Not sure I like the last-minute strategy this creates - there’s an incentive to conceal your Request until the previous Drop is almost over, so that opponents can’t plan around it (or can even be misled into preparing for a fake Request that you change at the last minute). That’s a tactic available to players who can check in frequently and be awake at the right time, and not available to those who can’t.

(Also, working out what an empty Request would default to here is an interesting challenge - what is the “alphabetically earliest legal text string” describing a Block?)

Yeah, the last minute shenanigans tactic is something I thought about, but I didn’t think it would be as big of a deal. I wonder if adding something like “The architect at the start of the bidding queue may not change their request” would fix it.

If you break a block description into its component parts then it becomes A J-block of Corridors. Most phrases will default to I-blocks and corridors, because you can replace the components in the description. Note that: “An I-block” comes after “A J-Block”, and sticking an “a” in front of a letter will come before any other options. the position of the ‘+’ symbol would matter if corridor wasn’t winning anyways.

This theory isn’t perfect, but I think its pretty robust.

Even without changing it, there’s still the advantage of setting your Request five minutes before the end of the previous Drop.

  Per Kevan’s comment.

We tend to want information on what other players are doing before performing our own actions. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it tends to slow the game somewhat. I feel this is the main reason the last Dynasty suffered.
(It does beg the question, though, of how a Dynasty where everyone does their actions “at the same time” would work out; something like Diplomacy. It would be difficult to make that work, as “at the same time” is somewhat of an impossibility without physically being in the same space.)

[naught] It’s actually quite easy given the setup we have here - player can submit their actions privately to the Emperor, who then processes them at the same time. It worked particularly well in the Assassin dynasty (with some tweaks for how to handle players who fail to submit orders). Would be good to try a proper Diplomacy dynasty some time.

I do like that this would speed the production of blocks up, but I think a slightly different way could make it better. So to move the queue along.

I think that since we’ve been using descriptions of blocks that “An L-Block of Corridor, Corridor, Corridor, Corridor.” is the auto-default block.