I’m not as concerned about a 3-person conspiracy, so no need to struggle to push it up to 4.

I think of people want to eliminate collaboration then they should just pass a rule that bans collaboration rather than tinkering with second-order phenomena that slow the game down.

(For what it’s worth, it’s interesting that the two players leading the charge on this are the two who are 9 points adrift of the leader… What’s your plan if this succeeds? Or are you just coronating Habanero? If the latter, then again, just do that by proposal and spare us all a week of looking at an unchanging game state while everyone waits for the OpTiMaL time to make the first move)

@Josh: I think my chance of winning the dynasty is higher if two-player conspiracies are stopped than if they aren’t, because I’m not part of one.

I also note that you are only 4 points behind Habanero, so you would have quite a reasonable chance of winning legitimately if this were a no-collaboration game.

As such, I can only conclude that you’re a) intending to win in a conspiracy with someone and b) being misleading about the reason behind your vote in an attempt to hide the fact.

(I am also fairly confident that the race will not devolve into a week of waiting, now that the Slug of Death works properly and gives players motivation to move.)

I see Josh’s point on half-measures, though. I’ll propose including the No Cooperation building block.

If you do so, consider suggesting to fix the typo in the building block while you’re there (“Victory in Ascension” should be “Victory and Ascension”) – it’ll save slots and blog space to fix it in the future.

to go with the full-stop cooperation blocking instead.

For what it’s worth, I’m worried that the full-stop version may lead to arguments about it being subjective what counts as cooperation. Suppose that two Snails both start slipstreaming each other early on for fear of the later movers running past them and deploying squirrels on them; that’s going to look a lot to other players like they’re cooperating, even if it’s purely made in terms of individual decisions. As such, it might lead to a DoV being decided subjectively in terms of “did these players help each other so much as to effectively kingmake?” rather than with an objective rule.

Outright saying “no, you can’t have two players bouncing off each other for an instant win” is likely a more objective way to resolve the situation (although probably doing both is a more comprehensive approach).

@ais Ignoring the paranoid-conspiracy-brain ranting of the “as such, I can only conclude” business, if you’re not part of a conspiracy have you considered becoming part of one? No-one has approached me about teaming up at all in advance of this race, which I can only assume reflects a lack of ambition amongst those who are content to lose.

@Josh: Conspiracies are much more useful for people who are ahead than people who are behind, under this ruleset. The primary chance for players other than Habanero to win is if Habanero gets eaten by predators and fails to finish altogether (meaning that the Track Record is irrelevant), which means that it benefits us players who are behind if the game goes long (at which point it becomes much less certain who will win, as Predator results are considerably random). The race is quite likely to go long, unless Habanero is involved in a conspiracy, in which case it will probably all be over the moment the Race starts as Habanero and a co-conspirator zoom off to the finish line before anyone has the opportunity to stop them.

As such, to have any chance to win this dynasty, it is quite important that the players ahead of me aren’t involved in conspiracies. Although joining a conspiracy myself might be fun, I wouldn’t get nearly as much of an advantage from it as Habanero would, so my best chance to win is to shut down the possibility of a conspiracy using rules changes.

Along similar lines, if you don’t want Habanero to win, you should also be trying to shut down the possibility that he could make use of a conspiracy to finish the race in the first few minutes. So I’m confused as to why you are voting AGAINST on this and all the related proposals, given your stated opinions about not wanting the race to turn into a coronation – in that situation, you logically should be voting FOR.

I think I can beat Habanero in a straight fight.

I wrote the Coregency split in to encourage lower-ranked players to think creatively so as to try to beat frontrunners through positive play. I am disappointed that they are instead shrugging themselves into irrelevance. Habanero doesn’t need to wait 24 hours to become vulnerable to predators or the Slug; he can crawl to a win no sweat.

Only if other people play, allowing him to make more than 3 plays of his own.

This proposal makes things more stable by ensuring that two other Snails would have to move to allow the front-running snails to run away with the game early, not just one (and none of the snails at the back have an incentive to do that).

