figured out
that universal domination and annihilation of all opponents wasn't a realistic goal so that's when Tim introduced
REF.EXE which allowed several distinct victory conditions.
The
first full game I played on a BBS and not by mail was one of those
where everybody got a huge fleet of Super Transport Freighters filled
with clans and supplies and you were on the exact same point in space as
everybody else and everybody had to go their own direction and
establish their own home territory. It used
REF.EXE to determine the victory condition, which in this case was "Moly the Stuff of Life".
God, how
absurd and boring. I can't believe I actually played/enjoyed such a scenario,
but yes, we really did just fly all around the sector and fill our
freighters with Molybdenum and the first player to get a certain amount of Moly in their ships' cargo holds hold got the win immediately. And we loved it ... but then
again we had all just gotten our VGA monitors from Santa Claus so
Planets was sublimely beautiful and rewarding regardless of whether you
were fighting or not.
However, after that game was "over"
(REF.EXE decided the outcome after about a month) we just kept playing
for like a year (seriously) because it was so fun and some of us were
attached to the little empire we had built. We assumed that the "real"
winner would be total domination of all 500 planets and extinction of
the other. So I was playing Cyborg and the only other that didn't finally quit was
the Privateer and we played one turn per day thinking that one of us
could dominate the cluster and eradicate the other ... so I had the
bottom half and he had the top half and we kept building up and moving
those ships around every single day and trying to figure out where the
other's minefields were (in DOS they didn't show on the map).
Seriously, I played the same game 3 hours a day ... gosh how funny that memory is
now.
The point system
(10 for a capital ship, 10 for a planet, 1 for a freighter, 120 for a
starbase) was the most common way of determining the winner in REF.EXE,
but it also allowed for a planet number winning condition (like we
have on Nu), destroy all opponent homeworlds as a victory condition, and games that would end at a
pre-determined turn number.
And then (ahhhhh) there was the
wonderful variety of setups allowed by MASTER.EXE (the universe creation program which you run once before ever running HOST.EXE) which included Crazy
Intermix (most planets already owned by somebody but all ships
[freighters] start at the same point in space) and Ashes of the Evil
Empire (one player owned most of the map, all other players had just one
homeworld, and the idea was to annihilate the Emperor, who could be the Evil Empire or any other race. The player who destroyed the Emperor's homeworld was the winner, and if the Emperor destroyed all other opponents' homeworlds, then the Emperor won).
I never played an Ashes game but I still dream of the opportunity of playing Ashes as the Emperor.
So anyway, what if we were to try to discover our roots even more and look at adding a creative variety of starting positions and victory conditions?
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Show Media Item - Variety in starting and victory conditions
