BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

This feels even more unfair to Chiika and Jumble. Would cost 4 influence to get up to 2, whereas they spent 16 to get there. And then 9 to get up to 3 whereas Jumble spent 24 to get there

Might be interesting if you refunded current purchases.

This is still a blatant “punish the leaders” proposal, and I don’t see how it’s a material improvement on the last one.

Additionally, this is going to create ridiculously large amounts of Puissance; if you have no BMCs, you can get yourself 10 Puissance a day purely for having a Sepulchre.

…and this is still a daily, something that really needs fixing. There are power actions that cost 1, and we can expect people to form a long chain of them to buy time to convert all their Influence into BMCs.

that’s a good point about the daily action

I think keep the increasing costs, make it not a daily action, compensate people for stuff already purchases, and maybe just get rid of the “BMC -> puissance” rule and there is something workable and good here that makes it harder and harder for people to bank BMC which leaves more room for catchup

Fascinating, as always, that two other players with zero BMC are concerned with keeping the cost of BMC high to their own detriment. Why, it’s… it’s almost as if they’re commenting as proxies for other players, in bad faith! 🤯

If we collectively decide “OK, so everything that happened so far doesn’t matter”, that might help us now, but will act against us in the future when the same proposals pass again.

It is bad for the game in general to decide that we’re going to ignore early leads no matter what. This is basically a proposal that says “let’s ignore the gameplay and just let proposals decide who wins”, because if there’s a precedent that everyone-who-isn’t-leading can collectively outvote everyone-who-is-leading, the same thing is just going to happen in the future and nobody will ever win.

Or would you prefer it if, next time you win, we make a CFJ to negate the win on the basis that it increases the chance of everyone but you winning, so we should all vote for it?

“Some people got luckier than others at the beginning of the game, so the winner is already decided now, but we still have to play the rest of the dynasty out. The point of nomic is to never change the rules once it becomes clear that they’re unfair.” Got it!

You should also read https://blognomic.com/archive/crisis_illegitimate_heir which is the last time I made a proposal to outright punish the leader to make everyone else more likely to win.

It didn’t pass, with at least two players voting against on the basis that the same thing could just be repeated and the players who voted through the first punish-the-leaders proposal might be the players being targeted the second time. I’m in a similar situation: I still have hopes for winning this dynasty, and if we set a precedent that “if anyone is doing too well we’ll just negate everything they’ve done so far” it will almost certainly be used against me later in the dynasty to stop me winning.

Anyway, given that you seem unwilling to edit this proposal to fix the flaws in it that have been pointed out, and given that this whole thing seems to be in bad faith, I’m no longer willing to let you use this proposal slot productively, and am intentionally locking it:

(our messages crossed) I don’t think the people who are doing well at the moment got luckier. I think they reached the place they did by playing more skilfully than everyone else. There was plenty of time, once Glyphs were enacted, to put a deathtrap near the entrance, but the current leaders were the players who actually did; that isn’t getting lucky, that’s studying the rules and using them to your advantage.

I also don’t think the current rules are unfair. Even if they were, the solution is to change things going forwards, not negate everything (or almost everything) that’s happened so far. If you think that escalating Blood Mana Crystal costs is a good idea, I’ve made a proposal that implements that – without causing the leaders to automatically lose all the progress they’ve made so far (and hopefully creating some gameplay in the process). But I think you don’t really think it’s a good idea, and are just looking for a way to punish the leaders because you don’t want to try to play the dynasty as intended.

“The dynasty as intended” is exactly the kind of specious phrase I so treasure in your arguments, ais. Whose intention are you talking about?

I already laid out the good faith arguments behind this catch-up mechanic in the previous iteration. Nothing about this proposal causes anyone to lose anything. I spoke in haste when I said that Jumble and Chiiika have been lucky; they have, but you’re right, they have made skilled plays as well. But the current state of the game, as measured in victory points, says that they are the only players who have made any correct moves at all. I don’t believe that, and I’d like to change the status quo to reflect it.

I do like the irony of talking about making “good faith arguments” while accusing people of “commenting as proxies for other players”

A catchup mechanic doesn’t feel unreasonable where the early leads involved some leaps of luck which aren’t possible any more, and I like how this would add some genuine early dilemmas on whether to cash in Puissance or build stuff.

But it costing a new player only 4 Puissance to catch up with where Chiiika was at the start of today is a bit much.

[ais] BlogNomic players do often seem reflexively squeamish about direct gamestate changing proposals, I’m not sure why that is.

I am so lucky, I haven’t won even a lucky draw from kindergarten to university.

Conversely I have banked a lot of hours in boardgames.

A lot is over a thousand, even over ten thousand.