BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

I inherently don’t like this sort of tiebreak: it encourages doing any victory shenanigans you might have right before the cycle limit, so that other people can’t respond to them. Achieving victory straight away upon something happening is fairer, because the timing is less predictable (it might depend on the cycle limit, but might also depend on a proposal passing, or on some other action by someone else, etc.).

I also don’t like the flavour of the victory condition being locked down like this (especially as a Cake seems like it would be inherently tied to Flour and Sugar, thus heavily advantaging farming-based strategies). We should look for a victory condition that bridges together the dynasty’s main mechanics, rather than lock the flavour to something that’s hard to use correctly.

“allowing the first person online when the cycle happens to win right away is better than giving everyone a fighting change”

wow

and having a victory condition to work towards allows people to shape mechanics around that victory condition as a north star to work towards

whereas if you just let mechanics continue to develop, you get a bunch of random mechanics that become very unwieldly to then okay “okay how do we turn these into a victory condition”

@Clucky: your proposal also gives the first person online when the cycle happens the win. They just do it as the cycle ends, and then immediately do the cycle action in order to lock in their win. At least with an instant win, the triggering event is less certain.

Also, we have an existing thing to work towards – Prototypes – and your suggestion makes it less clear what we should be working towards, because it’s unclear what a Cake is.

A victory condition like “have 10 more Prototypes than anyone else” would probably make questions of timing irrelevant, anyway; waiting to the end of the cycle only matters if there’s a realistic chance that anyone could catch up in that time.

if someone is the only person during a cycle who can make a cake, then yeah they win. you are correct there

prototypes are currently just as much victory mechanic as sugar is right now. I understand that because you invested there, you think they should be somehow tied to victory and that people should work towards them but that isn’t how the game of nomic actually works.

I did say in the proposal that I expected them to eventually form the basis of a victory mechanic. You voted against it, but a lot of people voted for it on that basis.

really feel like this shouldn’t need to be said, but people vote on the contents of a proposal. not on the flavor text. flavor text has zero impact on the actual rules.

I disagree – knowing where people are going with a proposal is important when voting on it.

i think it’s beneficial to the game to keep an open mind & not lock ourselves into specific visions of the future. just bc prototypes have been discussed as a potential victory mechanic doesn’t mean other victory mechanics are off the table, and this incomplete one being put into the ruleset doesn’t equal a binding promise that we will develop it more in the future!

and @ais i think it’s very presumptuous of u to say what basis other ppl were voting for a given proposal on

yeah I also think prototypes as a means to do stuff like unlock fancier machines is a much more interesting mechanic that would help tie the dynasty together even more

…is there any reason why, with this, you couldn’t just win by giving Jumble a cake in real life? I thought there was a specific rule against that sort of thing but I can’t find it. Normally, with undefined phrases, we rely on there being no way to satisfy them, but the action being described there is something that it’s physically possible to do.

Anyway, this proposal is basically a) locking us into a particular tiebreak for the victory condition, which effectively encourages camping the cycle action so that you can get in just before; and b) strongly implying a particular flavour for the victory condition, which a) doesn’t make much sense with the theme of the dynasty, and b) probably advantages the players with sugar and flour (like me) as those are the only dynastic quantities we have right now that fit the flavour.

The other reason I think prototypes would make a good victory condition is that they neatly tie together all the existing mechanics. For example, Clucky’s 8-box in storage is useless for most purposes, but would be pretty powerful when aiming to accumulate prototypes (as it would let Clucky break the 7-box barrier). Likewise, lemonfanta’s large Cog stash is useful when it comes to paying for prototypes, but has no obvious relevance to baking a cake. So this is a big step backwards – it’s basically saying “actually, I plan to make half the dynastic mechanics irrelevant because they don’t fit Cake flavour, and also I’m going to confuse you all about what the victory condition is, despite one of the FOR votes on Prototypes being explicitly based on it being helpful to know what you’re aiming for”.

“Let’s get lots of cogs and try to build increasingly large boxes” is much better in terms of directing the dynasty than “who knows how you actually bake a cake”.

[ais] “Presenting a Cake” is sufficiently defined as being the Effect of a Cake, isn’t it?

because this is pretty much an instant win if someone finds (or makes, or has already found) a way to generate an arbitrarily-named Thing.

Also thematically odd for workers in a heavily automated factory to be striving to produce exactly one (1) cake before presenting it to the building.

So don’t introduce arbitrary thing generation? That seems like a fairly easy thing to avoid.

Scams, Clucky, scams.

Couldn’t you say the same thing about any victory mechanic?

But right now, I can take a look at the rules and safely say there is no way for anyone to pull off arbitrary thing generation. Whereas it is possible for people to get stuff like prototypes. So while I don’t see a way for infinite prototype generation, I can’t safely say its not possible.

Thus, it seems better to tie victory to something we can control than something that for all we know someone might already be able to pull off.

It’s on top of Ais’s point about timing. If anyone spots a loophole to generate an arbitrarily-named Thing - even if it’s such a simple loophole that everyone else could immediately repeat it to get a dozen Cakes of their own - they’ll be guaranteed victory from the timing of this rule, by waiting until the end of the cycle before generating a Cake and giving away the secret.

I can’t see a way to generate an arbitrarily-named Thing right now, but I know it potentially wouldn’t take much (eg. a rule saying to “gain a Thing” without specifying which one; “I choose to gain a Cake Thing”). I’m not confident enough to gamble the game on that, particularly when a rival player is suggesting we gamble the game on it.

but ais has argued for an “as soon as you win, you win” which is even worse way of doing things because all you need to do is be the first person online after a cycle happens

i’m not sure with the current rules how you avoid the “person finds a clever scam they keep to themselves” stuff from happening. Seems like if that happens we should just congratulate the person on a game well played.

i like this, but it also feels a bit too scammable

. I did not expect joking about baking a cake in Discord to cause this much controversy :P.

Neither the conventional nor the scam way is achievable right now, so this just creates an abstract goal that we can develop later. For instance, similar to my Magnum Opus proposal, the cake-baking machine could have a built-in delay to allow opponents to respond.