Conquer Club

This glorious image of a luxurious antique German spy typewriter can only inspire...



Though, of course, I will have to change the keys around so it's Qwerty and not Qwertz...

Not a map at all yet, but this map will be little else but image and legend. It promises to be the new least popular and most hated map on the site, if it ever makes it that far, but there's absolutely nothing like it on the site right now and so it promises to expand the variety in a whole new direction...game chats from the first week will read:

"I don't understand this map"
"This map blows"
"I thought this was a different map"
"wtf"

...but I still think it's worthy.

Enough throat clearing...every key is a country. Attacks, as usual, are to contiguous countries. You obtain a bonus for holding all the letters (and numbers or symbols, if necessary) of any of the words listed and assigned bonuses in the legend. The list of words will likely be limited to ones with non-recurring letters (ruling out e.g. attack but including e.g. conquer) and will be sufficiently long as to make it an incredibly intricate task to block others from getting word bonuses. This will be a thought-intensive map that will definitely displease a lot of people, but take the game to a whole new level for those intrepid few who venture onto its keys...

The legend would likely have 40 words or so. To feed the visualization a little, use these as examples:

CONQUER - 9 (3 vowels)
CLUB - 3 (these letters unlikely to be hotly contested)
WAR - 3 (the A is a valuable letter)
KING - 2
ARMY - 4
SIAM - 5
VICTORY! - 7
TRUCE? - 6

etc

Please, noooooo!!

It sounds interesting. I would play it.

awesome!

not to bad id play it

You have too much free time.

The word siam is a bit random. Im thinking about making a map, what program do use for the image?

Interesting idea. A few questions come to mind.

Will there also be more traditional (i.e. contiguous) continents, like QWERTY or UIOPJKL?

Will you be marking the routes between keys with lines, or will you just be trusting folks to figure it out? (It may turn out that having every key near the middle of the board connected to all six keys that surround it might be a few connections too many...)

Will you be replacing the the German characters like the umlauted vowels with English ones or keeping them?

What will you be doing to make continents using the numerals and punctuation?

Marv, I knew you would love it...I wasn't sure whether you or Pedronicus would love it more...

Jota wrote:Will there also be more traditional (i.e. contiguous) continents, like QWERTY or UIOPJKL?

Don't see why not - the same rules would apply...

Will you be marking the routes between keys with lines, or will you just be trusting folks to figure it out? (It may turn out that having every key near the middle of the board connected to all six keys that surround it might be a few connections too many...)

I think I'd use connection lines. I'd have to see how it looks. I probably won't end up using this image to work off of - I was looking for a keyboard with square keys - but it was too slick to just leave there in the google images search...so with square keys it might be explicit enough to avoid connection lines. I'll see.

Will you be replacing the the German characters like the umlauted vowels with English ones or keeping them?

No German characters will be appearing on this map except perhaps Gerhard Schroeder. What a character!

What will you be doing to make continents using the numerals and punctuation?

Double-barrelled words could need the space bar, some of the numbers could be worked into words, or historical dates could be among the words, e.g. 1789, and some of the words could require punctuation, as seen above with "TRUCE?".

I agree Siam is random. I was just coming up with words off the top of my head.

40 words as continents seems like wayyy too many. It would take a long time to check each person's letters to determine what full words they have. I would limit it to 15 or 20 which is still extremely high for a number of continents.

sully800 wrote:40 words as continents seems like wayyy too many. It would take a long time to check each person's letters to determine what full words they have.

That's the point. Would make the strategy very complex.

I know make it so words like

death
defeat

etc. are -# words so you need them to get other words but if you have the whole word you lose men

Good idea, Max, though "defeat" has 2 e's. But it would work for death.

It's not that I don't like complexity. I just feel that searching through all 40 combinations each turn for each player and trying to figure out whats going on would take too much time. It seems like most bonuses would be awarded and taken away not by strategy but by luck because it wouldn't be readily apparent what words people have taken.

