Not a huge fan of the fact that that its basically a black market for power. Seems a little redundant.

Even though the mechanic is almost identical to the black market, I think the in-game dynamic will be significantly different. The black market’s role is that of the reliable but costly source of marines, while this is a way of rewarding players who obtain a substantial lead in credits while simultaneously incentivising them to spend those credits and level the playing field.

Works.

Still finding this “rich get richer and have more options” direction a bit unhealthy for an auction game. It should be enough that a rich player just gets to win more bids.

Theoretically.

You don’t think it’s enough in practice?

No, you misunderstand. The richer player wins more bids *theoretically*. I haven’t won a bid yet. That’s why I’m rich.

Well, those are the breaks, but every lost bid leaves you in a stronger position to win it next time. I don’t think we need to commiserate unfortunate rich players further by making a “gain 5 Victory Points, but only if you’re very rich” Institution.

The point isn’t that missing bids have made me unfortunate, just that the long-term strategic balance between a strong credit balance and winning bids isn’t straightforward, and it certainly can’t be said that having a large horde of cash is necessarily an advantage, because if that is the case then it is built upon a string of cumulative small disadvantages.

Remember that the effect of this is exactly the same as the effect of the Mine, except that it costs vastly more and can thus be used maybe two or three times in a turn instead of once.

Given that the MPI is always a bit higher than the average credit balance of players, I think this is mostly going to be a one-shot. I don’t know what the new MPI is, but during the last cycle even the richest players couldn’t have used it more than once.

It’s the same as the Mine, except it has a “minimum bid” level equal to the MPI, which (even if they send in Marines!) will always shut out more than half of the players.

Still, I have a bit more money now.

Doesn’t this actually help poorer players? Presumably if a rich player wanted to, they could just chuck MPI at the Mine and be almost guaranteed to get it.

Actually you know what, this is crazy. This is just replicating the Mine, and gives an extra institution to derive inflation from. CoV

CoV

per Kevan

CoV