The politics of losing

[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!