BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

The restriction on Plays was sort of meant to do that, but it’s not perfect either.

So what if we did “turns” but not really? A Snail may take its Turn, in which they have an hour to make their legal number of Plays, and no other Snail may make Plays during that Snail’s Turn. After that hour, that Snail’s Turn ends and they may not take another Turn for 6/8/12 (pick a long enough number) hours.

I was really trying to avoid any notion of Turns, but I’m forced to yield to Kevan’s thinking on some of this. If we keep the Turns limited like this, that will still allow an easy flow of the game.

I agree that the restriction on plays isn’t perfect – in particular it means that two cooperating Snails can take their entire race at once, but a lone Snail is stuck.

I like the line of thought on “turns” but don’t think that implementation actually works – it helps to make cooperative timing scams interruptable, which is possibly a good thing, but which may just end up substantially slowing down the game because they’re one of the few things that prompt Snails to move rather than wait – and it doesn’t obviously do anything else.

I think I understand the fundamental issue, but I don’t know the solution. The issue is that it is normally generally better to delay as long as possible in order to get last-mover advantage: for the most part, the rules effectively simulate a race in which everyone is moving independently and we see who finished fastest in their personal gamestate. Being able to know what other people did is a huge advantage in the “solitaire” version of snail racing, because you can adapt your play based on what your opponents did. Leapsnailing and Slipstreaming both take the game away from the “solitaire” viewpoint somewhat, but also generally reinforce the “going last is better” timing properties (except when Snails cooperatively Slipstream each other, which is just about the only factor that made anything at all happen in the current Race).

Counteracting that pressure, we have offensive Items and Predators; offensive Items can’t be used against Snails who have finished already, so if you’re using those, you want to move early; and Predators create a risk of failing to finish on anyone who is delaying too long. However, those are inherently vulnerable to timing scams, because in many cases you want to use/trigger them at the first possible moment. We’ve currently attempted to fix that by placing a time delay on them, so that Snails can get out of the way of the Items or Predators early in a Race if they want to; that fixes most of the timing scams in theory, except for scams in which offensive Items interact with each other (which become a straight race to see who can deploy those first). Incidentally, Waking Hour doesn’t do anything to block that remaining case of a timing scam, and I don’t think Turns would either?

As I said above, I don’t know how to resolve the situation, but that’s what the current situation is as I see it. Right now, the pressure very much seems to be in the “do nothing” direction, but that probably happened because the active Snails chose very defensive Item loadouts, meaning that all the pressure is in the direction of waiting.

I suspect this dynasty will be over soon anyway.