vsotvep, will you please play j7 next turn?
Why?
Great, now le_4TC is comfortably in the lead. I donāt see a way to change that anymore.
I have slightly more āterritoryā but less secure eye-shape compared to you and Vsotvep. The game is far from over!
Some has to capture my stone.I will have to make a move on eye spaces.
I have some experience in diplomatic multiplayer games, sort of similar to this one. Once there are people who feel like they have no chance of winning anymore (especially if they cannot resign), they often act as āKingmakersā, helping change the outcome of the game in favor of one person or the other. Because that way, at least you impact the outcome of the game.
I believe that Haze and ęå»ŗę¾2 probably feel that way, and I am starting to feel that way as well.
2 Likes
Iām not sure if youāre trying to appeal to pity or empathy, but as a 1d, surely youāve played games of normal go where you crawled ahead out of worse situations than youāre currently in, right? And this is Diplomatic Go, weāre pioneers in this game type. I am convinced that it is a lot harder to live with something in this game type.
With about 3 games experience in SAS Go, I can tell that capturing something is both hard and easy at the same time. Because capture can be blocked by well-timed collision, it is sometimes impossible to actually remove a group in atari from the board. In other instances, it is almost impossible to defend, since the opponent may be playing in anticipation of your saving move.
This is not at all a finished game, and although le_4TC currently looks scary, that also makes them the prime target to fight against.
Who knows, perhaps 5 players on a 9x9 board will turn out to always be a draw?
1 Like
One interesting outcome would be a 3-way draw, with 81/3 = 27 points each 
Who knows, I can imagine a possibility that Haze and ęå»ŗę¾ remain in the game until the end, just by never completely dying. As long as none of us can solidify territory, it will be a draw.
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Iām not trying to appeal to pity or empathy, I just wanted to share this thought with you. I feel the premise of this game variant is that all players are trying to win. But you cannot expect this from players that have no chance of winning anymore.
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Not necessarily, even if stones without eyes manage to remain on the board, we could get a āpremature scoringā either by repetition or by a second mutual pass, in which case the player(s) with most stones on the board (+ possibly some territory) will win.
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In that case itās beneficial to the player in 2nd place to give up some of their stones to prevent repetition / passing. Suicide is allowed after all.
Technically repetition is a possibility, but I bet weāll get bored of it before that happens
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The question of what players who feel that they donāt have a chance anymore should do is interesting and a bit problematic. I believe this is the reason for including the āeliminationā mechanic, but as weāre seeing itās not easy to eliminate a player completely. I think we should provide some clearer incentives for losing players in the rules for the next game (for instance, is it really better to have only winners and losers, compared to competing for 4th and 5th place?). But this is a tricky problem in general and there probably is no perfect solution.
Edit: One possible idea is to have each players score be how many points they are behind the first place player(s). So letās say one player has 30 points, one player has 27 points, one player has 24 points, and the remaining two have no alive stones. You could say that the first player has 0 points, second player has -3 points, third player has -6 points, and remaining two have -30. If your incentive is to maximize your own score here, it is in your interest to keep attacking the leading player, even if you canāt keep any of your own stones alive. You could use this rule together with or instead of the current elimination mechanic.
4 Likes
Eventually avoiding repetition/passing is impossible without sacrificing your own alive group. If the game is headed thay way, we donāt necessarily have to play it out to the boring end, thatās why thereās an option to vote to resign!
Round 15 has ended
Here is what happened:
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@le_4TC, 
@Vsotvep, and 
@martin3141 collided at J3 for their first choice -
@Haze_with_a_Z placed at their first choice J7 -
@ęå»ŗę¾2 placed at their first choice F2 -
@le_4TC second choice collided at F2, and they placed their third choice E2
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@Vsotvep placed at the second choice H8
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@martin3141 placed at their second choice C9
Round 16 has begun and will end on 2020-09-04T00:00:00Z
Just to be clear, here is the current board position:
4 Likes
Well, Iād argue itās really not that hardā¦ The trouble in Diplomacy is that if you have a player missing suddenly someone becomes too powerful and it throws off the game, but if someone in this game is near-eliminated it doesnāt really do much provided that the resignation is forewarned in advance (maybe one turn) so that the reading isnāt thrown off.
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What reading? 
well, not so much reading as preparing your moves, and honestly itās more of a relief to know someoneās not adding more chaos to the moves
Itās a big problem here. If a player stops playing while their stones are still on the board, that completely changes the dynamic of the game. If they keep playing but their behaviour is ill-defined (i. e. they donāt have any real goal, but have to decide who to help just based on what theyāre feeling), that also affects the game in a weird way. You canāt hope to do any āreadingā if you donāt even know what game your opponent is playing.
Itās not a major issue for us in this first test game, weāre just trying things out and are all still beginners. But I think deciding how to handle this issue is quite important for future games!
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