Team Strategy

[Dragar]

It is all situational, the most important thing is strong and coherent communication, and making sure your inbox always has room for new messages!

Also be careful not to hold too much back, if someone sticks their neck out in a war and their allies protect themselves, things can fall apart pretty quickly. Commit to the cause and make sure you are being proactively useful to your allies.

[Jarkko]

I wonder if Trumanator is looking for strategies for the various team-games going on, or strategies on how to play as a team in "regular" MP's?

There are three crucial differences between those two.

1) In a team game you know who you are going to play with, so your strategy has to be built up from Pretender design. Who crafts which items, who is the main dispeller (if you get to end-game you better have somebody able to dispel those killer globals), which globals are you two aiming for (and who will cast them) etc.

2) Pre-designated teams do not back-stab each other. You can be sure you are not all of the sudden overrun by troops from your cloesest ally and friend when you least expect it. Thus in a team-game you do not have to have an army around "just in case".

3) There is no need to build up for trust in a team-game. In a MP you need to show your ally that you are prepared to go out there and take punches (like Dragar above says) even when you are not fully prepared yet. If you don't do that, your ally might start to look for other options, and he will for sure remember your actions (or lack of actions) in the future. While in a team-game you can wait for slamming until you are ready, even when your team-mate is under very heavy pressure (as long as he doesn't croak, of course) so that you can pull of that killer gig when you have the perfect line-up.

[Viajero]

Originally Posted by Dragar

It is all situational, the most important thing is strong and coherent communication, and making sure your inbox always has room for new messages!

Also be careful not to hold too much back, if someone sticks their neck out in a war and their allies protect themselves, things can fall apart pretty quickly. Commit to the cause and make sure you are being proactively useful to your allies.

Totally agree. More easily said than done though. In essence any good diplomacy game, as is the case with D3, has at its heart the "Prisonners Dilemma" when it comes to Team Play and establishing alliances.

The Prisoner´s Dilemma is well taught in Game Theory (and I am not talking about tic tac toe) for commercial, political, diplomatic and also military environments where behaviour of other "players" matters.

In essence the dilemma establishes that in a one off game, played only once, the most productive course of action would be betraying your ally to take advantage of his/her trust. In the other hand, in a repeated game where your partners can see how you behave and can also impart punishment at the next opportunity available (i.e. future turns, or even future games as they know each other patterns) then the most productive course of action tends to be cooperation.

Having said that D3 is a game where at the end there can be only one, so Game Theory can not apply strictly, but you probably know what I mean by now...