pentagram diplomacy

[Zooko]

Here's a good way to play multiplayer that fixes the multiplayer problem of "If I kill you then he wins.".

In one-on-one, (or in one-team vs. one-team), you are always willing to expend your resources (i.e., send your army into deadly danger) if you think it will deplete your opponent's resources more.

But with three or more players, if you send your army to destroy player A's army, then player B is going to mop up both of you.

This encourages too much waiting-and-building-up strategy. I hate that. I want to see some good battlefield action and not just fifty turns of conquering independents and building up your super-tech.

Here's a way to play a 5-player game that has both plenty of combat and also interesting diplomacy:

For scoring purposes, arrange the players into a pentagram:

            Alice      Bob





        Charles          Doug





                 Eliza

That's some crappy ASCII art but hopefully you get the idea.

Now the scoring rule is simple: you win when both of the people opposite you are dead.

That's it!

Now what about the people next to you on the pentagram? Well, they aren't your enemies exactly, but they aren't precisely your friends either. It can lead to some very fun diplomacy.

Sometime after I move into my new house (Nov. 1), I'll host a game with these rules. There will only be four slots available, since I'm calling first dibs on one of the five slots. :-)

I'll also use the latest Version of Zen's conceptual balance mod. I like it!

[Chazar]

Sounds very interesting, but how do you cope if those nations cannot reach each other?

How do you extend this sytem to 7 or 9 nations?
Would it be more sensible to retain 2 specific nations to kill (which in turn also try to kill you), but which would lead to two nations being neither you enemy nor someone who shares your goal?

Or would it be more sensible to have non-mutual enemy relationships, i.e. something like
A vs. C,D
B vs. D,E
C vs. E,F
D vs. F,G
E vs. G,A
F vs. A,B
G vs. B,C

so that A hunts C,D; is hunted by E,F; and shares 1/2 of it goal with B,G? It is sort of bad here that C and D play a different role, since C hunts both of A's hunters. It should be a system where every role occurs twice equally...
(having three goals seems bad to me for 7 players)

[Gandalf Parker]

There are a couple of maps that make that easy to do. Designed for that type of play.

[Cainehill]

Gandalf Parker said:
There are a couple of maps that make that easy to do. Designed for that type of play.

Theater of war might be perfect for it, with 6 nations. That's a map I've always wanted to have a game on... It'd give a very different kind of play, though I think the .map file would need to be editted for six players so each started in a separate sphere, and also to modify the victory point conditions.

[Ed Kolis]

Chazar said:
Or would it be more sensible to have non-mutual enemy relationships, i.e. something like
A vs. C,D
B vs. D,E
C vs. E,F
D vs. F,G
E vs. G,A
F vs. A,B
G vs. B,C

This sounds very much like the "Paranoia" games over at SE4 PBW... except in those, you only had one target (and in one of the games, your target was known only to you! )

[Zooko]

I really don't know how to generalize to other numbers of players than five.

Also, I don't know what to do if the enemy nations can't reach each other.

You could get your five players lined up, start the game, reveal the location of your starting capitol province, and then assign enemies so that all enemies can reach each other without going through friends.

What maps do you recommend, Gandalf?

[Cainehill]

...A...B

C.........D

...E...F


You keep it to where each only needs two specific nations, the ones that are one apart. A -> D,E B -> C,F

This would work wonderfully with a Theater of War game, I should think, and only requiring 2 capitals to win would keep the game from going on and on.

(Edit : periods added since it wants to collapse spaces.)

[Chazar]

[Post completely edited for symmetry reasons:]

Well, this is for 6...but I am interested in 7.

What about this one:

A hunts C,D
B hunts D,E
C hunts E,F
D hunts F,G
E hunts G,A
F hunts A,B
G hunts B,C

So A is hunted by E&F, both being hunted by C who is A's prey...

So each nation needs to hunt the hunter of its own hunters. Furthermore, there are no 4-cycles and each nation is contained in a 3-cycle.

Therefore, alliances are highly unstable. The game is also likely to end very soon once the first nation got killed, so sitting back and developing is severly discouraged by this victory condition!
Diplomacy, on the other hand, rules, since it is unimported who killed the killed nations.
(Note that I am merely talking about victory conditions and do not intend to place any other restrictions on alliances, etc. Every player is just assigned his own private mission!)



Does this make sense to obtain a good game? I figured that 4-cycles must be prohibited so that there are no obvious alliances, while 3-cycles rule out alliances easily. What else would be good rules for such a victory-condition?

Here is a picture showing above's hunting relation for 7 players:

[Zooko]

A big difference between this 7-player graph and the 5-player case is that in the 5-player (pentagram) game, you are always your enemy's enemy. That is, if I can win by killing you (and one other person), then you can win by killing me (and one other person).

With this 7-player game diagrammed above, I want to protect myself from my two attackers, but I don't get any victory points for conquering them.

I guess the problem is if I were playing in this 7-player game, I wouldn't know what strategy to use!

[Zooko]

Well, Gandalf hasn't (yet) recommended a map to use for this kind of game. I'm partial to the Cradle map. It is good looking, has interesting barriers -- rivers and mountains -- and I appreciate that the map image lets me know the actual contents of the provinces (e.g. farmlands, extra-magical-provinces, etc.).

If I were to organize a 5-player pentagram game on the Cradle map, I would want to do it were each player reveals the location of their capitol and then gets assigned enemies so that all enemies are as close to each other as possible.