BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

One can’t simply “Set the Route Score of every Tripper who is not a Candidate to 0.” while the Route Score is permanently defined as the total coins plus 4xSouveniers. Can they?

Well, it’s an Atomic Action, so I assume that the definition of Route Score is only checked while outside of the Action. That’s how I’d think of it.

yeah that was my thought too. but I updated it to use “Final Route Score” instead to be safer

A very quick back-of-envelope calculation suggests final scores would be something like the following, if everyone took optimal moves:

Clucky = 35
Josh = 29
Kevan = 30
Raven1207 = cannot win here
Tech = 34
Trapdoorspyder = cannot win here
TyGuy6 = 36

Which might be slightly off, but this isn’t very compelling for a player near the back, and it’s surprising to have TyGuy as front runner.

The elaborate complexity of the atomic is making my skin prickle; it might just be defensiveness, remembering Brendan’s recent word-soup-resolving-to-alphabetical-order scam. I can’t see the angle but that, and Kevan’s calculation putting me at the back of the pack when I came as close as anyone to actually winning, is enough to earn my

“came as close to anyone as winning”

how? you tried a scam and it failed. From a gameplay perspective, that doesn’t really strike me as “came close to winning”

I said this on Discord and should repeat it here, since this is game-ending: this proposal does seem unduly complex when there are only a few live stops on the board and (I think?) only one realistic way that the final few moves can be played out.

From Clucky’s talk of a “21.8% chance of winning” in the Barnsley Chop comments, it sounds like they’ve already calculated the odds here and are happy with them. So why not just roll DICE1000 and assign accordingly, based on all those odds? Choosing to play more turns and then perform a complex atomic action does make it feel like there might be a scam either in the atomic action, or in the rules for the remaining turns.

I worded it this way because letting a dynasty play out and reach a semi-natural endpoint seems more fun to me than just doing an immediate chop.

If I had tried to try to figure out how I think the final moves would’ve gone I would’ve run into two problems. What I see as optimal play for other people either could not be optimal or could be stuff those people have missed. In the former case, those people would’ve complained that I wasn’t properly giving them the right chop odds. In the latter case, I’m putting myself at a disadvantage by giving them the optimal move.

Letting the dynasty play out until we’re all at the end solves these problems.

Fair point, although I’d expect the remaining players who haven’t timed out to a Starting Point are all paying enough attention not to make a bad move.

This isn’t “letting the dynasty play out”, though, it’s proposing a victory condition of “most coins” (which you’re leading in), and a rule change of “coins belonging to people who didn’t have a dynasty last year count double” (which takes TyGuy into the lead). I wouldn’t vote for either of those rule changes in isolation.

I think we should end the dynasty on what the gameplay was—collecting coins and Souveniers. Sure, could’ve included Will in that but it didn’t seem to do much of anything during the dynasty so I ignored it.

now because we’re ending the dynasty now, just suddenly going “most coins wins” is a bit unfair. Hence using it for weighting rather than just giving the person with the most coins the win.

As far as getting fresh blood in the emperor pool goes, the general sentiment from what I’ve observed on discord is that people are a bit tired of the same faces winning over and over again. Hence the attempt to give more of a chance to those people who either haven’t run a dynasty yet or haven’t run a dynasty in a long time

For what it’s worth, I don’t disagree with the sentiment that more people should be in the emperor pool, but think that should be achieved through partnership, mentoring and assistance (a la Clucky’s partnership with Tech in this dynasty, or mine with lemon in the last) rather than arbitrary victory awards that undermine the game we just spent a month playing.

After all - if you’re someone with zero dynasties so far and we slouch into a default of chops advantaging new emperors then the best play for those players is to steer a dynasty into a stalemate and hope for the best in the roll.

I also think that cutting Raven out entirely and prioritising Ty over Trap is unjustified.

Raven didn’t do anything all dynasty so cutting him in on the win possibility didn’t sit right with me.

Spyder can easily become a candidate if they wish. Unless you’re talking about giving Ty the “didn’t run a dynasty in 2021” in which case I think going “You’ve haven’t had a turn as an emperor in 2 years, so I’d give you priority over the person who was an emperor a couple of months ago” is definitely justified in my book.

Even if a quorum are behind the idea that people who haven’t won a game in a year should get double servings of each dynasty’s currency, the very end of a dynasty is not a fair time to introduce that rule.

If you add it near the start of a dynasty then the players can decide how to work with it, idle players can rejoin to take advantage, and active players can idle if they feel it works too strongly against them.

Throwing it in at the very end of a game where it only affects a couple of players (both of whom you’ve teamed up with?) is not fair to players who decided to play or not play the earlier weeks of this dynasty based on the rules it had.

I disagree. If writing a proposal that gives people who haven’t run a dynasty in a long time a better chance of winning at the end game is bad; then couldn’t you say the same thing about allying yourself with someone who hasn’t run a dynasty in a long time and pushing them toward victory at the end.

I find this proposal fascinating. I doubt Clucky has a scam in there; it’s not his MO. (Though Josh might in his, seeing how he ‘forgot’ a comma after his own line?) If Clucky is doing scams, he’s welcome to start in with this one.

@Ty Why do you think Clucky doesn’t scam? That would seem to me to be a distinct misread.

I don’t know what scam you’re seeing in a missing full stop but it’s a typo, so I’ve added it back in.

[Clucky] No. You choosing to help another player happens within whatever rules we’re playing under. You proposing to retroactively change the dynasty’s scoring happens outside of those rules. Which is fine, this is Nomic, but don’t sell that as “seems fair to me to do a chop based on coins”.

I don’t think TyGuy is saying I don’t scam. I definitely scam. But he’s right that if I had a scam here, it wouldn’t really fit with my normal scams which 90% of the time are just taking advantage of loopholes in the rules, and 10% of the time is sneaking something through to help with gameplay.

Scamming an end of game chop just seems a bit boring, especially when we just saw it a few dynasties ago.

For the sake of posterity and other voters, TyGuy has just let slip on Discord that he was working with Clucky on the end-game scam, which puts this proposal’s elevation of TyGuy specifically into a different perspective.

doesn’t that kinda show the flaw in your reasoning? We don’t know what scams people were working on, so rewarding players for working on scams as those being closer to winning seems too arbitrary.

I’ve consistently said that I’d be up for changing %s based on disclosed information. What I’m not okay with is arbitrary inflation for what has now been revealed to be a bullshit reason: the “oh, I want new emperors, but only ones who have been emperor twice before and not in the last year and not ones called Raven” is actually just you doing a favour to your confederate.

giving Tyguy a better chance of winning has little to do with the fact that I worked with him a bit on a scam. It did probably play a role in expanding the chop pool as it showed others were still engaged in the dynasty, but it definitely wasn’t any sort of ‘you get this for trying to help me’ arrangement like you’re implying.

even if this passes it’ll be 4-3 and create some hard feelings. campfire demon seems more fun way of ending things anyways