Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

Yes a longer clock would be good.

Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

All my units and provinces are gone now. Thanks for the game. What should I do so that the turns go on without me having to send confirmation (no point now as i have 0 units)

Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

Hi Wilburn. Thanks for the game and hope to see you in some more.

When you are eliminated it is best to still send in your turn as normal the turn you have been eliminated. The game may still wait for you if you don't, but I am not sure of this.

I send in my 'turn after death' when I get eliminated. But you won't get another turn after that. So you are spared sending in empty turns.

Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

wilburn, do you have any comments about the auction method?
Hope you enjoyed the game!

+8 hr added to clock by request.

Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

Sorry about the late turn submission, I would have made it in by the original end time. I had to do my turn twice b/c I overwrote my .2h file. -.-

Oh well, 2nd draft is always better than the 1st I suppose. :P

Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

Auction method seems a fine way to get the less than often used nations a chance as they will be balanced out from a weaker starting position by having more points for a pretender. Granted this is in a given enviroment where the auction mention works as it is supposed to.

Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

The only problem with the auction was that there was not much of one. For most it was just the handicapping system CP decided at the beginning. There were so many powers left in the rare cases someone was outbid they did not bid again but could choose another power.

If a game was set up with few positions with those powers fixed. Say 6 or 8 then you may get more bidding/over bidding happening. But that assumes people want to play that game as opposed to quiting the bidding to play in another if the power they want gets too costly. And plenty of us simply pick the power we want to play that time rather than try and powergame with the most powerful nation we can construct.

I think this would be a very good method in a game where you know / suspect it will be over subscribed. For example if we had another mega game. It would let people get the powers they want and give some indication of how people really rate some of the powers. That didn't happen here. Good game though :) with a complete range of players from first time newbies to the most experienced.

Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

I agree that there was no bidding because there was too much choice. Setting up fixed nation "slots", say Hinnom, Arco, Yomi, TC, Marverni, Helheim and then making people bid on each of the available slots would cause bidding, but I don't think that bidding in and of itself is the goal.

The goal, I believe, was to handicap certain nations as they have a greater probability of winning than others. Thus the idea wouldn't necessarily be to "bid" for the nations, but simply to handicap players who chose them by reducing their design points. One of the weird consequences of this game is that nations that prefer Cold/Heat get free bonus points. Of course, one would assume that such a condition would be designed to offset some inherent flaw in the race, but this does not appear to be the case. It appears, instead, to be thematic in nature. Therefore, I would propose a modification to the current handicapping system:

In addition to or in lieu of the handicaps determined by the win rate for the nation, that a number of handicap points be added to nations which require heat or cold of equal measure to the number gained by the optimal scale.

Therefore, in the addition scheme, you would take Hinnom's -25 and subtract an additional 80 points to account for free points gained from the heat scales making them, -105. Obviously a -105 penalty may no longer be appropriate as a hindrance, thus, starting with a simple -80 penalty based just on scales would probably be a better starting point. Only nations, then, that need a handicap, notwithstanding heat/cold bonus points would have any other particular handicap.

Of course, this allows for unusual circumstances like choosing Abysia with Cold+3. In this case, they should naturally get +200 points for this selection, but there is no way to account for that, so the idea here would hinge upon the nation selecting scales at variance from the already tipped scale and then determining the handicap based on that and setting a cap at the original amount of the heat/cold penalty if you follow me... I'll do an example to show what I mean:

Hinnom Prefers +2 Heat, so we'll determine Hinnom's penalty based on Heat +2 as the default scale position:

Hinnom +3 Heat: -40 Penalty
Hinnom +2 Heat: -80 Penalty
Hinnom +1 Heat: -40 Penalty
Hinnom +0 Heat: 0 Penalty
Hinnom +1 to +3 Cold: 0 Penalty

This would make adjudicating pretender design a little more intensive, but not terribly difficult.

Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

Yeah; with the split in the community, sadly I'm not sure we'll see another one of those.

Re: Countdown - ***Started***
 

OK, from a magic site, I've got a castle on a VP site now. But I'm not declaring vp for it (I haven't declared vp for any VP site I've held to this point).

So, is it OK to keep this fortress as long as I don't try to claim vp from that VP site (the strategic value is debatable, but I guess it does give me some small economic boost)?

If I keep it for more than 6 turns, can my vp start to go negative?

In the regard of utility, the 5 water VP provinces obviously have less use than the one land VP ("yeah, I can build all the Tritons I want" vs "I can build national mages and troops").

Don't know where I'm going with that, just something to keep in mind. In the end, I think this game will still come down to a contest of brute strength, but the vp variable may likely add an interesting twist toward the end.