[LURKERS] Setting Up Tents for a Ren Faire

[Mardoc]

So, would not knowing who the opposition was make players more or less aggressive?

To test this, how about a blind game, with veteran players assigned aliases by a neutral admin? Ideally they wouldn't even be sure who else was playing, let alone under what name.

Would require some thinking to allow posts / lurking without leaking information (I think we could all tell a scooter thread from a mackoti thread just from the count). Obviously, a malicious or careless lurker could do serious damage; the former is not an issue here, but careful design might be required to minimise the chance of the latter.

Of course, this may have been tried before - I've read a lot of RB threads in the last year, but there's a lot more out there...

"RB - Where nobody knows your name (this time)"

Well, it would be more fun for the lurkers, but I don't know how much fun it would be to play in a game like that. Ultimately the games are for the players, right?

OTOH, there have been games where vets came and played under smurf accounts. Generally people were less wary of the smurfs

[Bobchillingworth]

I imagine it'd be fairly easy for a dedicated player to discern who their opponents are, just going by writing style and playing times, especially since a vets-only game is going to be drawing from a fairly small pool of players.

[antisocialmunky]

I would love to see that.

[Krill]

An anonymous game has been discussed since PB1. I think it's reached the point where it could be viable (we have the technology to pull it off) but frankly the lurker conduct and spoiler threads need to be run completely differently

[Nicolae Carpathia]

A shame we couldn't go a bit further, to pit REM's recently conquered empire vs Mackoti's slowly redeveloped one with painful costs and long borders. Plus we had nice EP vision on all of Mackoti's stuff, which would let us find opportunities and quelch any opportunities of our opponent's.

As for the religious wonder trio? That was planned quite early on, little luck involved, except at the beginning. Each one you land (in order of AP --> SM --> UoS) degrades the value of the next wonder in the eyes of other players, and once we got the AP, the rest fell in line fairly easily.

I think we planned out a good opening, lots of horizontal growth to help power the planned monk wonders.

The RMOG war could have gone more smoothly, but it all worked out eventually once massed cannons broke their back.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

A shame we couldn't go a bit further, to pit REM's recently conquered empire vs Mackoti's slowly redeveloped one with painful costs and long borders. Plus we had nice EP vision on all of Mackoti's stuff, which would let us find opportunities and quelch any opportunities of our opponent's.

As for the religious wonder trio? That was planned quite early on, little luck involved, except at the beginning. Each one you land (in order of AP --> SM --> UoS) degrades the value of the next wonder in the eyes of other players, and once we got the AP, the rest fell in line fairly easily.

I think we planned out a good opening, lots of horizontal growth to help power the planned monk wonders.

The RMOG war could have gone more smoothly, but it all worked out eventually once massed cannons broke their back.

I would say like OT4E posted, I mocked up a sim (we had 3 cavs on 14.5-15, and 1 at 10.8) with the new seed. Each time I tried it (10 times) I had enough leftover to take the Plains hill sheep city site too. I never lost more than 10 cavs on the capture, although often with a few withdraws. I didn't feel like I HAD to attack to push it, but I felt that it was a given it would happen. As OT4E posted, I was expecting to average 2-3 hits per cav with a third of them withdrawing. Waiting we would have added little (cannon were a bit away still) so no point not to hit.