Alternative D: At the moment a player is eliminated, they may choose to remove any number of their chains from the board, in addition to the captured one(s).
I’m not a fan of this option myself, but it’s a relatively simple way to give eliminated players more agency, as @yebellz was suggesting 
Talking about the late game, for me the biggest actual problem is the fundament of Go: eyes. After certain amount of moves there is no way weakest can threaten strongest. That is, Matthew effect is too strong.
I thought about some variations like “your group with zero liberties dies when your next turn begins” but I am not satisfied with what I came to.
I do not understand this statement at all. There is a number of multiplayer games which are considered to be balanced with round-robin turn order, or at least being imbalanced not due to the turn order but for the other aspects. Turn order is just one small (yet important) aspect of the game.
On the contrary, allowing 4 successive turns for 2 players would be a nightmare.
I’d like to quote a post from the first battle royale game, which didn’t have a random starting position:
I shared that sentiment in our game. No one was willing to attack Red or Blue, and as a result, the game felt lost before it was played. The result was predictable from the start and we never challenged it.
My experience with diplomatic style games (or multiplayer games in general) is that there are always situations reminiscent of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Consider a game between players A, B and C, and player A starts with the most promising position. Players B and C are interested in cooperating against A in order to even the odds. However, both B and C consider the possibility that the other will betray them.
For example if B attacks A first, C may choose to not help B in this attack, and instead increase their own profit as much as possible. This may result in A and B being in a fight, and C taking all the big points.
These kind of considerations make it more difficult to cooperate in an attack. But I do agree with @ArsenLapin1, in that I believe that it is possible.
I believe I owe you an answer.
If you want to use this definition of failing …
failing ↔ not winning
… then you are technically correct. But I would prefer not to use it in this way, because I find that it unnecessarily puts losing in a negative light.
Example: 7 players, random starting position. The last player in order gets eliminated before making any move. Did this player lose? Yes. Did this player fail? Depends on how you understand “fail” I guess. Did this player make any mistakes? No.
It is not about “diplomatic”, it is about “multiplayer”.
It is just not true. @NeilAgg could go and suicide inside @martin3141 territory or just go for self-killing: all those options (including what was done in the game) would not give him victory. It was just a decision of one player, not “game was lost from the beginning”. You could kill @NeilAgg just before you died - it would help as well (because than Orange, i.e. me, would live longer and would have space to attack).
So, once again - yes, from some point the game does not depend on just your actions, but at the same time it is not over from the beginning.
I think it is reasonable to play these sorts of multiplayer games with a very strong focus on winning outright, putting a high preference on maximizing probability of victory, rather than taking a best position possible mindset.
However, I think one has to acknowledge and handle the reality that other players’ mindsets and preferences might not be exactly as one initially expects. One has to adjust one’s own strategy to the reality of how others are behaving.
It wasn’t that I was unwilling to attack Red or Blue. I simply did not see a profitable way to do so that would actually help improve my chances of winning. I wasn’t sure exactly how I could win at the beginning, but I could tell that I would certainly lose, if I did not secure life for each of my three disconnected groups. However, I felt that if I did get all of my weak groups to survive, that some potentially good things could happen as I had good exposure to several areas of potential growth across the board. I think the endgame wasn’t quite like how many would have predicted.
I endorse each and every word.
And my goal was to keep the number of remaining moves for all players as close a possible so that game stays unredictible enough.
I agree with this. I found the endgame to be quite interesting.
It is for that reason I think we don’t need to fix anything. It’s not broken. Life is not always fair. Some people were in a disadvantage from the start. That’s ok.
As @martin3141 alluded to, I think that some analogies can be drawn to the prisoner’s dilemma (or maybe the tragedy of the commons or free-rider problem). If there is one player getting ahead, I would love to see others go do something about that and take care of that problem, while I just focus on my own growth. More generally, in these sorts of games, I’m happy to see the other players get entangled in conflict that reduces the efficiency of their moves, while I maintain efficient growth under relatively peaceful conditions.
If the game was about grabbing coupons (there’s one of each) worth 15 points, 14 points , 13 points … and players take a coupon on their turn and see who has the most points at the end, it becomes much clearer why player 1 has a big advantage over player n.
If n=4 then 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 player order means player 1 will have score 26 in two turns while player 4 will have score 20. Bump that up to 8 players and player 1 will have score 22, while player 8 will have score 8 points.
Change the turn order to 1,2,3…,8,8,7,6… and now player 1 gets 15 points while player 8 also gets 15 points.
Go isn’t exactly like taking coupons, and some moves might have a similar/duplicate value, so duplicate coupons, but the players that take the corners first in a peaceful game have a big advantage over those stuck with the sides, and much worse is anyone stuck in the center.
A lot of multiplayer games have a huge amount of randomness to balance the game out over several plays, like card draws shuffling, dice rolls etc. Technically this battle royale does have randomness but I don’t think it’s inherently balancing. It likely doesn’t provide equal opportunity to all players in the turn order on average. One would probably need to generate a number of “fair” setups and choose randomly from those at game start.
More generally
the game doesn’t sound like it provides any incentive to not being peaceful, which just reinforces any initial advantages players have. If anything the weaker players (positionally) have to kill each other to survive while the stronger players (positionally) just reinforce their initial advantage.
I think this is exactly the “problem” which we are trying to solve. Maybe the solution (as you suggested) is to add more randomness to the game, but I still want it to have some strategy.
I mean one could just think of having a setup phase separate to the playing phase also.
For the first two stones it could go players 1,2,3…,n,n,…,1
And then say return to the normal turn order 1,2,3…,n,1,2,3…
Or one could imagine some other system depending on the rules, whether it’s capture go, whether there could be “komi bidding” to go first second third etc (that could be offering a certain number of passes afforded to the players)
With the “komi” bidding it could be like. I’ll offer 3 passes, another player offers 4 passes etc. Then the player offering the most passes goes first, the second most second etc, and the passes are given in reverse descending order to the last players.
Let’s say it ended up like
| Player number | Passes offered | Passes awarded |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 | 0 |
| 2 | 2 | 1 |
| 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 4 | 0 | 3 |
I’m not necessarily saying these are the rules I’d like to play with, just throwing some ideas out there.
I’ve seen some multiplayer board games do a kind of bidding like that.
And this is something I completely agree with.
I find adding a “pass” option to be great idea. Also there is an option to add a Veto which would make the game even more diplomatic.
I disagree with players being able to pass. It is central to the game that players are pushed to self-atari.
Regarding veto - How would that work?
They can only pass a fixed number of times, determined at the start of the game which may or may not be of benefit to them if they get eliminated.
It makes sense to disagree with in a two player game sure, but it’s not clear capture go is balanced since ordinary isn’t balanced without some small komi.
I think the disparity is probably much bigger with more players as well. It’s probably the obvious choice to give passes as a balance to compensate for a lack of a good position in the opening.
(Unless you’re me and thinking player one playing tengen would be funny, but it just ended up bad - probably to no one’s surprise)
Each player has one-time veto. After any move (e.g. made by A) any other player X can apply his veto and do not allow A to make that move. After it, A has to make any other move or pass instead.
It looks like cost of veto changes during the game and the later player was in initial order of turns, the more value veto has for this player. Also it greately combines with alliances (group has much more protection than single person), and makes game much more unpredictible and intriguing till the end.
I am not sure I agree with that. If you would like to host a game, we can try it to see how it goes.