[Hoplosternum]

Originally Posted by Archonsod

If nobody has stated beforehand that NAPS are unbreakable then you can't blame a player for thinking otherwise;

This is the heart of the issue though, this is exactly what some of us believe and have been led to believe. >>

I have played a few different mp games apart from Dom3 and few have had any binding agreements. I.e. in most games you would be able and expected in some cases to ‘stab in the back’ an ally and do some double dealing in diplomacy. The boardgame Diplomacy would be one, the Pitboss Civ4 community another (although there is no ‘NAP’ convention there).


However from following threads here I was led to believe that NAPs here were to be honoured. If you sign up for one you keep it. There are plenty of threads (often quickly closed due to the flames!) with people moaning about betrayals of NAPs. Often people back off to and agree to back off for a couple of turns if they are revealed to have broken their word.


From that I assumed that the community took these NAPs as binding. I didn’t think they were binding because I blindly trust people on the internet But because the community gave me that impression and seemed to police this. There have been and are plenty of occasions when it would have been in my (and that games' longevity) that I stab rather than give the required warning but have always refrained from doing so as I believed and have been led to believe that doing otherwise would be the equivalent of cheating.


But if they are not they are not. I can play either way. It is just that I don’t think you can happily have half the people thinking they are binding and the other half thinking they can be broken.


So I am all for making it clear which way it is at the start of the game.


It is not obvious that NAPs can be broken. There are conventions in this game as there are in nearly all games.


For example I was very surprised when I started playing that in most if not all none team games on these boards only one person wins rather than the players forming teams/alliance blocks in the game and declaring joint or three / four way wins as happens say in your standard game of the boardgame Diplomacy. Where at the start of the game does the game creator say these are not allowed? Yet most people won’t accept these joint wins and most people use diplomacy to break up such blocks using the arguments ‘only one of you can win’ to encourage part of the alliance to attack the other.


People don’t play the game like that by convention. Just as I thought they didn’t break NAPs. You can play it either way with both. But everyone should know at the start.