How to play when you have no chance of winning?

[DaveV]

One of the greatest sources of acrimony in PBEM and pitboss games has been the behavior of players who, rightly or wrongly, perceived themselves as having no chance at winning the game. If several other players want to keep the game going, the "no-chance" player usually feels obligated to continue devoting a considerable amount of time and effort to the losing cause. There seem to be several options, none of which is really satisfactory:

1) Pick your worst enemy, do your best to make him lose. This tactic has probably caused the most bad feelings. The choice of worst enemy is often arbitrary.

2) Pick your best friend, do your best to make him win. Or, vassalize yourself. Again, the choice is likely to be arbitrary.

3) Defend your territory. Usually the least time-intensive option. Stack up units in your cities, make someone pay if they invade your territory. The problem with this approach is that the "no-chance" player is typically behind in tech, and it will be cheap and easy for someone with much more advanced units to gobble up his cities. Less hedgehog, more balloon. >pop<!

4) Resign to AI. This lets the game go on without forcing someone to keep participating in a game he has no interest in playing. Disadvantage: we're playing an MP game because the AI is predictable and easily exploited.

5) Virtual resignation. Strip your cities of units, allow yourself to be eliminated. Unfair because the geography will make it easier for one player to conquer the bulk of your territory.

Maybe part of the pre-game rules discussion should include this topic? I don't think there's an easy answer, but it might help if players knew at the start of the game what they were committing themselves to.

[Dantski]

One of the greatest sources of acrimony in PBEM and pitboss games has been the behavior of players who, rightly or wrongly, perceived themselves as having no chance at winning the game. If several other players want to keep the game going, the "no-chance" player usually feels obligated to continue devoting a considerable amount of time and effort to the losing cause. There seem to be several options, none of which is really satisfactory:

1) Pick your worst enemy, do your best to make him lose. This tactic has probably caused the most bad feelings. The choice of worst enemy is often arbitrary.

2) Pick your best friend, do your best to make him win. Or, vassalize yourself. Again, the choice is likely to be arbitrary.

3) Defend your territory. Usually the least time-intensive option. Stack up units in your cities, make someone pay if they invade your territory. The problem with this approach is that the "no-chance" player is typically behind in tech, and it will be cheap and easy for someone with much more advanced units to gobble up his cities. Less hedgehog, more balloon. >pop<!

4) Resign to AI. This lets the game go on without forcing someone to keep participating in a game he has no interest in playing. Disadvantage: we're playing an MP game because the AI is predictable and easily exploited.

5) Virtual resignation. Strip your cities of units, allow yourself to be eliminated. Unfair because the geography will make it easier for one player to conquer the bulk of your territory.

Maybe part of the pre-game rules discussion should include this topic? I don't think there's an easy answer, but it might help if players knew at the start of the game what they were committing themselves to.

6) Keep playing as normal. You weren't devoting more than 5-10 minutes to every turn in the first place so there's not any great issue right?

[Jowy]

Best case scenario would be to have all players play "for the win" until the end. But it's tricky.. What if the player feels that, for example, helping a strong ally is the best option for him, but others / lurkers feel that helping a strong ally concedes the win to that strong ally? Okay, so.. The weakest players always dogpile on the leader then. What about when the leader is knocked down in the rankings? Do they then dogpile the second highest? It gets a bit silly...


There are a couple of things we could get rid of to make the games more fun:
- Ragequits (ie. myself throwing all my troops at India in PB2 when I still had a few cities left. Right thing to do would have been to put all my units in a city to defend, which would slow the enemy down a little bit more.)
- Playing for the second place (all other places than the first place should be equal. So doesn't matter if you come 8th or 2nd, if you lost you lost. Would still have the problem I mentioned earlier in the post, but some decisions would be more black and white and should make the games more enjoyable.)
- Stopping midway (anyone who stops paying attention to the game, stops diplo, stops updating his thread etc. during the game. Should rather ask for replacement than play on like that.)

[SevenSpirits]

It's hard to proscribe a single formula for all situations. But I would try to barely deter invasions/conquest by other players, and then try to raise my empire's productivity as much as possible for a hypothetical later comeback.

[DaveV]

- Playing for the second place (all other places than the first place should be equal. So doesn't matter if you come 8th or 2nd, if you lost you lost. Would still have the problem I mentioned earlier in the post, but some decisions would be more black and white and should make the games more enjoyable.)

This. I meant to include a quote from Vince Lombardi, a famous coach from American professional football in the 1960s. In those days, they had a consolation game between the third and fourth place teams, which he described as "a rinky-dink football game, held in a rinky-dink town, played by rinky-dink players. That’s all second place is—rinky dink.”

[Lewwyn]

-Take pleasure in little victories and goals you make for yourself.

-Delude yourself.

[Gaspar]

Options 1 and 2 definitely cause the most acrimony. Nobody ever wants to see an "irrelevant" player playing kingmaker.

I think what Seven suggested is most ideal. I think its not a bad idea to try and find smaller goals for yourself - taking back a city you lost, teching to a certain goal tech, trying to reach X score. Doing things like that will keep you motivated while having your civ focused on improving.

Of course, the other key is that once the game has a clear and obvious winner, concede. One pair of idle hands can be occupied. Two or three however...

[AutomatedTeller]

I think what SHOULD happen is that there is a dogpile on the leader. What I think generally happens is that people take out the players that are behind. An exception is when there's no clear leader.

I think it's hard to set up dogpiles on the top teams in games without diplomacy.

[Sian]

make it as costly for opponents to take your lands ... most fair for everyone IMO

[T-hawk]

Dogpiles don't work. Because war against a strong opponent is always negative-sum. Each dogpile participant will lose more than he gains. Each dogpiler's best interest is to commit minimum force, ideally zero, in hopes of finding himself ahead after the other dogs commit and lose more. Which means the dogpile is weak and ineffective and doesn't stop the leader. We've seen this happen in practice, most notoriously Pitboss 2.

Dogpiles work in other games like Diplomacy where there is no loss in war. It's zero sum for everybody and positive sum for the dogpilers (against the negative for the victim), properly incenting the dogs to fully participate. But not in Civ 4.