Sunday, November 29, 2020

Post-dynastic debrief

I’m going to take a day or so to consider my options so consider this a thread for a post-dynastic washup.

I enjoyed the core mechanism but felt that it didn’t come together in the end.

Comments

Bucky:

29-11-2020 21:04:14 UTC

I didn’t figure out how to play - how to interpret and change the Mosaic - until the last three days of the dynasty, after I’d spent half my actions for the week.

Josh: Observer he/they

29-11-2020 21:08:04 UTC

Oh god the wiki was UNREADABLE

Clucky: he/him

29-11-2020 21:18:48 UTC

Shared resource state of the board I think certainly made people hesitant to make moves for fear of setting someone up for something bigger. In hindsight, a secret “Try and build this pattern that no one else knows” might have been better than the public “complete this motif”

Bucky:

29-11-2020 21:21:53 UTC

I think it would’ve been a significant improvement if the final scoring were based partly on geometry rather than just total area.

Kevan: he/him

29-11-2020 22:10:53 UTC

I actually added “Shared playing area” to the comparison of action systems for being a helpful mechanic in discouraging stalemate: it definitely broke up the “do nothing until 11:59pm Sunday and then do everything” approach, once the board started to fill up and midweek opportunities might not last, if left for later. It was frustrating that the 12-hour window brought the game back to setting alarms and optimising actions, though.

The wiki template was a headache until I got into the system of looking up coordinates on the board view and just searching for “13-14” on the edit window. Was a shame that we didn’t have the ParserFunctions to optimise it into something tiny and legible, but we should have tried harder to sort it out.

To a small extent I think geometry was implicit - the shapes we built and areas we blocked off did affect how various colours could expand, just maybe not by very much.

I thought the core game seemed fine, and good that its gameplay didn’t get too baroque: that it all came back to what colour some squares were, and you could read the general state of the game at a glance.

Josh: Observer he/they

29-11-2020 22:29:05 UTC

I do have a general critique of the rest of the players, with the perhaps-exception of Kevan and Bucky: when it was clear that I was on a march and just directly going for a boring obvious win, why didn’t you stop me?

I mean, I get the hypocrisy here, my performative dismay on Kevan’s erase-all-the-ink proposal is definitely a stark contrast to this statement, but while the approach of that proposal was a bit blunt-force it was, I think, at some level reasonable in intent. I hadn’t *earned* the win at that point; changing the rules to make someone else even a bit competitive would have been a completely fair use of the proposal power in a Nomic.

I don’t want to be all curmudgeonly about the lazy millenials but this year, activity levels on the whole have been up but still only two dynasties have taken place that weren’t headed by Kevan (27 dynasties), me (13 dynasties) or Clucky (7 dynasties). We’re not unbeatable but it requires some will to win. So: c’mon. Win.

Bucky:

29-11-2020 22:47:22 UTC

I didn’t figure the march out until the last 48 hours of the dynasty, again because I was having trouble tracking what was going on in the mosaic. In particular, my tile actions earlier in the final week were very counterproductive. I infer that some of the relatively new players had even less awareness.

I did attempt to promote an alternate path in the form of a Monument, but made it too difficult to achieve up front (no Inlay tools) and my attempt to fix that got shot down.

Bucky:

29-11-2020 22:50:33 UTC

Also, I think the drama around the ink proposals demonstrates that the Traitor rule should not be active unless there are dynastic rules that tie into it.

Josh: Observer he/they

29-11-2020 22:51:36 UTC

As far as I’m aware, there either wasn’t a Traitor or it wasn’t germaine.

Not sure why it got pulled into the discussion substantially as the only thing that could have been impacted if there was a traitor was Kevan’s offer to win-share.

Bucky:

29-11-2020 23:21:06 UTC

That’s the only public impact. But the Traitor rule also discourages players from attempting private deals.

pokes:

29-11-2020 23:59:27 UTC

I don’t want to be all curmudgeonly about the lazy millenials but this year

ok boomer, I unidle

Raven1207: he/they

30-11-2020 00:00:28 UTC

LMAO

Raven1207: he/they

30-11-2020 00:01:21 UTC

Good thing I’m part of Gen Z

Darknight: he/him

30-11-2020 00:27:14 UTC

Dont make me feel old now

Raven1207: he/they

30-11-2020 00:40:40 UTC

Well I’m a 99er and almost 21 :3

Bucky:

30-11-2020 04:12:18 UTC

I’ve listed out what appear to me to be the key proposals in the dynastic history page (https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=The_Seventh_Dynasty_of_Clucky).  Additional commentary welcome.

Lulu: she/her

30-11-2020 05:38:13 UTC

> activity levels on the whole have been up but still only two dynasties have taken place that weren’t headed by Kevan (27 dynasties), me (13 dynasties) or Clucky (7 dynasties).

It gets even worse when you look at the wins.  The first one was a pooling win where they had the second lowest share, and the second was a diceroll between 3 players, where they had the smallest share.

I just think that you three have just been at it for very very long; and while I know that isn’t an excuse for not trying, the skill gap just seems too big to climb.

Lulu: she/her

30-11-2020 05:41:08 UTC

Why not just have a game with only newer players?  We definitely have enough for one.

Bucky:

30-11-2020 06:55:42 UTC

I think proposal volume has a lot to do with it. New players weren’t writing proposals later in the dynasty, so it developed into gameplay more suitable for experienced players than for new ones.

Since I unidled, there have been, I think, 59 proposals authored.  Raven1207 wrote two. One was a username change with no ruleset impact. Kevan, Josh, Clucky and I wrote the other 56.

If you’re trying to win, it really helps to take an active hand in sculpting the rules!

Kevan: he/him

30-11-2020 10:36:54 UTC

It did concern me that Josh’s “performative dismay” might discourage newer players from making game-changing proposals, in the final days of this dynasty or in future ones. It read like a warning that a move against any leading regular player would get a wrathful “veto this bullshit, how dare you, what even is this, can’t you see I’m about to win, you lost, get over it” reaction, which Josh was happy to paint as other veteran players agreeing on the breach of unspoken etiquette and closing ranks.

(In reality I appreciate that Bucky didn’t want Ink Wash to pass, as they had Black among their goals. I think Clucky was wrong to veto: voting against would have been enough to stop it, with Raven already voting against and Bucky very likely to.)

Bucky:

30-11-2020 17:45:23 UTC

I would’ve voted against Ink Wash even if I weren’t on Black.