I was thinking more that some letters might get hotly contested because rather than try to figure out every permutation and combination of words that might be assembled by a player, players would bid for the most valuable letters...

At a guess, I suspect that I would be likely to look at the letters I have control over and try to figure out if I'm adjacent to anything that would give me an extra word. Whether or not this should have any influence on your map-design, I have no clue. Probably not, but I felt like sharing.

Also, all of this is somehow reminding me of both Boggle and Scrabble.

boggle might be the way to go for that much vaunted 3d map!
I mean 16 territories would be way too few, but if you had an isometric view of three sides of each cube... why, that'd be... er... mmm... ahem... yes, 48! nice risk number!
but, of course, that is a different map.
This one'll be great, just as soon as tr0y's written the script that shows what words everybody's got!
[thinking]how do we make an alphabet of 48?[/thinking]

chinese characters

And I suppose that is true for strategy....people would hotly contest the 'e' and 'a' and other letters that almost every word contains. But would those few letters make individuals too strong too quickly? If you started with the e and a you would probably have many words at the beginning of your first turn.

My suggestion would be to try and get words that contain as many unique letters as possible. Some letters (mostly vowels) will appear in many of the words, but if there are too many common letters I think one person could start the game with too powerful a position.

Wise thoughts, Sully. And one way to take away the spectacular value of E and A would be to give higher values to words that don't have them, so that those two letters don't become too pivotal...some acronyms might help create words that don't have any vowels at all, like NSFW (appropriate designation of CC for Grimsleeper).

This suggests two possible paths for visual design - one that hints to players which letters are in many words/which aren't, perhaps by making those letters kind of glow somehow, and one that doesn't. I'm inclined towards the latter, but would like to hear your thoughts.

I think the legend would be enough of an indicator of which letters are important (assuming the words are in the legend). A Scrabble set might be a good place to go to get word-value estimates from; add up the Scrabble score for a word, then divide by some constant. Also, I think it'd be good to try to get as many longer words in there as you can. Also also, is the no-repeated-letter rule just to reduce player confusion?

Guys, 40 continents - words, and no colour or any mark to make then clear. Check if your enemies hold any will be the most annoying thing in the whole CC, maybe in the whole world With 6 "continents", annoying enough already. I sincerely cant imagine no one playing this more than 1 or 2 times. Are you sure you really want to do this?

I intend to become an expert at this map through frequent play.#

Great idea, should be followed through, purely for it's originality. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but it'd be a shame to let such a new and novel idea die.

I can picture it now, grab a couple of random letters, forming nothing useful... appear really weak, then BAM, cash in, capture e, and suddenly you're getting a bonus of 14...

I wanna play.

I think once you get the basis of the idea hashed out...really the best thing to do would be play test this on your own. Really wouldn't be that hard...since you wouldn't need an extravagant drawing.

The idea should probably be tested quite a few times, to see if it is at all possible to play, and if it is fun.

And once you get the basis idea, others can also chime in with their own results from playing.


--Andy

I like the idea a lot. Rather than watching what everybody else has, you would have to approach the game with more of a chess mindset - what will everyone else have in two turns, and where do I need to be, not necessarily to interrupt, but to counter-act them.

The vowels would be valuable, to be sure, but there are always particularly valuable countries on any map, and I think the suggestion to make words with the common letters less valuable is a good one. One other suggestion is to make words that require letters which can be attacked from many directions - as an example, J - worth more, while words using letters which are less approachable - example; P - worth less. (This would have to be considered carefully, since the QWERTY keyboard deliberately scatters the strange letter to the outside, but it's worth some thought.)

Keep it up - I look forward to playing this map!

eh, the qwerty keyboard scatters the common letters to the outside also. Just look for 'r, s, t, l, n, e'. It was made to slow down typists actually because they jammed typewriters if they went too fast.

Anyway, I do think it would be interesting to play, but it will be hard to get the word bonuses exactly write. So Andy's suggestion about testing the gameplay multiple times makes a lot of sense.