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Comment by kosei | Hacker News Reader

We never got into it at my office, but there's another game that offers similar tactics and is playable online, called Neptune's Pride[0]. It offers similar amounts of negotiation (and backstabbing), and we found that the game grew so contentious that people legitimately lost trust with each other in the office. Could be that we're just a sensitive bunch, but it was surely an interesting dynamic change.

[0]: http://np.ironhelmet.com/

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Everything I've read about [Eve Online][0] and [Metagaming][1] is about how this kind of diplomacy games are so socially challenging that I'm beginning to wonder if this might be a generally useful skill for anyone. I just can't figure out the balance between the time in the game and time for everything else. I don't play these games because of that. However, if you're playing against a larger pool of people (outside the office) it would probably prevent trust decay.

(Off topic) I didn't think that HN did Markdown in comments but your post convinced me that it is perfectly useful in that zero-based endnote-format style you used that I'm going to co-opt it.

[0]: http://www.eveonline.com/ [1]: http://eve-tribune.com/index.php?no=2_38&page=5

Be warned: Neptune's Pride has the fatal flaw (or killer feature, depending on who you ask) of occurring in real time. Later in the game, as it speeds up, players who log in more often gain a tactical advantage.

There's a sequel out now, at http://triton.ironhelmet.com that has the option of progressing time in steps once everyone confirms orders.

So you can set it to 12h steps, get payday every 2 steps, or whatever you feel like. With the right settings, if everyone is active during the day you can get maybe 4 or 5 steps complete and then nothing happening over the weekend.

Yep - this is what we ended up playing. Though we did just do it time-based, which also created a bit of a hit on productivity :-)

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