The Middle Way - Faerun EA [Need Replacement]

[Evilhomer]

Roughly when are you planing on starting this game?

[Amhazair]

Is there any particular reason you want to limit this game to 16 persons? The map is easily big enough to accomodate everyone willing to play imho.

[Hellboy]

Right now, I'm hearing more votes for graphs off, than graphs on, so I'm going with graphs off (at least for the moment). As posters have noted, there is a dependency w/ victory conditions, so I could imagine changing this if we end up going w/ VPs.

Teraswaerto said:
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I prefer games without victory conditions since they end naturally, and you can't use the mechanics to win before you've actually beat all your enemies. A player may lose practically all their provinces to raids and still come back, just as someone may attack 50 provinces in one turn with Cloud Trapeze or some such and not be in a position to win if there are no victory conditions.

...

I agree with this, and overall this is my intent regarding how this game should be won. I would suggest then that the primary way of ascertaining victory is simply by consensus of the players still alive.

However, as you have stated this map is in fact huge, and I think this means that the end game could become rather tedious and painful for those that stick it out. In general I suspect that barring raiding tricks, the outcome of most Dom3 games becomes inevitable once one player controls 40%+ of the resources (maybe gem income [including item hoards] is more important than # of provinces? The value (imo), then of either using VPs or province totals is that they can serve to estimate who will become the inevitable winner, and save time in playing out a tedious endgame.

In any case, I think that if we set a victory condition of 70% control of provinces, this would at least give an "out" to a dominant player, playing against someone too stubborn to concede. Now, I would say the value of 70% is in fact tremendously conservative, most especially on this huge map. I would hope that if I am the victorious player, I can win with never having to manage a 200+ province empire.

Also, while I do believe that we want to avoid the raid type of victory that happened in this game, I just don't see myself losing sleep over a raid involving cloud trapeze into 50 provinces.

So, at this point I see myself leaning towards a game that I would hope will end by consensus, but that still has some kind of province count condition in it (maybe 50%?). But, in my admittedly limited experience on seeing these games go through to completion, I'm flexible on setting the number.

To put it more pedantically, 70% is very, very safe that no one will "steal" a victory, but at the same time holds little value in enforcing victory against a stubborn player(s). While perhaps 40% still holds some risk of the stolen victory, it has more value of forcing the question.

[Meglobob]

Set victory to 1 province over half of all provinces on the map. So if there is 422 provinces, set victory at 212 provinces. Anyone who owns half the world, in my book as won. No one can get to this sort of total, without everyone knowing whats going on, graphs on or off.

[Hellboy]

Amhazair said:
Is there any particular reason you want to limit this game to 16 persons? The map is easily big enough to accomodate everyone willing to play imho.

Well, at least by the province numbers, this is true. However, I am somewhat concerned about starting positions. In my limited experience on the Faerun map, once I go over 16 players, I always seem to see at least two positions that end up pretty near each other. I think this might be true because (perhaps) there are a lot of nostart provinces, and those nostart provinces are not evenly distributed.

So, I am willing to add another land position (or possibly more), if most players think that is a good idea, but please beware that this will increase the chances that two players end up unreasonably close, or one or more players get screwed in their startup.

I'll have another post shortly where I'll comment on the Faerun map and startup positions, as there may be some partial fixes I can do in editing the map. Bottom line, I think that on the Faerun map you can't look at provinces/player alone, and I suspect the risk of player(s) getting short changed goes up rapidly as we increase above 16.

Edit: Oh yeah, one more thing - I do think it is unwise to add a 3d sea position, the sea players get screwed even when you just look at the # of sea provinces per sea player, in this case.

[Hellboy]

Meglobob said:
Set victory to 1 province over half of all provinces on the map. So if there is 422 provinces, set victory at 212 provinces. Anyone who owns half the world, in my book as won. No one can get to this sort of total, without everyone knowing whats going on, graphs on or off.

Personally, I'm fine with this.

[Hellboy]

Evilhomer said:
Roughly when are you planing on starting this game?

Good Question! I honestly didn't expect this game to fill up so fast. Originally I was thinking to start on Friday or Saturday (just based on how long it took big games to fill), but I can move that up to Wednesday evening (PST), perhaps. I still need to spend a significant amount of time editing the Faerun map, and testing the server.

So, this is not a requirement for the game, and I realize it may be impossible with so many players, but I did at least want to put out the idea of doing a short blitz (1-2hrs) on either Saturday or Sunday. I guess that if we did it early afternoon EST (GMT - 5, iirc), I think that would cover a lot of time zones at vaguely reasonable hours. Is this even remotely possible?

If a blitz is not possible, it would still be nice to see if we can't crank through some of these early turns this coming weekend. Blitz or no, it would be lovely to get well into the teens (turn number-wise), by Monday.

Incidentally, I will be out for Feb 13th, 14th and most of 15th, so I will need to set the server to 72hr QH over that period.

[Amhazair]

Terrel said:

Well, at least by the province numbers, this is true. However, I am somewhat concerned about starting positions. In my limited experience on the Faerun map, once I go over 16 players, I always seem to see at least two positions that end up pretty near each other. I think this might be true because (perhaps) there are a lot of nostart provinces, and those nostart provinces are not evenly distributed.

Fair enough. I don't mind more people comming in if they want to play, but if you (and/or others) want to keep it at 16 that's equally fine.

[Evilhomer]

On the subject of more people: I don't mind more people if our host manages to fix the map to incorporate this (i.e not to close starting positions)

blitz: Blits sounds like really fun idea and would get the game started, both days would work for me but I would prefer to do it on sunday.

[Meglobob]

I am happy to start wednesday if possible. Also I can blitz for a couple of hours saturday or sunday afternoon GMT -5.