[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
So I guess what I am saying is that in the end I do not think it is terribly important to squeeze out every Last drop of advantage from your design points, as long as you do not mess up to badly and is adaptable, you should be able to get by anyway.

My experiance is that generally a strong player with a tight design will win playing MP unless they get beaten by similar or better. This was my experiance in Stars! as well even though we couldn't establish fair starting positions for players - which I do when hosting Dom games.

I have to admit that its along time since I played in full diplomacy games and this can change things but in my experiance the skilled diplomicists also were skilled players with tight designs. Part of the reason I play no alliances is to avoid the way in which the top players run away with the game.

I may well have been somewhat lucky in my years of PBEM but fortune has not seemed decisive while focused race designs have done me proud even when I'm using "weak" races - I never MP the traditional power races although I have come up with some new ones. I think alot of what wins and loses any game of skill is *pressure* and loose designs put those running them under pressure while tight ones hold your hand. Probably the biggest thing in favour of tight designs is reliability and ease of play - once you have got them down pat. I have generally found that a tight but not very strong race has the advantage over a loosly designed power race.

Perhaps my usage of the word tight is a part of the difference here? Tight does not mean powerful to me so much as that the different elements combine together to make each more powerful - syncronicity/synergy.

But hey each to their own and the particular nature of my experiance of PBEM may have mislead me.

Cheers

Keir