: * trust the honesty of the players
You know, I see wargame after wargame with grandiose claims about how their game is cheat-proof when doing PBEM. I say nonsense; what’s to stop me from setting up a virtual machine, saving the virtual machine’s state, and then reloading from the virtual machine’s state if I don’t like how a game has gone.
My handling of cheating with PBEM is to trust the person I’m playing. Yeah, sure, we could make a cheat-proof wargame (perhaps, if using a random map, have the map change every time you explore unexplored territory) but then it would no longer be C-evo; if you’re worried about your opponent cheating and must use PBEM, just play Go (you can cheat in Chess by having a computer make moves for you) or a game called Arimaa.
Then again, having no fog of war or shroud (“fog of exploration”) and using one of the Total Fairness maps would also be cheat proof, but, IMO, a game with less excitement.
Indeed, we can have this today: You start a game on a TF (total fairness) map. Player one immediately does “manipulations → See everything”. Player one makes his move then saves the game immediate before hitting the “turn done” button.
Player two immediately hits the “turn done” button, then starts his turn as player two. He also chooses “manipulations → See everything”, makes his move, then hits turn done. Not moving any of player one’s units or making any other changes, player two saves the game.
So, yes, we have cheat-proof play-by-email today if we don’t mind playing without fog of war nor shroud.
If we want to play something more akin to a traditional C-evo game, what we can make cheat-proof is a client-server model. C-evo, as I understand it, already has everything in place to do this; you and your opponent send your moves to a trusted server which doesn’t give you information you’re not supposed to have.
: solution 3 may make an interesting, almost chess like game
As I understand it, we have this today.
: Player 2 picks a nation and mails the actions for turn 1-10
: Player 1 plays the first 10 turns and mails turn 10 save game + the actions for turn 11-20
: etc until contact is made and each turn must be mailed.
Yes, doing multiple turns will speed up PBEM a lot.
: Since it is difficult to create a game with equally useful starting positions, and playing the loosing side may be interesting, a double game might be even more interesting
Two solutions to this problem:
1) Just play one of the total fairness maps
2) Tweak the Random Map Generator to great mirror reflected maps; for example, having the continents in the west and east sea be identical.
Posted 9-Feb-10 23:06 by samiam