2 thoughts about possible improvements of the rules:
A) I think we should wait with the discussion until the game is over. Not so much because I’m worried about giving away information or the game spilling over here, simply because we can more openly discuss about how we felt at which time in the game after it’s over and also because we’ll know for sure if and how the game had different phases at that time.
B) I think we should play another game after this one with unchanged rules (even if we agree about improvements already), because seeing if and how strategies change because of the experience from game 1 will be an interesting experience in itself. (Maybe more formalised rules about pausing the game may make sense though.) I’d volunteer to host game 2 in case Martin wants to play for a change. But I’d also play again.
Thank you for offering. I would indeed like to play.
I have been thinking about the balancing, and I believe it is difficult with such an asymmetric setup (one team with advantage of numbers, the other with advantage of starting information). We can talk about this later, as you said. But we can also think about having a symmetric setup. I think I would like that.
Yeah, the setup got me thinking. As of now, the settlers can place one more stone in every round, and this is huge. After 3 rounds of 9 players, that gives 27 stones in total, of which 12 are of rebels and 15 of settlers. The board’s got 169 intersections. Say, there are 18 rounds, that gives 162 stones, of which 72 rebels and 90 settlers. How sound is Vsotveps Komi formula?
Move order is quite a huge factor. By randomly assigning players, there can be all kinds of weird cases, of all rebels playing consecutively, followed by all settlers, or it could be perfectly intertwined, with the settlers having one double move, but it could also be that rebels have only one double move, and settlers have a triple move, or the rebels could have two double moves and the settlers a quadruple move.
Then there’s first move advantage, and how the settlers decide to disperse themselves across the board, while rebels may aggregate from the first move. Naturally, it really depends on psychology as well, or how long rebels can keep their advantage of knowledge…
Finally, there may not even exist an optimal komi, since with an imperfect information game like this, it’s quite possible (perhaps, I dare say, even likely) that there exist good (in the sense of strong enough to win from humans on average) strategies (that is, ways to respond depending on the situation you find yourself in, including the assigned role and the board position) that are not transitive on average (like rock-paper-scissors, each strategy wins from one and loses from the other, when averaging over all possible distributions of roles amongst the players).
Oh, I see, you have the board and the list in one picture and want the pixels around it to be fully transparent. For me they are white, which is okay, because I’m using the light theme.
So the image seems to be a JPG, which doesn’t support transparency, if I remember correctly. Did you upload a JPG or something else?
We might have this situation come up in the current game, so I am interpreting the rules this way, which I think is correct:
Players are never eliminated from the game, even if all the stones they played are captured.
They will continue to play moves on their turn after that.
It is always good to check, so @martin3141 please let me know if I am wrong.
So… I’m fine with in-character banter, playful jokes, and witty repartee. All part of the fun in social games. However, it’s a delicate balance and what may be fun for one may not be for another.
I’m not okay with direct insults toward me or my characters. It’s not fun for me. I would prefer if you wouldn’t do it again, @Vsotvep.
