I was on lockdown, so I couldn’t do anything between C hour (12 hours before victory became possible) and the end of the dynasty. But I was already suspicious of lendun’s pile of valves. I’d submitted an agenda I called “Plumbing Collector”, reproduced below, and knew from Alliance chat that JohnathanDark had also drafted an agenda around having sufficient Valves and Housing that turned out to be lendun’s actual agenda. I had some suspicion also that lendun, having been arrested by an ally, had an agenda involving that, but not enough detail on the other conditions to pinpoint which such agenda.

I also wanted to power and activate a System of Dwelling Facility to make a safety margin for my already active Residential Brownouts agenda (see below), which may or may not have been Beadworks to disrupt lendun’s third agenda. So the lockdown, just as much as the lack of other active players, was critical to the victory.

Plumbing Collector - One Machinist has at least one more ‘’‘Valve’‘’ than the two other Machinists with the most Valves combined, and at least two more Pipes than the two other Machinists with the most Pipes combined, and that Machinist has not Traded away any Pipes on the ‘’‘Flea Market’‘’ today.

Residential Brownouts - You own at least 1 Housing and the amount of Power present in the System of Dwelling is greater than zero but less than the sum total of Housing owned by all Machinists.

I had a nice Agenda synergy with 1 Agenda to have the Surroundings be “Snowdrifts” while the System of Control was Destroyed, and the other to have the same Location in Surroundings as in the Destinations list. Unfortunately, I needed just a few more days to make it happen, and like Bucky, I saw that lendun was likely matching the Agenda I wrote, since he wasn’t selling or using his increasing number of Housing or Valves, so I was racing the clock on whatever his other Agendas were.

Regarding my own play, I was attempting to bluff a nonexistent agenda based on the System of Dwelling having 5 or fewer Damaged Parts and not Salvaging (“Well Maintained”). I was also maintaining a maximally ambiguous policy (“Cover”) of camping on the Flea Market and accumulating a large pile of Baubles which, while not an agenda in itself meant I could easily throw purchases at a variety of possession-based agendas at no time delay.

The Well Maintained fake agenda and Cover policy served Residential Brownouts in that staying on top of the System of Dwelling gave enough control over both the housing stock and (with nobody else using Facilities) System of Dwelling power levels to keep it active without deviating from optimal dynastic play for either the Cover policy or Well Maintained.

The obscured second agenda I was going for, after Residential Brownouts, was Surgeon - “There is an unbroken sequence of 5 or more entries by the same person in the Repair Log for a Megasystem, and that Megasystem has no Damaged Parts.” which aligned with the bluff agenda in terms of general actions (i.e. repairs) but the bluff implied that the purpose of a full repair was to keep a two player alliance from breaking it by Salvaging. This particular agenda had a downside where Passing Time would reset the victory timer, so I couldn’t start it before C hour.

My vote for Bread and Bounties was an extreme gamble to conceal the particulars of Surgeon and direct rivals’ attention to the Cover policy instead.

Also, I was the earliest Schematic submitter and got two of my Schematic’s agendas stricken for difficulty because of the change from instantaneous fulfillment to fulfillment after 24 hours. Those were the Order 44 agenda and the Triplicate Itinerary (destination 3x in graffiti) agenda.

Oh, and I should comment on the early Declared Alliances shenanigans. The idea was simply that Alliances were the only dynastic gameplay possible during Initialization I, why not make a bunch of temporary alliance links for private chat with no intention to pool anything after initialization?

Why not, it turns out, is that it activated Kevan’s paranoia which haunted me for the rest of the dynasty. I’d like to know what Kevan was thinking.

as said in the discord server, We Have Atomic Crimes Now contained a scam that would let you arrest yourself. my original intention was to use this to fulfill my second agenda, but I got worried that other people would use it, so I roped in kevan to arrest me and withdrew the proposal

the original plan was to fulfill my second and third agendas: however, after SB idled, I found that it was a lot faster to just go and complete my first agenda (doing so would let me fulfill both my agendas before C hour, but if I had gone for my second agenda instead, I would’ve only been able to win on sunday at the earliest with kevan’s 30-hour proposal). the 30-hour proposal was kevan’s idea: given that lemon liked to pass time at 1-3am UTC, completing the second agenda would’ve required 3 jail cycles with the 24-hour schedule unless we no-lifed it

could I have won without kevan? if I had played my cards differently right at the beginning, probably (although I would’ve still needed him to acquire a valve so that a majority of players would have a non-zero amount of valves).

anyways, found this dynasty generally quite enjoyable, although there were a couple fairly noticeable pain points imo (which I’ll talk about later because I’m tired)
thanks to lemon for running this operation and making the dynasty possible!

also, here are the agendas I wrote (kevan also sent me his but I’ll let him decide whether he wants them out there)
“You have caused order to increase by using the Arrest action at least 5 times on Machinists who have created Graffiti.”
“At least one Megasystem has 10 or more Damaged Parts and you have gained at least 25 Baubles from trading in the Flea Market.”
“Your name has been added to the Lockdown list at least 2 times and you have gained at least 30 Baubles from trading in the Flea Market.”
“Five or more Facilities exist and more than half of them (rounded down) have at least 2 Power.”
“Order is at 75 or above and you have removed at least 10 pieces of Graffiti using the Clean action.”

the way things played out was a little bit weird — i agree that there were some noticeable pain points — but i’m certainly satisfied with the experiment!! i’m glad we tried it, tho i don’t think i’ll be pushing for hidden objectives again (even though i do think i learned some more about how we could make them work)!

the original concept for this dynasty had two things i wanted to see happen: the hidden objective mechanic, and the idea of players caring almost entirely about neutral/public gamestate for their victory condition(s) instead of personal gamestate. the latter didn’t really turn out the be the case, unfortunately, so i do think i’d like one of my future dynasties to be a NON-hidden objective dynasty in which the objectives truly only care about non-personal gamestate!! i originally came up with this idea during Josh’s castlevania dynasty, because i v much enjoyed the idea of playing a kinda complicated tug-of-war with neutral ground, and was a little disappointed when we all started focusing in on our own territories and hoping the hero stumbled into them :0

If you want only common gamestate and not personal gamesate, one idea might be to add to the first Proposed rule of the dynasty that any publicly-tracked variables may not be per player and may not have values that contain player names. That would rule out the concept of “locations” for individual players, but you would have gamestate shared by everyone.

