Won’t that repeal the entire Historical Dynasties rule as well as its subrules?

Oh dear, are subrules not rules? We don’t seem to have actually defined “subrule” in the glossary, only the never-used “sibling rule”.

How will a new dynasty start if this rule is repealed?

Josh: by convention we’ve always assumed subrules are rules in their own right.

Once all the machines are fixed, what else is there to do? 

Once all the machines are fixed, what else is there to do? 

Henri: We’ll propose a new victory condition later.

Ienpw - I am unfamiliar with that convention, and I’ve been around a while. As I said elsewhere, though, “convention” is a crappy justification for anything. I suggest that this would make a fine glossary entry.

Isn’t it standard English usage that a sub-something is a type of something?

[scshunt] Applaud the player who fixed them? Or break some of them? “If X=Y then end the game” just seems unsatisfying either way, and (if a bug in a rule immediately repairs all the Machines) just as bad as an early victory condition.

Self-kill to keep the queue going, anyway.

@Kevan - a submarine isn’t a type of sea.

The definition is a little detached, but it’s a type of “seagoing ship”. (A “marine” isn’t a type of sea either!) But I really mean things where the noun has a meaning and its “sub” is a subtype of it - sub-basement, subway, subgenre, subspecies, subeditor, etc. If we had a rule where all Homo sapiens editors had to travel along a path to the nearest basement in order to proofread a romance novel, then it would be legal for a human subeditor to take a tunnel one floor further down and crack open some paranormal romance.

What’s been your reading of subrules, then? That a “rule” is the whole thing, and a subrule is just a divider on a par with “paragraph”, without being a rule in itself?

Effectively like sub-sections in a technical document. The use of “sub” is an acknowledgement that “section” is a useful unit of navigation that needs to be preserved, so further units of division are subsections. Referring to Section A, subsection ii makes sense if a subsection is a clearly different type of unit; if you refer to Section A Subsection ii as a “section” then you are likely to confuse people.

Hum, fair point when you put it like that. I suppose historically it’s been a shift from having everything as a separate rule, to bundling some of them together thematically, so I still think of them all as “rules”.

I’ll throw out an appendix proposal to make it unambiguous, once we’re through the early-dynasty building.

It’s alright, I’ll do it now; I don’t have anything dynastic to propose anyway.

It is called a submarine because sub means “below” or “under”, so it means below marine (or water).