[JimMorrison]

I sort of thought that, barring a random distribution, placing the teams adjacent is the fairest way to go about it. Otherwise, there is no incentive to even take a nation that is perceived as weaker, because you neighbors will just rush you, knowing with absolute certainty you will die alone.

As far as my first post, I spoke to my roommate who has decided to finally purchase another copy of the game and he wanted to partner with me - with his first choice as Niefelheim, and as a rather inexperienced MP player.

I sort of thought the dynamics of the point system were already thought through to some extent, as far as that it's obvious that with Hinnom and Nief at 9, they ONLY partner either could get, would be Jomon.


Zeldor - I think in a bidding system, you would just give each team a budget as well (for bidding, something higher like 100 points would make it more dynamic), and then there would be an auction for the most sought after nations, and those who got very powerful first nations, would likely pay so much that they'd have to take "the kid who gets picked last" for their second choice. With 10 the range of bids would be too restricted - you might get f teams bidding 7 on a nation, with none wanting to go up to 8, not sure it would be nice to just random it off. I don't know, it seems this is all getting so much more complicated than the original post.

I had been planning to run a team game at some point in the future. What I had meant to do, was pair nations up beforehand. They wouldn't be random, nor would you choose what nation was paired with what, you would just choose the pairing that you wanted.

Fully random just seems like a horrible way to go. Not only do you deliberately not avoid overpowered combos, but you add in a great risk of people getting badly uncomplimentary combos. Imagine an Eriu/LA Man pair - 2 rather weak nations with access to only a couple of magic paths. They'd be dead before the game even started.


Ultimately, any setup is going to have its flaws. Arguing against a system doesn't do any good, if you can't present a system that is not significantly better. The major flaw with the bidding system, is the effort involved to make it really work. Just doing it as a single blind wouldn't be as exciting, and would be horribly time consuming - but it's not like we'll be able to hold a live auction for them either. (Bear in mind in single-blind bidding, if we had an auction once a day, we'd have to 3 nations each day just to get the game going within 3 weeks from now. The more nations you run at a time, the faster it goes, but the less fair and interesting it becomes.)