RBP3 Lurker Discussion Thread - No Players!

[novice]

HRE lost the settler (and warrior escort) that was going to found their third city to a lion at something like 4.4% odds. Tough luck.

Krill took a similar risk when founding Dunmanifestin but had better luck.

[banshee]

So does anybody have an overview of who's attacking (or going to attack) whom? novice?

[novice]

This is an image Krill sent to Carthage in settlement discussions:


Quite sneaky, as that is NOT Krill's capital we're seeing . Carthage seem to assume that it is, not realizing that Dunmanifestin is a holy city with more than 100 culture, and that Krill's capital is 4 tiles further west.

Banshee, I drew some war fronts in my alliance map upthread. There may be other conflicts brewing though, I don't know.

P.S: Maybe we should just stop posting here and start PM'ing each other.

[T-hawk]

P.S: Maybe we should just stop posting here and start PM'ing each other.

Who lurks the lurkers?

[zakalwe]

I am meta-lurking this game - i.e. mostly lurking this thread.

[WilliamLP]

I'm lurking this thread too, and I love your overview posts, novice.

What do you guys think of this from Maya's thread:

We don't like making war like this AT ALL.

We hate the two alliances setup.

Yeah, we kind of have to. But it stinks like month-old overused gym socks in a humidor. It's worse than the stupid microplan (which at least we'll "get" [read: be forced by necessity] to change - yay more hours simming stuff out) I posted a little ways upthread that eats our civ just to get Math a couple turns sooner - and that microplan was rejected by the National Association of Slugs, Slimy Things, and Yuck because it was found too ugly for the membership.

No one wants this game, but (given that most people want to maximize their chances of winning) this is the only game there can be with the ruleset we have.

So, what to do? Well, we're going to squeeze the most fun and pleasure we can out of what's left of the game we wanted to play.

Is this game really going to degenerate into one mega-coalition against another in a massive 1v1 team game, and is this completely inevitable if all players play rationally? I'd think that at the very least something has got to give, in terms of enough local conflicts springing up to shake this up.

[novice]

It took me by surprise and I think there are lots of twists in the alliance structures to come. It was also surprising that they felt so strongly about it.

It should be pretty apparent from the game setup, with 17 teams and tech trading (albeit no brokering) enabled, that diplomacy was going to play a major role. Many good options for limiting the role of large alliances were suggested but voted down in the setup thread.

[Sullla]

If you leave Tech Trading turned on, the gameplay will always turn into competing large alliance blocks. Always. Because tech is so powerful, any group of teams that forms a trading block will have a huge advantage, and so everyone else must form a counter block just keep up. The logic is pretty inescapable... I mean, we've seen the same thing in PBEM #1, Pitboss #1, Pitboss #3, etc. Attempts to limit this with metagaming rules are tilting at windmills.

There's a reason why I'm only involved in Pitboss #2, without tech trading. Despite its problems, I think the gameplay is a lot more interesting and less predictable when each team has to research their own technology.

[novice]

I agree Sullla, although I think there are side rules that can limit the role of alliances. One suggestion that I found interesting was that techs could only be traded when they were known to x players, with x set to something like # of players / 3. In effect, important techs would have to be self researched.

(Although thinking about it now I can envision alliances that work even with that restriction but they would require a lot of work and trust to organize.)

[novice]

So rego's team is building two more settlers right now, with nothing but a paper thin force of warriors (some getting killed by lions) to support 4 cities? I have to say it would be pretty funny to see them punished for overly eager expansion in two games in a row!

Nice catch William.