BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Mildly opposed to this, not because I can spot a major problem with it on its own terms, but more because I resent the drift away from decisive winners to effectively open pool share decided at an arbitrary time threshold; this dynasty will likely be won by someone with less than 25% of the victory resource, which seems like a silly definition of winning, to me.

When have we had a “victory share threshold” in the past? We’ve done victory shares before, but often they aren’t based on reaching a certain treshold.

Furthermore, we already have a proposal in place that has identified a major problem with this sort of threshold approach (it rewards people online at the right time to get their daily actions in) so seems like something we want to back away from not lean into

@Clucky Basically anything in here tagged Merit Random is going to be this type of victory or close to it; Trapdoorspyder 1 was the most recent one that would have fit the bill, had it resolved conventionally.

But the trigger there wasn’t “reach a certain number of victory points” it was “pass this proposal”. It also put a cap on the number of victory points someone could get for their roll, something this doesn’t afford.

I think that shows that a one-size-fits-all mechanic probably isn’t gonna work here.

The victory share threshold I was thinking of was the… current one.

(As for “online at the right time,” nothing about this says anything regarding a daily action, and it’s triggered at the emperor’s discretion to allow for exactly that kind of “everybody get one last turn in” leeway.)

I do still like the idea of defining a Victory Variable to pre-empt the endgames where everyone just has differently-coloured piles of fool’s gold and it’s hard to get much proposal traction for a method of deciding who’s furthest ahead - gravitating instead towards an unsatisfyingly levelled coin flip, or a metadynasty. “But we agreed two weeks ago that Zirconia was the Victory Variable, and that Pyrite wasn’t” would be a useful thing to have there.

I don’t think it needs a defined Threshold mechanic, though, which would always reward a particular type of infinite-generation scam, and would risk handing dynasties to players who’d taken no actions to achieve them. I think “Zirconia is the Victory Variable” alone is probably enough for a quorum to agree some way to hand out victory on its basis, if a consensus has been reached that it’s time to cut a dynasty short.

And yes, I agree with Josh that randomised pooling shouldn’t become a default. Why not just “most Victory Variable wins”?

Have we had dynasties where the VP-analogy was labelled as such from the very beginning?

The generics don’t seem especially necessary.

[Josh] We’ve done a few like this one a week into the Activism dynasty, where a variable is set up very plainly as being the victory score, but hedged by not yet being plugged in to the words “achieves victory”, or by being put explicitly beyond a distant calendar date.