Basically, the problem here is that we have two separate timers – a Plays timer, where you can’t Play unless other opponents are also Playing – and a realtime timer, where predators, the Slug of Death, etc. move only after a certain amount of real time has passed. All a frontrunner really needs to do is finish, so a frontrunner gets an advantage if the realtime timer never gets a chance to be relevant (e.g. because they are conspiring to finish the race before anyone else gets a chance to move). For the snails behind, they need to ensure that the frontrunners don’t finish in addition to trying to win the race themselves, which is best done by making the realtime timer run quickly compared to the plays timer (i.e. by reducing the supply of Plays). But at the moment, even a single Snail moving is enough to make the realtime timer irrelevant.

As such, the only way for the back of the pack to have any real influence on the race is for enough time to elapse that the “fun” options, like Predators and Crystals, start having an influence on the game. That’s what’s causing all these protective proposals; we don’t want the race to be over before we have any chance to do anything, because then we would necessarily be irrelevant (it seems unlikely that I could beat Habanero by 9 plays even if mine are much more creative, and as such my only chance of winning is if Habanero fails to finish – but under the current ruleset, a conspiracy could trivially ensure he finishes, and although that would probably count as throwing the game by the co-conspirator there’s no rule against that at the moment).

As a side-note, this proposal can lock the game, as the check is against the Plays of Snails, not Racing Snails - meaning that if, say, two Snails are behind the Slug of Death, then they can’t play but still count for the can-other-players-play check, meaning that those still in the game would be locked from moving.

Not a fan of stalling out the race even more by further restricting the conditions under which plays can be made. It’s harmful to my position but more importantly it’s just plain boring IMO

Although I always thought Josh was planning to be (or already was) part of a conspiracy, after thinking for it a while I think I know how to prove it to others.

Suppose all Josh’s stated reasoning was correct. In this thread and the thread for the other proposal, he has expressed the opinions that a) he can beat Habanero in a “straight fight”, b) that if collaboration is banned he has no option other than to allow Habanero to win. These are only consistent with each other if Josh is planning to beat Habanero using a conspiracy, either via conspiring with a third party to overtake Habanero, or via conspiring with Habanero and using a coinflip or the like to decide who wins, rather than playing out the dynasty competitively.

All the “beat frontrunners through positive play” is a smokescreen – a) it doesn’t take into account that the backrunners cannot be the frontrunners if the race ends within the first few minutes (no opportunity to deploy the positive play then!), and b) doesn’t explain why Josh would be able to beat Habanero only if the backrunners were allowed to conspire, but not if they weren’t, unless Josh were also planning to use the option himself. (It isn’t like a conspiracy of backrunners is of any benefit to Josh in helping him beat Habanero.)

(It’s also worth noting that a backrunner conspiracy is very unlikely because they have nothing to offer each other except a die roll to see who wins, but I hate that particular practice and don’t want to ever participate in one. In particular, it’s no longer legal to trade favours cross-dynasty, e.g. via intentionally aiming for a Coregency, and it’s no longer possible to do a win-for-mantle deal. I think the “no cross-dynastic favours” rule is good for the game, but also suspect that people haven’t realised all of its implications yet.)

@ais I’m ignoring all the unproductive stuff - you’re omitting to respond to the point raised above about this proposal locking the game. Whatever else is at stake, please recognise that that outcome is bad and that at the very least this needs to be reproposed.

It is a little bad, but seems trivially fixable in a followup proposal (or via CFJ at the moment that the situation occurs), and I think the situation is unlikely to occur in practice.

If this proposal passes I will be happy to use a slot on fixing it – I think a simple fix proposal would trivially pass regardless of who wrote it. You could spend a slot on fixing it right now, if that’s what you cared about doing! I don’t have any slots available right now, though.

You think it’s unlikely? Isn’t your overt strategy to put myself and Habanero behind the slug or under a predator?

Yes – I think it’s unlikely even though I’m planning to do that. Even if it happened, the game would almost certainly be decided by the next Spot Danger roll, given that it can only happen once there are only two snails left, which only happens once the predators have got through most players’ defences.