Nuke and Overtime in Multiplayer (rules of Lix)

[Simon]

Players don't remember the exact rules of overtime and nuke. People ask why the overtime doesn't start, or why the nuke doesn't work. I'll treat these questions as bug reports against the nuke/overtime design.

In 0.10, if you nuke, you lose all remaining skills immediately, and overtime starts once you have 1 or more points. This is too complicated. The original design goal in 2010 was (a) to prevent people from nuking before anybody can score, and (b) to challenge other players to beat your score. Yes, the 0.10 nuke solves this, but pays too high a complexity cost (it has too much if-then).

In a 4v4 team game (of 2 teams), if the newbie nukes on your team, all players on that team lose their skills. That must become impossible. The obvious answer -- changing the nuke button into a majority vote, i.e., more than 50 % of the players on your team must push nuke for the nuke to activate -- would pile even more if-then rules onto the existing unrememberable nuking system. We can do better.

But the whole nuke-overtime system is a hard design problem to solve.

I'm contemplating to ditch the loss of skills altogether when you press nuke. Your nuke still triggers overtime, but you keep your skills and continue playing. In 0.10, it's strange that the loss of skills doesn't always go hand-in-hand with the start of overtime: When you nuke and have 0 points, you lose the skills, but overtime doesn't start.

It feels correct to keep the nuke as a game element. It allows you to force the remaining players to bring an almost-over game to a timely conclusion. I don't want to ditch it altogether.

None of this solves the confusing overtime, i.e., when exactly the overtime starts. This is still too confusing to explain to new players. The first hunch is to start overtime immediately when somebody scores 1 point from his own lix (to prevent accidental triggering by others who start near your exit), but that, again, wouldn't be elegant to explain. I have no good answer.

-- Simon