By the argument of your first point, doesn’t that make the whole idea of “No Private Communication” pointless in any dynasty? Why not just repeal it?

And that’s not sarcasm…I actually mean it. I’d be in favor of either that, or severely limiting the Alliance-switching to maybe once a dynasty or at best once a week.

It’s basically just the interactions between alliances and no private communications right now that’s causing the issue.

Alliances aren’t standard so the rule normally blocks all private communication (excluding the emperor), and even when alliances are on, you can still restrict them dynastically to meet some condition so that it’s a big deal getting the ability to chat. It’s only when alliances are free to set that it causes “no private communications” to become silly.

And when I say “normally”, I of course mean “normally, when it’s turned on” since it’s not a standard rule either.

If the Comms/Alliances interaction paragraph “literally does nothing useful”, wouldn’t it be better to fix or repeal it? If we just switch half of it off, the next dynasty that uses both rules is going to have the same questions.

Gotta be honest, if the dynasty’s emerging 4-2 dynamic is going to persist, I’m lightly in favour of keeping impediments in place to your communication… You might want to flout the spirit of the rule but it doesn’t then follow that we should help you change the letter, too.

That’s a difficult one. On one hand, yes, it’s mostly useless. On the other, there can be times where you can make it work by restricting how often you can become allies. It’s not like special case rules should really come with explicit guidance in the rules text though so it’s hard to make that explicit.

@Josh I can freely declare that I have no current or future deals with Lulu, nor past deals in this dynasty, nor to my knowledge have any such deals been discussed. The last communication I’ve had with her, direct or indirect (outside of comments on proposals) was the discussion that you witnessed about there being few people for her to ally with.

There’s no 4-2 team-up here.

@Singular I mean, we already know that you have no contact with her - we can see that from checking the “alliances” column of tracked gamestate, which is a great reason to keep that publicly tracked information available.

That’s why I’m specifying indirect too, to cover questionably legal cases of having messages shuttled back and forth.

Per my earlier comment, if you think the paragraph in Declared Alliances about combining with No Private Communication “literally does nothing useful”, we should fix that rule.

“mentioning what one person said to you in another chat” sounds like a clear break of Private Comms’ “use of creative strategies to circumvent this rule” if it’s being done intentionally to communicate gameplay information between two currently non-Allied players (no different to me asking a non-player to pass you a message), and not if not.

The public disclosure of who you’re talking to is a useful mechanic, even if there are ways of circumventing some aspects of the spirit of the rule.

Contra Kevan, I think Declared Alliances’ exemption of intra-alliance communication from No Private Communication exempts said communication from the entire rule, including the creative strategies clause. Indirect private communication is not a scam so long as every direct exchange of information happened along a two-way Alliance link. However, the creative strategies clause does cover ideas like establishing a code via an Alliance link for a limited private information exchange on public channels after breaking the Alliance.

However, I’m voting against this because I’m enjoying the awkwardness. We’re rewriting the Declared Alliances playbook right now, and the tactics haven’t settled into a new metagame yet.

hey all, pardon my absence — i had a very busy few days and wasn’t able to make any time for blognomic!

CoV per lemon’s comment on CfJ: That Feeling Inside