JC's Lottery Game!

[jc]

Every time the Senate convenes, I also perform a lottery draw!

As I am currently Speaker for the Senate, I have the ability to trade with anyone in the world, provided they have a Customs House or Office Tower.
Thus, there will be a draw every Senate for a prize!

Current Lottery:

Tickets cost: 1 Food (for 1 Coal)
Prize: 1 Diamond Drill (for 1 Coal) [Net Trade: 1 Diamond Drill for 1 Food]

Multiple tickets permitted.

The draw will be held on Wednesday at Noon (Senate Convenes).

Obtaining Your Prize:

If I am able to trade with you (ie using your trades; if you are a Global Leader or one of my Neighbours) , you must put up the prize trade (1 DDRL: 1 COAL).

If I am not able to trade with you (ie you are far away) but you are able to trade with me (ie you have a Customs House or Office Tower) , I will put up the prize at your request at some time we're both online (you may send me a message to request for me to be online at a particular time, and I'll try to be on then). Provided none else are online, the trade can then be made.

If trading between us is not available, you must wait until one of the above conditions are fulfilled.

Lottery Schedule:
Fridays - Choose a number between 1 and 10. A number will be chosen randomly. Prize will be split between winners, rounding in favor of the earlier ticketholders. Prize: 3 DDRL. Ticket cost: 1 Food
If no winners, prize carries over onto Monday's lottery.

Mondays - 2 DDRL, lottery. Ticket cost: 1 Food. Ticketholders automatically get one free additional ticket (chance to win) per vassal, as of Monday Noon; multiple tickets are not available for purchase.

Wednesdays - 1 DDRL, lottery. Ticket cost: 1 Food. Multiple tickets are available to purchase.


Any suggestions, let me know! The prizes may change to ICBMs or AID, depending on what I have available (feel free to donate to the prize fund!)

[Rasteroid]

This is so cute.. I was looking at the 1coal:1food trade, and I completely forgot about the lottery. I'd be interested to find out how this goes, could you post your profits here or even better announce them? Neat idea! Of course, you need to maintain your speakership to make it swing.. what if a bunch of people buy tickets, then get ripped off because you can't reimburse them? Tut tut, no guarentees.. JC's a shyster..

Anyway, I'd buy tickets but I already traded my Food to Ramul for a shiny new ICBM, to replace my LAST ONE which was stolen by thieves. I thought that so harsh I made it impossible to get your last EUR, Coal, or ICBM appropriated by random events.

[jc]

Certainly, I'll talk about my profits (or losses, as the case may be).

I would need to maintain my Speakership to fulfill the trades; I am considering making the lottery 600 on Monday/Wednesday/Friday instead; that way, even if I don't get the Speaker vote that day, it will still work out, provided people can get online by that time.

The trouble is, however... that I work those days... and I actually can't do it until after 1800, to be honest. So that's when the draw will be done. So right now the times are just for "how late you can buy a ticket and still qualify", unfortunately. Anyway, if people want to have their DDRL, they better vote for me to be Speaker (if they can) , no? Still, if I ever end up owing someone a DDRL, and I'm not the speaker, I'll strive to get it to them somehow.

What I really need to do is draw on non-Senate days, I guess. Tuesday and Saturday, I suppose, should be the days I do the draws.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm going to re-evaluate my current lottery ideas. Right now, I have WAY too many DDRLs, but I also have to consider that it costs me about 10 Food per DDRL, so I need at least ten tickets purchased in order to make up for a SINGLE DDRL prize... Then again, it's cheaper if I just trade for ALU. 10 Food -> 6 ALU , which basically means (three cycles later, due to my huge PM and two Refineries producing the necessary two DMND per turn) 3 DDRL.
So actually, 10 Food -> 3 DDRL, if I give it time.

Hmm... Of course, there's costs on my part --- that's 6 DMND I could've used for something else, and a whole lot of spent Power... but meh. ^_^ I don't really have anything else to do in Battle Mines now but distribute Diamond Drills out.

[Rasteroid]

Yeah.. I guess it does kind of peter out. Also if the game scaled up a lot, people would probably figure out ways (maybe cheating) to build doomsday devices incredibly rapidly, wiping off the map every week or so.

I guess I need some kind of additional bonus.. maybe something which reset your tech to 0, but gave you +1 on some kind of SECOND scale.. with various levels involved in that.

If people wanna keep playing, I can keep growing it. Hey, I know.. space ships. wheee...

[jc]

There's an idea.

Let people launch ships to Alpha Centauri... or even better, let's assume people have discovered that Alpha Centauri is completely uninhabitable, and we have to go even FURTHER.