@JonathanDark oh yes, certainly! i could have done that this dynasty, but i was already doing a lot with initialisation and didn’t want to overcomplicate things.

i did also realise in retrospect (as Initialisation Phase Two came to a close) that my qualms with Josh’s suggested Agenda guidelines were misguided. it turned out the ruleset was fleshed out enough as is, and (though i couldn’t say this at the time) nobody made a single truly speculative agenda! even my own speculative agendas were centered around Facilities — my favourite mechanic of this dynasty, personally — and those were sort of an exception to the guidelines set out in Make God Laugh anyway, being undetermined but still supported by the ruleset as-is.

so… sorry, Josh. i do wish we could have had a more stub-focused, less fleshed-out ruleset to make agendas for, but at that point the opportunity for that was long gone and i just hadn’t realised :‘u

My assigned Agendas for that one were “A Facility is ACTIVE as a result of having been Operated by a Machinist whose name was present in a piece of Graffiti on the surface of that Facility at the time the Operating action was performed.” (very easy but also very easy for the creator to spot and undo, if the creator was a rival), “You carry exactly one of each Component, and each kind of Component is listed in the Damaged Parts of at least one Megasystem (there is no need for each one to be in the same Megasystem.” (a bit difficult, and also easy for the creator to spot and to block) and “The amount of Coal that you own is more than double the sum total quantity of Power present in the Megasystem that you are inhabiting.” (so easy that I’d been achieving it for almost the entire game as soon as I picked up a Coal, although the difficulty would have increased later as Power rose).

The Agendas I wrote were five “write specific cryptic graffiti and then” ones; I’d deliberately expanded the graffiti stub to be about free text, so that it could exploit “the act of causing an Agenda to be fulfilled is never considered a disclosure” and allow an ally to communicate unambiguously to me that they had drawn my Agenda, so that I could help. I was also vaguely intending that rivals would be forced to reveal they had my Agendas by having to write the graffiti first, although given that one of them got rejected, I’m glad I didn’t pursue that more aggressively.

I did find the first three weeks (!) of the dynasty quite hard to engage with for being played under the suspended sword that someone might write a free text Agenda that would let them win instantly. The only thing blocking a big zero-day scam was whether “The Great Machine judges it to be unfairly beneficial to the writer”, but it seemed like there were plausible routes around that (writing something that was unfairly beneficial to an accomplice, that was benevolently fair at the time of being judged and became unfair later, that was only unfair in combination with other Agendas, writing something in code so that its effect couldn’t be judged, etc.), and I didn’t know whether anyone would make it through. The fact that someone might have done meant that I did tune out a bit, rather than sinking time into a dynasty that could be over before the first gamestate action.

(One loophole I did warily close was the idea that you won by having two of your “own Agendas” fulfilled, where it was a little ambiguous whether that meant “Agendas that you own” or “Agendas that you wrote”. I was considering using it to get an instant victory until Bucky’s No Prior Claims purported to fix it. Although I couldn’t see that it actually had fixed it, so I made sure to reword it while doing something else.)

The whole unknown-unknowns Agenda thing did feel quite hard to work with, and I still don’t quite understand what gameplay outcomes Lemon was hoping for. Part of the reason I took Lendunistus up on their mantle offer was that my chances of winning among a group of similarly gamestate-engaged players never really felt any better than random - somebody could win at any time for achieving something I couldn’t anticipate, and I didn’t know whether my actions were helping or hindering them. It cast a bit of a shadow over every proposal, where any change to the gamestate or rules could be part of someone’s Agenda, and I would be a mug for voting it through if it didn’t help my own position.

I’d assumed that speculative agendas were off the table for being “unfairly difficult to Fulfill”; if I wrote an Agenda to activate an as-yet-non-existent Facility, I could call out anyone proposing to create it, instead insisting that we call the new Facility something else.

It was good to see the game playing out with an actively engaged group, after the first act. Possibly a useful data point that setting a high-ish bar for participation (“write some Agendas, the game cannot proceed until everyone has done that”) seemed to discourage players from staying at the table but entirely ignoring the dynastic game. I was glad that the later proposals were being contested thoughtfully among invested players, rather than being nodded past quorum by people who weren’t following the game.

[Bucky] Are you conflating my reactions with Josh’s, on the paranoia note? It felt like Josh was going harder on the 3-vs-2 frustration in the first act - and successfully, given that SingularByte eventually leaked the private conversations to show how little coordination has been happening. Beyond that point I just treated you as a competent opponent who could have allied with another rival at any point, and who was presumably using proposals to help rather than harm their own position. (If I Had A Hammer was a casual bluff, incidentally, and I would have withdrawn it later in the day if anyone had seemed too keen.) I was expecting you to ally with Jonathan towards the end, and was a little nervous that you might ally, enact Purified Watercooler (itself a bit of a bluff to suggest that I really needed to talk to Lendunistus about Agendas, when I didn’t), infodump your Agendas and then impose Omerta, all while I was asleep.