is feeding acceptable or not

[Omnirizon]

I havn't a problem with trading items, that makes sense. It is just that giving items away because your losing and decide to go AI doesn't make much sense to me. It doesn't seem right somehow.

I can ONLY see it justified thematically if you fight to the LAST province, and before going under, send off your stuff. But if you actually fight to the last province, you won't really have any stuff to send. I suppose if you do that though, it is OK. But I think rarely that actually happens. Typically people have a respectable amount of stuff left, but know their fighting a losing battle. So they send their stuff to someone who might be able to win out over their aggressors and go AI. There are many ways to argue that this is NOT thematic, not the LEAST of which is the AI nation you leave behind; kind of difficult to explain their continued fighting when they just sent all their stuff to a neighbor, who they likely invade in the next turn or two.

I don't think diplomacy is bad. I enjoy all that stuff, all manner of diplomacy: trading to tribute to bribing, it is all plausible and understandable. I think giving away respectable sums of stuff requires some fangling and shallow rationalizing to pass it off as thematic though. In fact, if read through them carefully, most peoples responses even imply if not outright admit that it is more personally oriented. We could debate whether that is OK, though I think most would actually readily agree it is personal, not thematic, and that this is OK.

Lastly, we could examine this from a purely gaming perspective. However, I think that is unwise with Dom3, as many of the wild card factors that competitive gaming tries to minimize (in order to accurately judge skill rather than luck) are the very things that make Dom3 so much fun. However it is worthy to mention from this perspective that feeding is a HUGE wild card, perhaps to much for anything more than casual Dom3. You can build a strategy around diplomacy, but you can't build a strategy around being the benefactor of feeding. Yet the bestowal of this kind of gifting is very game shaping.

[Randvek]

Your whole premise is flawed: feeding isn't a wild card. It's usually very predictable who will give their stuff to whom. If someone's going out, they will give their stuff to their allies and/or the person who took them out's enemies. That's just human nature, and a lot of pretenders are, in fact, human.

When you keep saying that it's unthematic, yet the overwhelming majority disagree, you must at least entertain the notion that it is you who do not understand the theme.

[capnq]

Sombre said: No diplomacy games make sense to me. If you don't want to go that far, make a 'no giving items, gems or gold' game.

My experience with other multiplayer games makes me leery of any rules that don't have an in-game enforcement mechanism. Otherwise, you just get endless arguments between the people who voluntarily follow them and the ones who ignore them.

[Sombre]

Well the mechanism would be kicking people out who don't follow the rules. There's no automatic rules for non-computer games and not all of them need dedicated referees.

I think explicitly stating NO DIPLOMACY would probably work. If some people choose to 'cheat' well it wouldn't keep me up at night or anything, I'd just think they were lame.