Saturday, February 08, 2020

Declaration of intent

So, just in case people try to anticipate the win condition and plan ahead of time at some point around the extremely common win condition of “having the most apples”, I intend to push for a win condition which is fractional, in the form of “lottery tickets”. Having more tickets means you have more of a chance to win at the end (your chance would be your_tickets/total_tickets). We already do mantle splits all the time so I don’t think this would be too jarring. I don’t think this changes the idea of the game much either because you’d still aim to have the most “wealth” - which would be the tickets.

My intent is that playing the game fairly straight is still viable - even if you’re in an alliance, because you’d want to maximize the sum of the group’s tickets instead of having 1 person be the pool target and the rest can dump their wealth into them and play kamikaze. Hopefully. Things can always get weirded up in nomic lol.

My intent is to just shake up gameplay, team play/cabals aren’t entirely bad, but I just aim for variety for the sake of variety.

posted by Madrid at 08 Feb 2020 08:11:40 UTC Comments (2)

Comments

Kevan: he/him

08-02-2020 08:49:42 UTC

Oh, it’s you, I started reading this as being an intent from the Liaison

I don’t think I’d vote for a lottery victory condition. Some past dynasties have had a lot of tactical dynastic play come down to (without us intending it) a single winner-selection die roll for the final action, and that’s always felt cheap and something to avoid.

This is interesting for what it does to cabals, but looks like it would either end up as enforcing a cabal victory (if victory could only be triggered by unanimous consent of all apple-holders) or a lottery victory (if it could be triggered in other ways).

The Duke of Waltham: he/him

08-02-2020 08:59:57 UTC

I have all those ideas to advance the theme, but I’m not sure how to translate them to mechanics.

Something about the Portal and activity through it causing fractures to the two Universes (probably disproportionately on one of them), which could be a negative reaction to people travelling across or advancing relevant research. Something about each player’s Scientists being in conflict with each other (and unable to communicate across the Portal) rather than work in concert, because they want different things even though they are controlled by the same human… I think each side could have a different victory condition, and whoever reaches it first wins, although it couldn’t be at the cost of dooming the other Universe because the destruction of one would bring down the other as well.

Things like that. I’m not saying they will happen, but it would be something different from the usual dynamics.