Competitive games

[Ruudjah]

Hi! After years being back for a few weeks, I'm having a blast again. Supernice! And thanks to all contributors .

For competitive gaming, I have a few suggestions that should probably be quite simple to implement. The goal of these features is to requires less admins and increase gaming fun in competitive games.

- option to disable destroying of goods-accepting buildings (or any building). This prevents situations where trolls destroy goods-accepting buildings to diminish income from companies making bank using goods.
- options to disable competition on secondary material (goods, steel, etc). This prevents trolling where players build a short line from the factory to a town to compete very cheaply with a player having setup a massive production on a factory.
- (less simple to implement probably) introduce reputation as driver for competition share. It's a bit rough to service say a farm for years with 100% rating, and then suddenly a competitor start competing with 40% rating still getting a big proportion of the produce. Reputation should fix that - I leave it to the experts to figure out a way to keep track of that. (Idea: monthly check on rating, gaining/loosing reputation points based on current rating?)

My 2 cents. Cheers!

[Redirect Left]

You should also remember that, people who want to troll. Will always find a way to do so, always. You should always prepare for a server to need admins, especially "competitive" ones.

Your suggestions for not destroying industries would work to a degree though, I had a look at the options and I'm actually surprised that isn't already in there, but then again I have magic bulldozer enabled nearly 24/7.

Arguably the alleged troll doing your second thing with short lines is just "playing smarter, not harder". No need to spend money if you don't have to, after all.

Also in terms of "reputation". That is essentially what Station Rating & Company Rating already does. See the manual here for the maths that it uses to work it out, its all based on what a real life passenger would rank to give it a "reputation".

[jfs]

Agree, if you want to have serious competitive games, you put the rules in writing, and then have a referee enforce them. You just won't be able to implement technical measures against every possible thing, it's going to be endless whack-a-mole against new things people who want to play unfair come up with. Hence it's going to be much easier to have a referee who can respond with, "I know what unfair play looks like when I see it".

[Ruudjah]

Of course, when trollers want to, they can ruin anything. The point is to make those things harder, so that they find other, easier things to troll on.

Similarly, because your house can burn down, you also don't say "we don't need fireproofing or a fire extinguisher". You still mitigate any potential fires.

> You should always prepare for a server to need admins,

Agreed! Those suggestions are not to ensure no trolls will have any power. Just reducing immense power they currently have.
I'm never claiming to "implement technical measures against every possible thing":
> requires less admins and increase gaming fun in competitive games

All I'm looking at Santa for is a few simple measures that go a long way in helping competitive games, that's all

Preventing destroyment of buildings (or goods-accepting buildings) and prevent competition on secondary industries will definitely help on that

[2TallTyler]

It’s possible for NewGRFs to provide buildings which cannot be demolished. Vanilla houses, however, will not be modified as that opens the door to all sorts of arguments about balance and game design. Best to leave it to GRF authors to do as they please.

Some industry sets (FIRS is one) also include industries which accept goods and produce nothing, similar to the vanilla Power Station.

As for avoiding competition for industries and introducing new rating mechanics, Game Scripts can assign a company as the exclusive supplier and/or consumer of an industry. This was introduced for this reason, for competitive gameplay.