On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Ørjan Johansen wrote: > On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, Kerim Aydin wrote: > > > First, this system hit a real sweet spot in decision and contestable > > "exciting" points. Grind with Stems, make strategic decisions with > > Roles, play them out with the other currencies. Offices with "power" > > to set policies that had gameplay impacts. Winning was related, but > > not the whole purpose of currencies. There was enough variety that > > each "exciting moment" had a different quality and tactics, but not so > > many options that we were lost in the weeds. > > As I recall, the three-currency system was also carefully thought out for the > purpose of encouraging an economy with meaningful trading - something which we > hadn't really managed before. This required making it impossible for a player > to alone produce everything e needed, thus both the roles and the three > different kinds of assets.
Good point! I'll add that. One thing that jumped out in writing this is that players could only change roles every 3 months (I'd mis-remembered that it was monthly). In Agoran terms, that's a long time for a player to be locked into a decision, but I think that long time was a key to getting players to trade instead of just switching between roles. Later "diverse" economies, like Notes, had much more frequent role switching IIRC and players tended to just rotate through on their own. -G.
