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Lepanto:
No offense meant to Lorric, but if you run another forum game, it'd probably be more fun for most of the players if you somehow made it harder for one player to come up with a mathematically-optimized ideal plan for each turn. The game was still nice, but it's less fun for the people involved if one person makes all the strategic decisions for everybody. Maybe have the different factions sorta work at cross-purposes, with their own political sub-objectives that only they will be interested in fulfilling?

Lorric:

--- Quote from: Lepanto on April 14, 2014, 10:31:50 am ---No offense meant to Lorric, but if you run another forum game, it'd probably be more fun for most of the players if you somehow made it harder for one player to come up with a mathematically-optimized ideal plan for each turn. The game was still nice, but it's less fun for the people involved if one person makes all the strategic decisions for everybody. Maybe have the different factions sorta work at cross-purposes, with their own political sub-objectives that only they will be interested in fulfilling?

--- End quote ---

No offence taken. I wouldn't advise pitting the players against each other though. I think it was the fact it wasn't competitive that way that made it work so well and become greater than the sum of it's parts.

I pondered it myself when this came up in the early going, was there a way to make it so that everyone would take their turn individually, which I think is what Spoon had wanted. I couldn't think of anything though. But I'd be happy enough if a way could be found for it to work that way. The thing is you need to make it so that either planning like I have done is not going to be useful, or make it so that individual players get more involved in their fleets actions somehow, or that the planning phase is but just a part of the game instead of how big of a deal it was in this one, so that even if I (or anyone) ended up in the kind of role I ended up in this one, it wouldn't be such a big deal and only a mere part of the game. I don't know how you'd do it. It's potentially a good topic though and we may have an opportunity to pursue new ideas.

In this game we had the planning, and we also had the role play. And the role play was in the hands of the individual at all times, so if we could have more things involved in the hands of the individual that would be great.

I don't know if anyone would have predicted there'd end up being a kind of de-facto leader/strategist in the planning phase at all, certainly I wouldn't have. I would have thought we'd all end up discussing it and all end up coming up with different ideas and strategies and such and different people would be having different impacts on the turn every turn. And I really wouldn't have thought if there was going to be a de-facto leader/strategist type it would end up being me. But now we know, and Spoon knows too, so we can potentially all work together to ensure each individual gets a stronger individual role in the next game.

You know, I always hoped that someone would come up with a better plan than me each turn. :)

Do you have anything to say about this Spoon?

General Battuta:

--- Quote from: Lepanto on April 14, 2014, 10:31:50 am ---No offense meant to Lorric, but if you run another forum game, it'd probably be more fun for most of the players if you somehow made it harder for one player to come up with a mathematically-optimized ideal plan for each turn. The game was still nice, but it's less fun for the people involved if one person makes all the strategic decisions for everybody. Maybe have the different factions sorta work at cross-purposes, with their own political sub-objectives that only they will be interested in fulfilling?

--- End quote ---

This is something called the quarterbacking problem, and it's a fundamental issue with pure co-op game design, particularly in deterministic games with transparent information. Pandemic is an example of a popular game that suffers very strongly from it.

There are two broad approaches to solving it: giving individual players secret antagonistic sub-objectives within the context of the overall game (as in the superb Battlestar Galactica board game), or restricting players' ability to pool information (as in Hanabi). A third, more radical approach comes from restricting players' time to make decisions, forcing local instead of global judgments. This is the approach used by the hilarious Space Alert.

There other interesting co-op and semicoop examples to look at, like Flash Point: Fire Rescue. It's a very interesting design problem that's seen a ton of work in the last ten years of game design.

swashmebuckle:

--- Quote from: General Battuta on April 14, 2014, 11:58:27 am ---
--- Quote from: Lepanto on April 14, 2014, 10:31:50 am ---No offense meant to Lorric, but if you run another forum game, it'd probably be more fun for most of the players if you somehow made it harder for one player to come up with a mathematically-optimized ideal plan for each turn. The game was still nice, but it's less fun for the people involved if one person makes all the strategic decisions for everybody. Maybe have the different factions sorta work at cross-purposes, with their own political sub-objectives that only they will be interested in fulfilling?

--- End quote ---

This is something called the quarterbacking problem, and it's a fundamental issue with pure co-op game design, particularly in deterministic games with transparent information. Pandemic is an example of a popular game that suffers very strongly from it.

There are two broad approaches to solving it: giving individual players secret antagonistic sub-objectives within the context of the overall game (as in the superb Battlestar Galactica board game), or restricting players' ability to pool information (as in Hanabi). A third, more radical approach comes from restricting players' time to make decisions, forcing local instead of global judgments. This is the approach used by the hilarious Space Alert.

There other interesting co-op and semicoop examples to look at, like Flash Point: Fire Rescue. It's a very interesting design problem that's seen a ton of work in the last ten years of game design.

--- End quote ---
Injecting a bit of light competition really livens things up in these sorts of games.  I assumed it was going to happen here (maybe with forced political alliances) because the players were split into teams from the outset.

I think that trying to restrict information sharing while staying competition-free would be kind of against the spirit of the game in this case (and pretty impractical here on the forums with a system in place specifically for the purpose of secret information sharing).  Effective time pressure is also pretty unworkable given time zones.  Randomization in risks/rewards/objectives/capabilities like in Flash Point might be a good way to go if the group is truly against competition, though it doesn't eliminate quarterbacking (just means the quarterback uses probabilities in their arguments).

In a potential sequel I'd like to see something like the players/teams all having to work towards the same goal of defeating the external threat, but each also wanting to come out of the game in the best possible circumstances (fleets/territory/wealth expanded).  Teams currently in the lead might have to submit their orders first so that losing teams could see which way the wind is blowing and play that to their advantage.  Might wanna eliminate perma-death too to keep things from getting ugly.

Spoon:
Split this into its own seperate thread because its interesting.
My thoughts will follow later

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