[Roanon]

Originally posted by Gryphin:
Pax has define "win" for himself. He knows his "Have Fun" wins will never get recorded as a win on a table anywhere.

Winning in a game = achieving victory. No sense to talk around it.
Of course, one can - and most of us surely will - get other gains, or "wins" from a game. Otherwise we all would consider lost games as a waste of time, and at least I still remember games (not SE) that I had *lots* of fun even though I lost.

Backstabbing -
What we have done here is established our style of play.

Do we really ? ? I doubt it... I still play to win not to become master in treaty-keeping. Guess old Dippy (AH Diplomacy) habits die hard

I'd suggest to all people going forward that they develop a stock set of agreements on how treatys can be canceled, make them clear to anyone who they make a treaty with and make clear the consequenses of such a violation.

What consequences? Do you want to organize and legitimize cross-gaming as means of enforcing some personal and subjective view of how to keep and break treaties?

This is not a matter of villifying a drive to win. It is a matter of what some people do and do not feel is an acceptable style of play.

Any style of play that does not violate letter and spirit of the rules is acceptable. Even if you or I do not like it. And there is no rule in SE4 that makes treaties rock-hard and unbreakable. Or even difficult to break. Which makes PERFECT sense. Otherwise, it would have been easy to program things like "periods of enforced peace" or similar.

In that case, we just would have to play the first 20 turns of any given game and then look who has got the most profitable treaty partner. I do prefer a game where strategy and tactics is the main challenge, not diplomacy and treaty-making. Making treaties too reliable makes them too effective and dominating the game. For similar reasons, I will not play games where tech trading is allowed.
If you have different preferences I can understand and tolerate it, but please do not try to spread them over all PBW. If you want, make a special treaty game with special rules so that I can avoid it but please don't say we have "established a style of play" and try to force it onto others.