Thinking of slighly changing the rules

7 November 2015 20:13

Hello everybody,

I'm thinking of changing rules a bit. Nothing too significant, mostly updating them to the way we've already being playing.

So, removing some stuff from current rules 4 and 5:

  • No blocking, no rating pushing, town growing only in claimed town. Blocking is serious crime. Rating pushing is the same as self competition. You can grow other town limitedly, always leave enough space for others and roads have to be used by vehicles!
  • No land reserving, no unused roads, no station spread abusing. You can reserve maximally 14 tiles for future stations. If you use more, or use land buy for blocking, you can get yourselves into trouble! Using non adjacent stations is allowed but they must not be chained!

And joining them together into a new one:

  • No blocking, no sabotaging, no unused property. Intentional sabotaging is a serious crime, you can get banned in no time for it. Just having some infrastructure that isn't used by your vehicles is acceptable, but take care not to block anyone with it (especially in cities), always leave enough space for others.

Reasoning:

  • Rules 1 and 2 already forbid self-competition, no need to repeat it.
  • Everyone is growing cities like crazy, that rule is not being enforced already.
  • Same goes for unused roads. I did add a note about unused property though.
  • Forbidding station chaining doesn't seem to be necessary, as it doesn't give any benefits and it's hard to distinguish it from what we already do sometimes.
  • Land reserving is limited by server and all harm you can do with it qualifies as blocking, no need to state it by itself.

Some known things are left uncovered. I think it's ok to leave them out of short version of rules and cover in full one which we have on wiki (ok, that page really calls for update, but we'll get there eventually).

  • Crashing vehicles. Intentional goes as sabotaging, but unintentional show be specified. Also I feel like intentionaly crashing own vehicles should be foridden for some reason (ofc short runways are exception).
  • There should be smth else, I forgot ^^.

Anyway, what do you think of it? Any opinions and mb better wording suggestions are appreciated.

7 November 2015 22:21

hi great we get some talk about the rules.

I think there is a difference between self competition and rating pushing. Self competition is when you have 2 stations serving the same industry. Rating pushing is when you not always have a train loading at a station, but a truck with only that station in the orders, so rating goes up because every few days a vehicle arrives. If you allow to grow towns that aren't your own you will get that people grow towns in the order of 30k. I don't mind about this. If you are aiming for a good record you still need more towns for the vals. I agree that stationspread and road rules are hard to distinguish what is allowed and what isn't, so allow all stationspread is fine to me, maybe put some exeptions like chaining at the wiki(we got an topic about that at the old novapoliswiki, in the admin section if I remember right). Claiming land isn't a problem to me since the server limits it. We have to take a close look at the examples at the wiki. this is all for now I think, if I come up with something else I will say it here.

lol

7 November 2015 23:39

lol wrote:

I think there is a difference between self competition and rating pushing. Self competition is when you have 2 stations serving the same industry. Rating pushing is when you not always have a train loading at a station, but a truck with only that station in the orders, so rating goes up because every few days a vehicle arrives.

Right, I got tricked by current rule 4 stating it's the same xD Though it seems to belong to rules 1-2 rather than blocking. It mb better to rewrite those rules as well. Also one day I hope it will be possible to enforce this kind of stuff automatically, by game itself, rather then trying to deal with it in rules. Haven't even started on that yet though (and it can't be done by server only, so have to go long way proposing patch and waiting for it to be accepted by opentdd devs).

If you allow to grow towns that aren't your own you will get that people grow towns in the order of 30k. I don't mind about this. If you are aiming for a good record you still need more towns for the vals.

Don't really get it, you mean preparing bigger cities beforehand to gain some advantage? That actually touches separate big topic of preparing stuff which isn't covered by rules at all atm. Honestly, I don't even know what to do about it yet. But at least for cities there is an easy solution, I can just stop their growth completely like I did on 15m goal, and that's what I intend to do in future for nogrf cb (currently gs cb).

Btw, now that I think if it, rather than in wiki, it would probably be better to have detailed explanations with pictures on rules page itself, after all stuff that is there now. But that can wait, now it's more important to figure out what to do with rules themselves.

10 November 2015 19:16

On my side, I have no trouble with most of the rules, and your addendum just makes everything simpler, so I agree with everything (KISS and DRY).

Growing cities seem to be mandatory to do amazing cities in citybuilder mode, I would be ok to have extra rules for citybuilder game. Citybuilder game to aim for solid records are the most interesting to me, playing or watching, and I would be sad to see despr or gelidis to struggle to much with pax/mail during extreme citybuilding, and even more with a high score multiplayer attempt.

Page for rules with pictures and maybe even tutorial would be great. I will open another thread regarding how to improve usability/design of the site.

11 November 2015 07:49

I think it seems like a good adjustment of the rules.

Regarding growing cities, I don't feel like it's overpowered in CB. In order to get valuables, it's still much more effective to connect multiple cities. Growing cities might be better for pax/mail so there is a reasonable balance to it imo.

7 December 2015 10:03

Regarding crashing your own vehicles: note that there are at least two quests that require this (crash 100 airplanes, crash some number of trains that I forget).

14 April 2016 17:26

Somehow I never did actually update the rules. Done now. Also added "no rating pushing" to both rules 1 and 2. Looks a bit weird, but will do for now. I have a feeling this isn't the last adjustment of rules anyway :)

P.S. Updated !rules output as well (may not get to all servers immediately).