The Factory sleeps (Post-Dynastic Commentary)
Okay, I know it’s a bit early to be posting this but I’m going to sleep rn and I doubt anything is going to change in 4 hours.
This Dynasty…was kind of a mess. I know, first time and all, but I’m pretty sure I still got off to a rough start by those standards. And then it ended in a midgame scam. Hey, at least the scam felt satisfying to me.
ais523:
This dynasty was a lot of fun for me, but I recognise that this style of dynasty may not have been fun for other people (and had recognised this even during play).
One problem is that this was a very “grindy” dynasty – a lot depended on making optimal use of your actions in order to set up for future cycles, and the eventual winner was basically just going to come down to whoever could plan out their turns to the end of the dynasty most efficiently. And the other problem is that working all that out was hard; it took me several hours a day of thought over multiple days (which I was happy to use because it was such an interesting problem to work on). My solution for getting to the infinite loop took quite a while to plan out, and I doubt I did it optimally; my actions over the last three cycles took a number of attempts to plan out (e.g. the idea to use two Seeders two cycles ago took me quite a while to find, and eventually ended up saving me a critical point of Energy during the startup of this Cycle by allowing me to grow Corn without spending Energy clearing away a Seeder).
If anyone’s reading this in the future, and likes this sort of puzzle, then there’s still one remaining unsolved problem in this ruleset that might be interesting for such a hypothetical person to solve: I strongly suspect that there’s an infinite loop that uses no Corn, instead relying on Wheat and Sugar. I failed to figure out the details, though (either for what the loop is, or for how to get into it).
The problem with grindiness is that it makes it hard to get into the game if you’re a) new, or b) fall behind for any number of reasons. I expect we would have seen player numbers plummet over the next couple of weeks if the dynasty had continued – when players feel unable to win by conventional means, as most players pretty much were at this point, they tend to either turn to pooling attempts (not possible here, and that’s probably a good thing), or idle out. (It’s also possible to try to win via scam or punish-the-leader proposals, but those are less common courses of action; and this dynasty was reaching the point where most substantive proposals would fail out of paranoia.)
The thing you need to be aware of as a new Emperor, though, is that all this is usual! A “this dynasty is too hard for me” / “I can’t guide this dynasty’s mechanics in a direction I like” / “I’m too far behind and can’t catch up by conventional means” point happens to most players, in most dynasties, and it doesn’t reflect a failing of the Emperor; it’s very rare to come up with a theme that can keep everyone engaged all the way through, and almost any ruleset will appeal to some players but be off-putting to others. When a dynasty reaches that point, normally the best course of action is for someone to win the dynasty on the spot and cause a reset (in my opinion, it’s very unusual for a dynasty to remain fun for the majority of players all the way through, and the best course of action is to find the point at which interest starts dropping off and end the dynasty by pool / scam / proposal / making the victory condition trivially easy). Although I haven’t done it myself, I have a suspicion that back in the Age of Scams, some players saved core rules scams for use at a moment when they thought there was greatest need for a dynasty change.