The politics of losing

[Warhammer]

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

I've got a game past turn 150. And it's a pretty long one and I wonder whether it'll ever finish.
I've seen several games where the balance of power is clearly in favor of one or two and the rest can't do anything like king-making. Those where several player are mostly equal in pwoer can indeed drag. That's why I personally favor smaller games now (4 players is great imo), or victory conditions like a deadline or 2/3rds of the provinces or some such which means that the game will eventually end.

I would also argue that smaller games give greater replayability as there will not always be an end game stage. The game might never get beyond mid game. The result is some nations which would never otherwise be taken, suddenly become powers, like TNN.

[Corvus]

The multiplayer game I ran also had this issue, turn 11X, 3 players left. One looked like he was gonna win, got into a grueling fight with me, 3rd guy got bigger and bigger and was about to hop in and crush second guy, I could either turn on 3 with 2, and go back and forth and back and forth, since we were all just throwing around endgame stuff in a stalemating circle, or I could just do nothing, which I would probably have if We hadn't decided to end it by consent, I mean theoretically any of us could have won but it could have taken another couple hundred turns. If you have the energy to stick out a back and forth stalemate, switching sides until you get a chance to strike, more power to ya, but once everybody gets into the super-end game and multiple people have fought each other and survived mostly intact, you have a problem. Because it might take a really god drat long time to decide a winner. It probably didn't help that 2 of the three were blood nations making use of vampires.

[Gandalf Parker]

Really large games should probably not be played to decide a winner. Even if there is one, it causes arguments. Should someone be called a winner, and allowed into the Hall, if they won just by holding out longer than everyone else? Should they be able to win by turtling? By being able to stand more micromanagement than other people? Some say a win is a win, and others say it violates the concept of a strategy game.

On the other hand Ive hosted and played in many games that went over the 100 turn mark and I thought they were fun. And Im well known for loving really big maps (my site is about the only place to find some). It makes the devs sigh, but yes I like those games. Especially since it empowers some of my favorite races to use strategy and tactics that cant be used well in smaller games.

But I will concede that such games should probably not be played like usual games to see who is the winner. They should be played more just for the fun of a very different game

[sector24]

Pretender Gods in the Arena at dawn...I do my killing before breakfast.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by sector24

Pretender Gods in the Arena at dawn...I do my killing before breakfast.

Ive seen that done. Basically its a one-turn game.
Thanks for reminding me of it

[Warhammer]

The more I play, the more I feel the sweet spot is to have games with 6-8 players. Most nations are viable, and you don't have the 150+ turn games. You also don't have terrible micro because at most you have 80-100 provinces.

[Bananadine]

An important point: When you start playing, you've probably mostly already lost the big war that is the focus of your game, just by joining it--because you probably have more than one opponent, so your chance of winning, if everybody has the same skill and starting nation strength, is 1/3 or less. Maybe a lot less! And the imbalances brought by skill and nation design probably aren't going to increase it past 1/2. If you have to win to have fun, then you have to focus on individual battles and lesser wars, not on the big war that determines whose pretender god is the real god. That war is generally not won, in multiplayer games.

I guess it comes down to roleplaying. What role should you play at the start of a game, when your chance of winning is say 1/8? People don't seem to talk about that much. But one doesn't have to try to win from the very start. Does everybody try to win from the start? If so, why? It seems delusional to play that role, without also consciously accepting that the role is generally a tragic one. If it's okay to give up on winning halfway through a game, and thereafter dedicate yourself to hurting or helping some other nation (or killing the world's population, or doing some other strange thing), then maybe it's okay to do that at the start. Why not do that at the start? Maybe it'd make more sense than trying to win from the start. And it'd be more consistent. You wouldn't have to pick out some arbitrary threshold at which a likely loss becomes a "certain" loss; you wouldn't have to venture into the absurdly complex and mostly undeveloped science of Dominions 3 statistics to (inaccurately, and without much hope of ever learning how inaccurately) determine the likelihood of your own loss. You'd start out with a goal, and you'd keep that goal to the end. You'd control your own fate, instead of letting yourself be pushed around by frustration or by some weird attachment to winning a game that is usually lost by almost everybody, almost certainly including you!

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Bananadine

An important point: When you start playing, you've probably mostly already lost the big war that is the focus of your game, just by joining it--because you probably have more than one opponent, so your chance of winning, if everybody has the same skill and starting nation strength, is 1/3 or less.

Some good points.
Altho I feel like mentioning that a specifically "New Players" game can work around the early gang-up thing by choice of map. One of the Arena maps, or a Maze map, or one of the Towers make pretty good choices for newbie games.