Please don't take my toys away!

[johan osterman]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
My experiance is that generally a strong player with a tight design will win playing MP unless they get beaten by similar or better. This was my experiance in Stars! as well even though we couldn't establish fair starting positions for players - which I do when hosting Dom games.

...

I have to admit that its along time since I played in full diplomacy games and this can change things but in my experiance the skilled diplomicists also were skilled players with tight designs. Part of the reason I play no alliances is to avoid the way in which the top players run away with the game.

...

No wonder our experience differs, we seldom if ever use fixed starting positions, the dynamics sprung from the starting positions tend dominate the game more than tight race designs. This is fine by me, I do not want dominion to be chess. Although I can certainly see why other people do want to play with balanced starting positions to me it might detract from gameplay.

We usually play with some form of informal diplomacy, mainly because we like to blabber away about dominions over a beer or a cup of coffe. This has some effects on our diplomatic interactions since it often does not seem worth the bother to conspire with or against people you meet on a more or less daily basis. So most often our diplomacy is limited to players joining the fray on one side or the other when there allready is a war in progress, or occasionally banding together if one player appears to be getting to far ahead of the rest.

[ November 26, 2003, 21:54: Message edited by: johan osterman ]