Total proposal volume by proposal, between the Ascension Address and Declaration of Victory:
Bucky 41
Josh 30
Raven1207 10
Coderblaze 9
Pokes 4
Kevan 4
Brendan 3
Clucky 1
Robotabc773 1

Same but for January only:
Bucky 21
Josh 11
Coderblaze 4
Brendan 3
Raven1207 1

Codifying pooling removes a lot of its advantages: in this case making pool memberships public (removing the option to keep an alliance secret, or for any given group of individually-leading players to agree to end the game), having the victory chosen at pure random (making it unappealing for a strong player to ally with a much weaker one) and making pool membership manipulable in-game (meaning that a leading player or team - with the exception of Blue Lotus - could suddenly find themselves having to share their win with a hanger-on).

This is Nomic, of course, and unidling players could have changed any of that, but I think any simulated pooling mechanic is still going to be up against the real thing, until - if you add secrecy and freedom of movement - it gets to the point where it may as well be the real thing. It’s certainly been the case in past dynasties that ostensible “team games” often end up being brought down by cross-team alliances, as part of some covertly planned pooling strategy that exploits the assumption that everyone is loyal to their team.

To answer the question of not joining in and proposing, nothing in the dynasty really interested me.  I didn’t really care for mechas.

Thanks for starting this thread, Bucky.

In general my feeling on the dynastic ruleset for this dynasty is that it was designed for more players than we had. Timed actions and combat mechanics would have been better integrated and, I think, just better functioning with more players, more enemies and more nuance needed in the timeline.

This dynasty definitely tipped over the line of being slightly too much cognitive load for the Emperor, especially given that it was hard for anyone to check my work until it was too late. There were days when I resented the inescapability of the task and I think it might have been better had there not been a slightly pervasive feeling that this was a “failed” dynasty (just on grounds of player interest). 

I am very grateful to Bucky and Coderblaze for having played this dynasty and for having made the ruleset work. There are elements of the ruleset of this dynasty that I think are genuinely good and should be salvaged for a better dynasty.

I’d gamed out some multi-way combat scenarios, and there was a tactic available where a Pilot could schedule an attack right before an identical attack from another Pilot, and thus nullify the earlier-scheduled attack. This, moreso than the general need to cycle one’s attacks quickly, was the reason why attacks needed to be scheduled for the earliest part of the available window.

Oh, and “failed dynasty” seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy more often than not.

Uh-huh

“On a meta level, I was very confused by the several players who were opining on the dynasty on Slack (which I couldn’t access at all) and waiting for it to fizzle, but not willing to actually jump in and propose anything.”

Remember that Josh did choose to take a very loud stand at the end of the last dynasty, to say that an endgame proposal to diminish an advantage enjoyed by a possible leader was enormously, wrong-headedly rude, and not how BlogNomic is meant to be played. I’d assume some players took that to heart without being sure where the line was drawn.

If Blue Lotus were on track for victory as a cosily unjoinable private Corporation, a proposal of “allow players to join Blue Lotus some other way” or “make another Corporation like that” may have gotten the same disapproval, with Josh wielding the veto this time. I wasn’t that pessimistic myself, but I was genuinely surprised that a proposal of “leaders lose, random other player wins” was maintaining apparently serious admiration from Josh instead of a straight nice-try veto once its marks at Blue Lotus had spotted and called the scam.

Oh good, a new angle by which this is all my fault

I should probably take a little break from the game, eh. See you in a bit

Don’t get me wrong, this looked like a good end to a dynasty, and I didn’t feel genuinely blocked out from it. But if we’re asking why nobody made a last-minute proposal to pull ahead, there’s a precedent in very recent memory.

(My own takeaway from last dynasty, iterated from this one, is that the group will accept a power grab if it’s wrapped up in a thin layer of ruleset mechanic or scam, but start to get squeamish about equivalent cut-to-the-chase gamestate amendments.)

I think Kevan is being unfair to Josh here, given my own behavior on those same topics.

I prefer victories to come by dynastic gameplay, rather than core gameplay. That means a proposal to change the dynastic rules in a way that happens to disadvantage the perceived leader is okay (and as the leader I might vote for or propose such rules) but a proposal whose main purpose is to punish the leader for leading is off-limits, particularly if it would put them far behind rather than simply leveling the field.

Thanks for running the dynasty, Josh. I tried blaming you a few times but my idleness was ultimately not you.

I gesture more broadly at the whole thing last dynasty: I think it was an unintended snowball where Josh put on a good performance to win over floating voters, and didn’t actually expect to get the veto he was pretending to demand, but rolled with it.

We ended that dynasty with the announcement that three veteran players all agreed that a certain type of late-game proposal was extremely inappropriate, and a general sense that we should instead “play the game out” unamended. So I’d assume that was why this dynasty didn’t get any late-game challengers.

I don’t think this was a failed dynasty, and I didn’t mean to give that impression, in slack or on here.

Nor me, this was definitely a good set of mechanics that were evidently worth playing out, in (at least as it looked to me) a strange and original narrative game world. The combo-building construction dynasties are always among my favourites, and it’s a shame that I never got to try a Shell out on the battlefield.

I sorta felt like CB and Buck were more guaranteed to win and felt that it was patty-cake until one of them wanted to give in to the other

@Kevan, then in hindsight you should’ve jumped into a Shell, not with the expectation
@Raven, I felt that our lead was only significant in the last week or so of the dynasty. Up to that point, even with my meme, it mostly amounted to a couple of lucky shots. Plus joining a Corporation; I was very disappointed that Battle Lines failed to apathy with nobody AGAINST it, but even without it someone that had already gotten lucky once could guarantee joining one of the two corporations by simply staying in a Shell until either they could join Air Power or they were shot down first for the Ace League.