Bidding on Nations

[MaxWilson]

There was a thread a while ago about bidding on nations in MP by bargaining away pretender points. HoneyBadger recently expressed the opinion that a lot of the nations could stand to use some rebalancing of their militaries to make some of the underused units useful. Traditionally wargames get balanced through bidding. Thus.

Balancing in single-player (which I play exclusively) is easy--just create a mod and incrementally alter every nation until they are all equally attractive. For me, since I like big maps, this would mean a lot of races would have capitol-only restrictions removed. I'll know I've succeeded when I'm happy playing on Nation: Random (knowing that any choice I get will be fun). However, this doesn't do much to balance the races to competitive play. It just customizes the game to my playstyle.

In MP, you can't offer bonuses to weak nations, say EA Ulm, as simply because EA Ulm has more than one opponent and they might disagree on how much to offer. I might need to dig through the multi-agent decision literature to find a good auction method, but at least one simple one comes to mind which is inspired by the traditional problem of cutting cakes fairly: I cut it in half and you choose which half you want, so my incentive is to cut it so fairly that it doesn't matter which half you choose. You could adapt this for the multi-player case as follows:

Suppose there are four players in the game, A, B, C, and D. A gets to declare any improvements to any nations in the game that he wants. For instance, Jotunheim PD is improved to 1/2 Jotun Javelinist per point, and Marverni Druids get move 2/9. B gets to add any modifications that he wants, but can't take away any of A's modifications[1]. C adds some more, and then D doesn't get to mod any but gets first choice of which nation to play. C chooses from the nations which remain, then B, then A. There's still some potential for abuse here--C could triple the hit points of every unit belonging to both Ulm and C'tis, ensuring that D will pick one and he'll pick the other, which basically wipes A and B out of the game--but C can't put himself at an advantage relative to D. You can deal with the potential abuse either by taking turns being A, B, etc. or perhaps by ruling that you can never play any nation that's been modified by you.

It's tough to predict whether the nations would converge over time to new balances (differing depending upon the size and type of game) or whether every game would be different than the one preceding. I predict that the nations would still remain generally thematically true, even though you could technically "improve" Sauromatia to be identical to LA Ermor.

Another possibility which is a little bit simpler: everybody submits a list of potential modifications (call them "themes") to every nation in the era. Players are randomly assigned to nations, and get to choose any theme for that nation that's been submitted, or the vanilla nation. For instance, "Gorgon pretender is available to every land nation" is a theme for any nation, but can't be combined with a theme from another player that says "White Centaurs get scale mail armor." Downside to this method is that you don't get to choose your nation. Upside is that no player is at a particular disadvantage (as A was to C before) and so you don't need extra complexity to make it fair.

I've no idea if anyone is actually interested in bidding in MP games, but this is at least one way this could be done.

-Max


[1] This is kind of hard to define in practice--is changing Spear to Shortsword on a unit that's already had Defense modified "undoing" a change?--but you could say that A always gets a choice of his version, B's version, or C's version, while B can choose from B's or C's versions and C can take his own or nothing. So C can add options for A but not remove them--the idea is all nations are supposed to be equally acceptable to you once you've had your chance to mod them and any extras your opponents add are just gravy to be exploited.

Edit: added a second bidding method.