[Septimius Severus]

Originally Posted by Maerlande

I prefer alliances. The problem with teams is you might get stuck with a nutball teammate and you can't do anything about it without breaking the game rules.

Alliances are better because you can make other alliances and then gank your old ally and remove him from the game making a better game for everyone else. It's especially effective if he doesn't suspect you are about to backstab him.

If team games had a rule where you could gank an underperforming teammate I'd be all for it.

That is an interesting idea and I recall players suggesting it from time to time. To make the fixed nature of the alliances in team games flexible like regular alliances. I can't speak for other team games but I know captains in my games do have control of rosters and can replace/bench players at will with alternates or anyone else they can get to sub, though they can't change the nations their team has been assigned.

I suppose a team game could have a rule that after a certain number of turns or at the captain's discretion or option, teams could go FFA (every player for himself) but with the option to freely ally still intact, which would of course cease to be a strictly team game (it would sort of be combo team/FFA game), but it would probably satisfy many who are more inclined to FFA type games and it would provide a mechanism by which a team could rid itself of under performing members and yet still ally with their selected old teammates. Team identity would suffer though, but it would provide an incentive for team laggards (likely noobs) to shape up. It may be something worth exploring in future games and perhaps may even be possible in NaV. The option to disband the team at the captains desire. Though that would be something of a last resort I would think.

Originally Posted by Trumanator

You're correct that recently there has been something of an uptick in larger team games. However, a look at Tyrant's admittedly outdated Hall of Fame shows a definite prevalence of team games consisting of several 2 person teams. There are 6 of this type on it, and I believe that there have been at least 3-4 more since its last update. Contrast this with the single "large scale teams" game on it currently (which I actually organized and admined btw), and even if we add your 3 NVV and 1 NAV games completed there is still a definite difference of around 9 or 10 to 5. For simplicity's sake I'm only counting completed games.

I may be wrong about this, but it is probably safe to say that were other completed team games (with more than 2 players per team) that didn't make it into Tyrant's post as well, and if I recall correctly the team section of the opening post was a later addition. I say this because I sort of remember asking Tyrant why there was no team section. And if you count in progress games of course, if could be said that each type was at least equally prevalent. But I agree with others who posted here, there are still far fewer team games overall in comparison with the vast numbers of FFA type games.