BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

This doesn’t play well with the previous proposal in the queue, which puts everything into the Wastebin. Maybe “excluding those whose name only appears once in the ruleset, in the Wastebin list”?

This also awards people who are Very Online and can run their moves as early into a cycle as possible

Any victory mechanics should be evaluated at the end of the cycle, with tiebreaks in place to deal with the case of two people reaching the victory goal in the same cycle. That way you aren’t rewarding people simply for having less of a life outside of blognomic.

I think a better fix to the problem Clucky points out may be to prevent players winning if someone else is close – say, require the player to have at least three more Prototypes than the next. “Simultaneous wins” being broken at a cycle boundary is going to make players to want to leave their wins as late in the cycle as possible (so that their opponents don’t have an obvious target to try to hit with the tiebreak – say you use Cogs as a tiebreak, and someone who achieves the win condition can either Spin or Press a box with your last point of Energy, it’s a big advantage to know the Cog total of the other winner before you choose whether to play safe or whether to gamble).

Note also that a Chime victory requires you to collect 10 different things to buy the Chime, and another 10 different things to use it. I think this is probably good (it’s best for victory conditions to start hard and make them easier, rather than start easy and make them harder), but it’s a little counter-intuitive.

I do like this victory condition, though – it links all the major mechanics of the dynasty together.

going late doesn’t matter in a solitaire game. you’re still going always try and get your tiebreak as high as possible

the only reason you’d want to wait is if you have some scam that you can use to achieve victory that others can counter, but you hope they don’t notice. but don’t really see how you block that. if you find such a scam, and no one else sees it, more power to you.

on the other hand, if you just win because you were fast enough, that is no fun for anyone

After thinking about this a bit – I’m a bit uneasy about the “otherwise gain two Prototypes” part of the machine being defined here.

The reason is that it theoretically allows a win without using Cogs or Boxes at all. If there were some infinite-Thing scam out there, then having a victory path that doesn’t use Cogs or Boxes would be pretty valuable. It’s probably better for the victory condition to at least minimally require Cog/Box usage (e.g. by making the “gain 2 Prototypes” effect only apply if you have 7 or fewer Prototypes, so that you have to get the last two with a 10-box and an 11-box).

@Clucky: the point is that you may have two paths to boost your tiebreak, one that’s safe and always increases it by 5, and one that’s risky and increases it by DICE10. Going last will let you know whether 5 is enough to win, or whether you need to gamble on the DICE10.

so we should instead just reward very online players like yourself and just let them win right away?

yeah no. that just turns “sometimes a timing issue” into “always a timing issue”

the cycle mechanics certainly aren’t without flaws. but we should keep stuff to the cadence of the game and only end stuff when a cycle completes

I’m not going to edit further. We aren’t close to activating it, so there’s plenty of time to amend the details.

do not like any rule that just lets someone win on the spot rather than at the end of a cycle

i’d enjoy seeing a variety of possible win conditions this dynasty

I don’t see how an end of cycle resolution makes timing less of an issue, it just encourages going as late as possible instead of as early as possible. I don’t like it either way, but it feels like an inevitable consequence of this being a real-time, asynchronous game. Plenty of dynasties have ended with “who posts their DoV first”.

@vovix

end of cycle doesn’t encourage people going as late as possible. if you’re in the best position to win you can do at any point during cycle and still win. you don’t need to be online right away. sure, there are edge cases where doing stuff at the end of the cycle helps but those are edge cases.

whereas with this, you do need to be online right away. otherwise someone will just win first

I also don’t really understand the “no we don’t want this because its possibly scammable” when it comes to cake, something that is not even possible to create right now there

when for all we know, there is a scam out there to quickly generate things and prototypes (something which seems unlikely, but if someone finds a way to run hot machines or get more than six machines at least within the realm of possibility)

Going late stops people from being able to respond, and also allows you to make use of proposals enacted mid-cycle that players before you could not.

what?

First to act stops people from being able to respond. That is the whole problem with in. You time your actions so you go right when the cycle happens, you post your DoV, and no one can respond even if they also could win because you dedicated more of your life to winning a online game.

Meanwhile, if you evaluate stuff at the end of the cycle sure there are edge cases where you might benefit people from acting super late. But at least someone in a dominant enough position that they can win the tiebreak regardless of what anyone else does will still win.

The proper solution, if you’re worried about it, is to make a victory state something you need to hold for a cycle. Then people actually have time to respond.

@Clucky What I was saying is that either way you get timing issues. Instant wins incentivize camping to be the first to act, while end-of-cycle conditions incentivize going last, so you can go for the win without your opponents being able to respond. I agree that the best solution is to have a holding period, which is how I set up my proposed victory condition, which was voted down because people didn’t want a mechanic that created a “do something or I win” clock.

But this 100% of the time will have timing issues. Doesn’t matter if someone has a better claim to winning than you, all you need to do when you are close to winning is wait for https://blognomic.com/archive/cold_dust to pass, delay taking your turn until you’re the last to go, take turn 1, run a cycle, take turn 2, and you can win.

If you require a cycle to complete before anyone wins, sure, some clever play could still reward people who move at the very end. But dominant play can also stop that—if you just assert a lead no one can catch, doesn’t matter that a person stayed up all night so they could act right when a cycle started or ended, you still win. And as far as other last minute shenanigans go… we can try and word victory in a way that stops that.

There isn’t much you can do to stop a “first to do X” victory mechanic.