The question: Would anyone be interested in having me upload a version that I’ve been working on?
Recently I’ve been working on improving a version of the Twilight Imperium 3 module. The version I had originally started working on was one I found on a forum (which I cannot seem to find again). It was fairly buggy, and nearly unplayable in its original state; however, my friends and I really like this game, and so I spent a couple months learning how the system works and improving the module for live play.
Some of the relevant changes I made include:
Phasing out GM necessity - I felt like the game should be as close to playing an actual board game as possible… and so many functions that were once GM only are now accessible to players. That said, I only play with friends who I trust not to cheat (though this would be difficult, as relevant actions are reported)
Removing unnecessary ownership - All players have a private window which can only be accessed by that specific player. This prevents other players from accessing or otherwise changing cards that are currently in that player’s ownership. Thus, it was unnecessary to restrict access to objects such as planet or action cards, which at times must be transferred between players. This caused problems where saving a game and reloading would make certain pieces immovable by the player currently in possession of an object which was owned by someone else, or moved by the GM.
I realize that these functions were put in place to prevent problems over PBEM gameplay mechanics, but after playing a few games under the current system, my game mates and I consider the changes to be beneficial for live play. Also note that card ownership was necessary when the player areas were connected to the map board, but this is no longer so, and therefore the previous system was outdated.
AH! yes, that’s actually the one I had been working on. I was unsure whether or not anyone else was working to improve it, or if it was considered to be a final version by its creator. In addition, I pretty much originally found it by chance, and then couldn’t find it again after searching. Despite the issues it had, I considered it to be an improvement over the TI3 module currently listed on this site.
Thanks… although I can’t take credit for the module as a whole… alot of the changes I made were purely aesthetic, and the mechanical changes, though small, were simply things me and my friends felt the module should have or handle differently.
I’m still curious to see how other people respond, and whether or not they’ll start using it (as well as their motivation regarding why or why not).
I’m having a few problems with the game tiles. They keep getting stuck in spaces, like in the private rooms and face down on the grid. Unable to right or left click them, so the game cannot procede.
Hey, thanks for doing this! The small changes you made make a big difference. Send me a message if you are ever playing a game of this online! If you’re interested, I have a Galactic Council rule mod that I think is a step better than what’s popular right now (simpler and more fun in implementation), if you like to add a little extra game play to the Political side of the game.
If you own the game, is it possible to fairly easily make your own version of the mod so that you have the card text (or a summary of them) on the cards? It doesn’t make sense that everyone playing the game needs a stack of cards to be able to play.
The reason the cards aren’t included is because the legality of a module including card texts is dubious. I read somewhere that the agreement with the creator was that the module is alright with him so long as the card texts are not included. Thus, even if I did have a version of the module which included the action and political card texts and uploaded it here, I don’t think fans of the game would look too kindly upon such a decision.
Anyway, I’m going to post a thread at the TI3Wiki forum to see if I can get more people to try it out. Perhaps I’ll get more feedback that way.
You know what, I was pretty unclear about what I was asking. I didn’t mean to ask if you could include the cards in the module. What I meant to ask was, is it possible for someone who downloads your module to plug in all the card text for their own personal use. In other words, is there any way using your mod for me to plug in the card text and have it available whenever I play a game with my own group.
So the difference here is distribution versus personal use. The owner of the game can’t (and doesn’t care) to stop me from making copies of his cards so that I have backups, for example. This is as long as I exclusively retain all copies for myself only and do not give, sell or lend.
Is there a possible answer to that question? Does that make sense?
As it stands right now, each action and political card has its own image, which is consistent with the version I used to create this module. Therefore, it wouldn’t be impossible to edit those images to include the card text (though it would take a considerable amount of time to edit them all).
However, I do plan on removing the extraneous images in order to decrease the size of the module in future versions, and having the engine place text on each instance of the card instead.
Don’t make your module look worse just to decrease it’s size. The maximum
sized module we’re willing to host will increase soon, and anyway there’s
no shortage of disk space these days.
