MP Game - Live and Learn (newbie game)-running

[Thufir]

My apologies for the delayed response - I've been meaning to reply to this for a while.

Yvelina said:
o Oh, and did I mention, I hate this game. I wanna play team games, where you know which way your front and rear are.

...

o I hate diplomacy. I think I will write Pythiumx2, Abysiax2, C'tis and AI on a dice, and see which way it rolls.

I can certainly sympathize w/ the desire to play team games. I've talked a bit with Boron about the team game that he's in, and it does sound like fun. The downside of a team game is that unless your team has the time and the will to communicate and coordinate effectively, then there's not much of a point in being a "team". From what Boron has told me, they have had some communication problems in their game.

You may have read this, but a while back Bleach started an excellent thread ( here) on what this community thinks is reasonable while conducting diplomacy in MP games. I come from a background of playing the boardgame "Diplomacy" where cutthroat play and back stabbing are essential to the game being interesting (and it can get *very* interesting indeed, if you're interested in complex strategy). Partly based on Bleach's thread, I've decided to moderate my behavior while playing Dom2, as I think the majority of the Dom2 community has a different mind set than most Diplomacy players have.

That said, even in Dom2 I find it helpful to cultivate a bit of deliberate split personality disorder (as one would with any RP type of game - particularly those RP games that permit/encourage inter-player conflict). As such, the one that thing that I can promise you, Yvelina, is that if you were to attack the nation of Pythium magically, or otherwise, based on a possibly mistaken belief that Pythium cast those dispels, then I would react with fury in-game (well such fury as the weakened Pythium is capable of ), but would *not* carry it over to any new games.

YMMV, but for me the 2 keys to making FFA, diplomacy type games fun are to deliberately split in-game and out-of-game mindsets, and making sure not to carry over grudges between games. Oh, and perhaps not taking the game *too* seriously - if I've made my guess wrong and attacked the wrong player - who cares? It's just a game!

On a separate note, I've hosted four games, and this game has had the most fun/interesting group to play with! It's been quite interesting to watch the ebb and flow of who's in the lead, and I'm looking forward to seeing the ultimate outcome!