A Discussion on kingmaking and community standards.

[Illuminated One]

Interesting thread, I was thinking about some sort of "kingmaking" in all future games I play. I.e. eliminating nations until the game get's to tedious/boring and then giving up. I would play competitively (i.e. any nation I have harmed or helped I'd have harmed or helped if I was intending to stay till the bitter end). I didn't feel entirely good about it so I guess I'll have to check back with the players.
This is also a point that convinced me to buy dom3, the good game theory/rules discussion, so thanks for it.


I guess if you wanted to have a general definition of kingmaking mine would be simple. Any action I take in order to help someone win is kingmaking.
It is irrelevant how this looks or how helpful this is.
Sending gems away, scorched earth tactics before going out, diplomacy.
However it is fine to do these actions if they serve a strategic purpose.
Scorched earth while waiting for your ally to fall into the back of your conqueror or that certain spell or even him making peace? No kingmaking. Sending stuff to a weaker player to give a competitor a tougher fight? No km. Helping a stronger player with some strategic consideration? No km.


Now there is another thing of importance, the reason of kingmaking.

1) Fun/Time. I.e. you can't/don't want to play anymore and see the game finished. Better find a sub or go AI.

2) Metagaming. I think the thing about "doing what is beneficial" is not clear enough. Beneficial to your nation? Or beneficial to you in later games?
I don't agree that kingmaking can be only done by players able to win (quite the contrary is the case - I guess there's not many players giving up a game that they could win).
Sure you can't "play to win" without being able to win, but I've often argued that you shouldn't play to win, but instead play competitive and strategically sound securing and expanding your power (as little as it may be) to the best of your abilities.
In fact the "play to win" attitude might account for those situations through metagaming. Scorched earth for no other purpose than to up your rep as a nasty ***** (I said female dog, you darned censorbot) you don't attack? Helping someone else win to have a diplo advantage in another game?
In any case I don't care if the out of game advantage of a player comes from hacking or from metagaming, so this is clearly unacceptable imo.

3) Thematically/RP. This is fine imo. For example you play a good pretender and once you realize you cannot become the one true God you are sacrificing yourself to help the pretender that will be the most beneficial to your people (which doesn't necessary mean your ally, as you might be allied to R'lyeh or Ermor for example). Imo this might be actually a great house rule as it would be an incentive to play kind and virtous pretenders instead of opportunistic and heartless ones.