I’m not sure about this. As Allocating is an action that can only give something to a rival, with the only return on it being that you might get something from other rivals in return, if it becomes optional I suspect it will simply never be used - and as access to Commons is now gated behind it, that weakens the commons mechanic as well. I think it has to be mandatory I’m afraid.

Ah, I was misreading the action as “choose any player including yourself”.

Maybe that makes some sense as a fix? You can give yourself 1 Energy every other turn, so long as you give some to others; if you stop taking the action, you’re missing out.

I’ve dropped the word “other”.

Don’t love it - it introduces a first-move advantage (the reward for allocating is “one quarter, rounded up” of the stockpile, so it’ll always be a race to be the first mover on weeks when you’re able to target yourself.

I’m Emperor-blind on what the current usage is, so I’ll just drop this down to forcing players to say in the comment who they’re Allocating to (so that it’s more obvious when they forget, and easy to check one Dilemma back to see if they broke the rule by repeating an Allocation).

Sounds good. I’ll have a think on more elegant solutions as well.

[Josh] Given the slowdown on reacting to Dilemmas, it does seem like we might be in the opposite situation right now, where being the first mover means that you have to grant an opponent the largest chunk of Energy - so it’s better to wait and be the last mover.

There’s a variety of use cases that I don’t want to talk about publicly.

(for the record, my slower reactions over the last couple days have been because i’m busy and tired atm, not because of any strategic reason. i plan to speed up my reactions substantially in a day or two!)