BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Believe it or not, this wasn’t meant to be a loophole, but is intended design! Prevents things like a group of two Snails slipstreaming off to the Finish Line and being untouchable, since the rest of us will be able to leap right up to them.

Yes, but the flipside to this argument is that I could sit at 0cm, let you make all the Crawl moves you want to get to the Finish Line, and 24 hours later use Leapsnail to get there in fewer Moves than you did, even with 50-50 odds of randomly selecting myself instead of you.

The above strategy works because “you may add to the random selection Snails who have been directly eligible Leapsnail targets for you at some time in the past 24 hours of this Ongoing Race” means that at some point, you were an eligible target in the past 24 hours when your Moves were 0, 1, or 2 Moves to my 0 Moves.

That’s not a particularly clever strategy, that’s just a waiting game, and we’re back to square one of no one ever making the first Move if the better choice is to wait for someone else.

Right, but you can sit at 3 moves for a day until you’re out of the extended targeting, then be free to bugger off to the finish line without anyone catching up to you. The idea is to give people a day to react to anything anyone else does to prevent the quick players from having an overwhelming advantage. (I don’t know if this will matter terribly considering we’re the only two quick players…)

You do raise a valid concern about slowing down the game and reinforcing the “wait until other people do something before acting” dynamic though. Maybe this would help fix that, I will consider voting for it.

After thinking about it some,

I’m not sure that a snail at 99 should be a better-weighted target than a snail at 101. There should probably just be a distance cap on Leapsnailing; if you don’t want a snail to jump 110 cm in a single bound, specify that Leapsnail can only get you 20cm at most.

Reasonable idea to limit the Leapsnail distance, and I think someone else floated the same idea, but no one ever got around to it.

CoV in favour of Hopslug

Just a note that “Hopslug” doesn’t completely do what you think it does, unless I’m missing something.

Ah, yes I missed the placement of the 20cm clause in it. CoV (again)