The politics of losing

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Grijalva

I'm totally against king-making just because you "want to see 'player A' win and not 'player B'". Everything you do should be in respect to yourself eventually winning, no matter how slim those odds might be. However, I think the odds are never quite as slim as they seem.

True, big empires can gain a lot of momentum in this game and it can often seem hopeless, but every turn has a good deal of luck involved and real cooperation between allies can be devastating.

So in your scenario, I would say try to affect a balance of power (support #2) until you can build yourself up enough or the two big dogs bleed each other dry.

You're absolutely wrong, there are definitely times you have no hope of winning. To pick an extreme example, you're dying to an opponent. Its sufficiently against you that there is no hope of recovery. (I can show you plenty of trn files that look like that, btw, so this definitely occurs). So what do you do? Clearly not play to win.

Myself, I play to spite the person killing me. I might die, but i'm going to do my damnedest to make sure they pay for it. And yes, that is definitely king-making (against your conqueror). But it also has a positive metagame impact for me - I'm a much less attractive target because people know I'm going to take a chunk of them with me and play it out till I'm out of effective things to do.