Allow the factory to produce numerous parts:
Structural Integrity (1 STEEL + 2 ALU + 1 DDRL?) (raises chances of not falling apart)
Hydroponics (1 AID + 3 GLASS?) (raises chances of successfully surviving the trip)
Rocket Fuel Cell (2 ICBM?) (lowers time to wait, helping the above).

Total cost for one of each:
6 STEEL + 5 ALU + 4 EUR + 3 GLASS + 2 DMND + 1 FOOD
(doesn't that sound nice? )

These would be stored in your Battle Mine, so would take up space and be subject to overflow, but would not be able to be traded (IWI won't allow it?) or possibly, they can be traded? They'd probably not count as Items (as those are made from base/refined materials only) , but perhaps as Products or simply Rocket Parts, as manufactured materials are used in their making.

Anyway...

Basically, when you have at least one of each of the above, you can launch your Rocket Ship to attempt to populate the distant planet. Launching costs all of your current Food (which also determines how much population units you send; you need at least 1) and 10 Coal.

When launched, you cannot launch another until the status of your previous launch is confirmed.

Initial time is 20 days (80 Cycles).

For each Rocket Fuel Cell you send along for the ride, the time required decreases by 6 cycles, to a maximum of -60 cycles at 10 Rocket Fuel Cells, for a total of 20 Cycles (five days).

For each Structual Integrity you have, you have a 20% chance of surviving liftoff, and also a 10% chance of surviving landing. If liftoff fails, you know immediately (and lose ALL the resources you put into it, and likely get a title that refers to one of those NASA explosive liftoffs...) , but if you succeed you have to wait until you try landing to see if you survived the landing. Maximum of 10 Structual Integrities, for a 100% chance of succeeding both launch and landing.

For each Hydroponics you have, you have an additional 10% chance of keeping the Food you store alive. At 10 Hydroponics, the maximum, your Food will last you the entire trip, and you'll reach your destination with all Population Units intact. Otherwise, each day (at 0 Hours), there's a chance one of your stored Food units (that was launched) will rot, equal to 100% - 10% * Hydroponics. So with 5 Hydroponics, it would give you a 50% chance each day of keeping your Food intact. If Food ever runs to 0, the crew dies and you are alerted of this fact (and can then launch another Rocket).

When arriving, it would store all Food units remaining on the ship (ie the population units) on your base on the other planet. It would keep track of the total number of successful launches, successful landings, and how much population was sent.

If 10/10/10 are launched, you'd reach your destination guaranteed in 5 days, with all Food intact (however much you were able to send).
If 1/1/1 was launched, your chances for success would be nearly zero : 2% for actually landing properly, and you'd likely lose 1 Food every day during the trip, so you'd need to send over 20 Food in order to succeed even then...

How this is useful?
Make it for every 10 Food units you successfully send to the other planet, you get +1 Score permanently.

Yay!

Oh, and you'd have interesting titles for all kinds of failed attempts and so on, too.

Theocracies would get a bonus on their Launches and Landings due to good luck (only if you're in that government at the time of launch; let's say they get a +25% chance to launch, and a +10% chance to land, and if you switch governments while in flight, it wouldn't matter, since everyone on the ship are Theocratic anyway) , while Technocracies would give a bonus to Fuel Cells (-1 day overall, regardless?).
Democracies could give a bonus to the Food portion, giving one Bonus Food to the shuttle launch on top of whatever you have?


Oh, of course, in order to make this stuff, you'd need to be Tech Level 15 at least. That would motivate me to actually raise my Tech Level.

[jc]

Oh no! I've been voted out!

How can this be? How strange. You see, people shouldn't vote for someone else, if they want to continue lotterying.

I'll do what I can to get the prize to the winner (determined in a moment), which may include requiring a few Food to be spent to fiddle with the winner's government (allowing them to Globally trade with me) if necessary.

Time for some statistics.

Tickets purchased: 8 (8 Food)
(1) Rasteroid, (2) Cirdan, (3) ieuwen, (4) Mikhail, and (5) Psiweapon got one ticket each.
(6, 7, 8) RedSpectra got three tickets.


Random.org says : RedSpectra is the winner (1d8 = 8).

8 Food -> ~3 ALU , I believe. So I'm not quite a benefitter in this case. Oh well.

It was a fun idea, anyway.

[Rasteroid]

oh man, harsh.. well, excellent effort JC, way to test the possibilities.

It was amusing.

[Rycchus]

Love the Space idea!

(Move it to a new thread to get people interested?)

I think the bonus should be different - at the moment it doesn't sound like there's a good payoff, but it does seem like there's a nice level of challenge involved, as well as a degree of choice towards how risky you want to be.
Nice idea!