BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

So who were the Dissolute Noblemen at the end, there? I almost ended up there myself by suddenly winning three auctions, bidding high after not managing to win anything up to that point, but hopefully the Valuable Roman Footrest saved me from that.

And was the “thanks for Naught’s help” a statement of teamwork from the victor, or just benefitting from another player’s misfortune?

Yes, I’d like to know what, if any, behind-the-scenes conniving was taking place. I thought maaaaybe there was an implication of some Brendan / Kevan co-operation?

At the end of the dynasty, Brendan, naught and pencilgame were all dissolute. Brendan bid 10,000,000,000,002 on each of the three items in Auction 1.5 and never made it back into the game. naught bid “3^7.26 Trillion” money on four of the five items on Auction 2, which caused me headaches throughout the dynasty and is the source of my “only real numbers, please” grumble. pencilgame bid 1,000,000,000 on each of the three items in Auction 6, and acted as the floor for dissolution for most of the rest of the dynasty, with Clucky bumping up against it towards the end but always staying just underneath it. Kevan, you actually never got close - you got very lucky with some Valuable items that ended up erasing your Debt entirely.

Some general thoughts from me: I liked this dynasty but never felt like the rules completely snapped into place. Maybe there was too much secret information, but it felt like there was a lot of caution about doing anything, and that left the endgame very vulnerable to what eventually happened - one bolder player being able to sweep in with good information and exploit a lack of determined, equally well-informed opposition.

As is usual with my dynasties, this one also suffered a bit from being over-dependent on the Emperor. I’m hoping that the next one is a bit more consensus-driven because coming up with two meaningful proposals every two days and making sure that the auction pot was bubbling along was exhausting! This dynasty definitely benefitted from the weird global situation; I think it would have been harder still to sustain activity had everyone been able to go outdoors.

I think from a pure game-design perspective, if I could change anything about this dynasty it would be fine-tuning the availability of information more and making the penalty of Dissolution more flexible, so that those players who hilariously overbid in auctions 1 and 2 weren’t completely locked out of the dynasty and to encourage players to overbid more in the later game. The latter was hard to arrange in a nomic, though. I purposefully made Duels buggy as hell in the hopes that Brendan or naught would spot the potential and make bank, and I get the sense that Brendan was sniffing around it, but the dynasty ended too soon for it to get used.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for playing! I hope that it provided some distraction :) I’m about to post the full auction history on the wiki.

Ah, no cooperation happening here.

I felt like the auction system had enough moving parts to be interestingly playable, and was just a little overreliant on timing - Appeals and the Lord Privy both gave a decent amount of information, you just had to be very precise or fortunate about when you used them, which is maybe why the game felt a bit cautious at times.

Where was the Red Line at the end? I got an appeal reading of 126,774 last week and a mighty 2,842,211,707 the other day, so was aiming to stay below 3 billion.

The caution around doing anything - particularly stealing - may have been partly down to the vagueness of Umbrage, which felt like you could be punished with a Power transfer for any game action, if an (even tangentially) affected player felt like writing a funny “have at ye, sirrah, upon the sake of my honour!” post about it.

Yeah, we should really have repealed Umbrage once it was clear that it wasn’t going to plug into anything else.

I’ve uploaded the full history of all bids on the wiki.

The final red line was 2,384,281,143, which was equidistant between pencilgame’s 2,999,536,162 and Clucky’s 1,769,026,124.

Naught and I had been conspiring since shortly after both going Dissolute; we roped pencilgame in toward the end, but without a good mechanism to dump items, the fact that we were the three most deeply indebted Noblemen doomed us. The plan was to throw some duels and seesaw back out of debt via side bets, but to really pull that off you actually need FOUR people (two to throw the duel, one to inflate the loser’s purse, one to rake in the final share). I reached out to Clucky at the last minute, in the hopes that dealing with all that theft would put him in a position of willingness to split a victory share. I suspect that as I was doing that he was swiping naught’s alliance out from under me, though.

> And was the “thanks for Naught’s help” a statement of teamwork from the victor, or just benefitting from another player’s misfortune?

Naught lowered their own victory score for me by stealing an item at the end. Otherwise my 87 would not have cleared their 45. That was the only collab we did.

Clucky, what changed midway through the dynasty that made you decide to win it?

How did I fair if I may ask

@Darknight you were extremely close a lot of the time - usually very much in the ballpark of a winning bid but just getting pipped by someone being a bit more extravagant.

I wound up getting pretty fortunate that when I got an appeal for 500k. Wound up being a number high enough to win important bids while still being far enough below the red line that winning multiple bids with it didn’t shoot me over.

I feel sorry for subjecting Josh to my numerical torture, but I did actually have a plan with my ridiculous bid. My original plan was for Brendan and I to go back and forth with increasingly ludicrous bids; if you know how Graham’s number is constructed, I was basically going to follow that, but with bids. My original bid was actually 3↑↑↑↑3 Money, but little did I realize that Josh had no interest in dealing with those ridiculous sums, so I had to lower it to 3^7.26 trillion.

I never ended up telling Brendan, either, because Josh threw a wrench in the plan when he came back to me confused about my bid.

Yeah, sorry. My math blindness should really have been an explicit constraint of the dynasty from the get-go.

You’re good. I did end up with the highest Debt, so I’ve got that going for me. What did it end up at? 3^7,260,000,000,001.26185 is the number I have, but it might a have been lowered ever so slightly from Valuable Items.

I’d have written Louis XIV Powers to cover fiddly maths stuff if I’d realised. I initially thought Josh was just groaning about tricksy verbal submissions along the lines of “I bid X, where X is the highest bid on this auction plus 1”.

Kevan: I’m pretty sure I tried exactly that, but one fix proposal or another enacted before it came to anything.

Lol it figures. Gg though