I think the dynasty started off with a lot of protosals, so people were voting down anything that wasn’t perfect and waiting for a rewrite.

Although you’ve got your Ns and Ms mixed up.

A couple of issues:

In “if the Ansible is not currently 100% complete or Unpowered”, it is unclear whether the ‘not’ refers only to ‘currently 100% complete’ or also to ‘Unpowered’. (It’s also unclear what ‘currently’ refers to but that’s not relevant.)

Besides the Ns and Ms, it’s weird to repeat “where N is…” but not what P and C are (between CONSTRUCT and DISMANTLE)

If I Influence the Signal Tower while the Ansible is not 100% Complete, if I have, say, no Marine, I could argue that I am not fulfilling the “provided they have them” condition and so may keep the 5 Credits, 2 Power and 1 Councilman.

Yeah, I messed up with the N/M thing. Good point on the Unpowered thing, although I’m not sure why I added it in the first place (if its unpowered, then nothing happen) =P

But all that can get fixed with another proposal.

No, the Unpowered is meaningful, since once could Influence the Signal Tower while the Ansible is at the same time Unpowered and 100% Complete.

Whether we want it or not is another question ;-)

Oh yeah, its when the Ansible is unpowered. Forgot about that. Knew I had some reason for putting that there =P

I think its good. It fits stylistically—you need a working Ansible to launch the signal.

In my opinion this system is flawed, anybody wanting to get the ansible online or wanting to influence the signal tower is really going to be set back, and I doubt any player is going to ever be so far ahead of everyone else that they will be able to give up so many resources while maintaining their lead.

This will just lead to a dynasty that never ends as none of the top players will want to give up that top spot just to get a little closer to ending the dynasty.

The current system may not be the ideal one, but I think it is better than this one.

Well you do have a point, I don’t want a stalemate.

If no one works towards it we can revise it, but I don’t think it’ll be a stalemate and think its way better than ‘make six lucky guesses’

I really like the public mechanic. Its not intended as simple “guessing” - its supposed to be a mix of reading what others will do and being able to control and influence on your own. I would much prefer to smooth out that mechanic to everyone’s satisfaction, such as saying that a guess still counts if no one influence the institution, requiring a mix of your own and others influencing, or changing how many guesses you have to make, perhaps having it fluctuate based on the gamestate, rather than abandoning the concept. I think the Ansible method will lead to a much more mundane and less exciting end. The public will work - I think it at least deserves a chance.

“Reading what others will do” is fine in a game with a small number of players and a small number of decisions, but if you’re having to guess how 11 people will bid on 12 auctions, you really can’t do any better than guess.

@Kevan: But that’s the point, you have to be in control of the game in order to make good guesses. Besides, you only have to guess 6 institutions.

@Kevan, it doesn’t have to be everyone’s bids on everything. The details can change, but the mechanic I believe is a good one.

Well, there’s picking six Institutions and guessing how the bids will go on them, or there’s looking at all 13 Institutions and guessing which six you have the best chance of overpowering with your own Marines.

At the high end (where you have over six times as many Marines as every other player put together) it’s an automatic win, but it drops off into sheer luck very quickly, below that. And since the would-be winner would lose a crippling number of Marines if they guessed even slightly wrongly, I’m not sure anyone would take the risk.

CoV