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[E. Albright]

Oh, another idea I'd like to submit for consideration. I'd like to suggest private intra-team diplomacy but public inter-team diplomacy. Thoughts?

[USEC_OFFICER]

Oh, another idea I'd like to submit for consideration. I'd like to suggest private intra-team diplomacy but public inter-team diplomacy. Thoughts?

I'd rather keep inter-team diplomacy private, or as private as these things get. It keeps a bit of excitement and mystery to the whole thing.

[Shadowlord]

Maybe I shouldn't have joined. If we're going to get thrown into random nations I'm not going to have any idea what I'm doing.

(Do scales even apply to disciples? This is confusing. It sounds like disciples' scales have no effect so we would be setting them to maximum negative for as many points as possible, but the pretender's scales would apply to us.)

Edit: I didn't vote because both options make me go D:, but I can't think of any better ideas at the moment, mostly because my experience with the game is limited to so few nations and I've only won it in SP as one nation.

[E. Albright]

You'll not get random nations. Even if we were to do the less-predictable simultaneous draft (which, while possessed of certain merits, is probably not a flawless choice for very raw beginners, I will grudgingly admit) you'd have a choice between at least three options on your team. To give yourself better choices... vote for round-robin in the poll.


Only the pretender gets to buy scales and a bless. The disciples get a smaller pool of points to buy paths for their disciple unit. It's a good idea to try starting a disciple game with both a pretender and disciple as human to see first-hand how that plays out if you've never done so before.


Also, don't worry about your inexperience. You'll be playing with more experienced teammates (you'd be on my team under the provisional division), so if you're not experienced with a nation you'll have resources to get advice from.

[USEC_OFFICER]

(Do scales even apply to disciples? This is confusing. It sounds like disciples' scales have no effect so we would be setting them to maximum negative for as many points as possible, but the pretender's scales would apply to us.)

Disciples have no scales in their creation screen, just magic and Disciple chassis/creature/whatever you want to call it. So it's only the pretender who has worry about that kind of stuff, as well as awake, imprisoned, etc. Note that Disciples always arrive one section before their Head God, so if I set my Pretender to dormant (or whatever the second option is) then your Disciple will start out awake. I'm probably making it more complicated than it is, but as a Disciple all you have to worry about is what magic paths would be most useful for your nation.

[Shadowlord]

Ah, thanks for the clarifications.

[lavenders2]

Oh, another idea I'd like to submit for consideration. I'd like to suggest private intra-team diplomacy but public inter-team diplomacy. Thoughts?

Intra-team diplomacy should be kept private.
I don't mind about inter-team diplomacy. Private sounds pretty cool though.

[tompliss]

Guys, if you need any non-partial party to set up the game (especially for nation selecting), I'm here.

But I think the "by-team round-robin draft" is better, because you get to really select nations you want, even if the last round takes place after many choices.

[Denzi]

Alternative to make this simpler to organize. (Simpler than trying to get twelve people online at the same time, or comparing 12 different lists). Each team gets a team captain(The most experienced member, preferably) and the team comes up with a 'game plan' and some alternatives of what they want to look for as far as nations go. Then you'll only have to get each captain online to pick the nations their team wants. This is especially useful for us beginners who don't know the Ermor from Atlantis. We also need team names. Can't go without Team names. I nominate Team 2 as Team SuperAwesome. and I'm fine with just about anything nation-wise. I'm going to be without internet/computer this weekend, but I'll be back monday to try discussing things. We got plenty of time fortunately(?) thanks to 4.05 being so crashy.

Also this has the benefit of each team having a 'theme' basically, instead of us being a bunch of mish-mash nations that might not compliment.

P.S: Checked the post, no reason not to have Karlito as our captain since me and Trixie are both beginners. Also Trixie, Karlito. What is the best way to get in touch with you two? Steam? Skype? Forum mail? (Please no)

Edit: As far as diplomacy goes I'd prefer us to not talk about that at all out of game publicly. Having our actions made aware of makes back stabbing harder, and back stabbing is fun in strategy games.

[E. Albright]

The round-robin wouldn't require 12 people on at once, nor would the simultaneous draft (and it'd be at worst 4 lists). Both could be done asynchronously. In either case, each team would plot and scheme together, and then either make the monster draft list or (what appears more likely, and not unreasonably so) shoot a couple messages back and forth before making the team's pick in a round-robin draft. The idea is very much to work together to come up with a cohesive team, but there's no need to reduce the teams to autocratic captains to manage that, nor for all of us to be online at once - especially since we have time to kill. We can roll through a drafting process over a day or two.


Right now I'm leaning for calling this vote for round-robin, given that at least a plurality of support looks to be leaning that way (a plurality since I'm leaning to regret my vote against it, upon reconsidering our demographics). Barring a massive outcry for the alternative and/or a compelling 3rd way before tonight, round robin will win by default at that point, and we can begin scheming and moving forward.

Are we all good with the provisional teams? Speak now, or...

[edit:

Edit: As far as diplomacy goes I'd prefer us to not talk about that at all out of game publicly. Having our actions made aware of makes back stabbing harder, and back stabbing is fun in strategy games.

Yes and no. Private diplomacy doesn't make backstabbing easier, it just fosters trust between players/teams and makes collaboration easier. You can backstab just as readily with public diplomacy, it's just harder to have coordinated sneak attacks/offensives. Public diplomacy makes coordinated backstabbing trickier and more subtle to arrange, and strongly discourages sharing of tactical plans. It doesn't eliminate skulduggery, it complicates it. However, if the majority follows the trends of the vocal first responders on the subject, this will be irrelevant, because early consensus looks to be against it.]

[Frumple]

Hnnyeah, m'fine with th'provisional teams. Nation choice wise, I... don't really have a preference. Not exactly picky when it comes to nations...

Communication is a question, yes. I'd probably be best with some form of IRC or steam, or PMs. Got skype, but no microphone and I've used the program all of once.

[Culise]

There is one thing I like about public diplomacy, when it comes to games for new players.  It gives new players a chance to see what's ordinarily going on behind the curtains when it's done by veterans.  They can see how the veteran players negotiate, what sorts of things are negotiated about or bartered in these games, get a feel for how vets who understand the game play define the relative values of certain things like gems or provinces, and so forth.  That said, with so many new players and the consequent distribution of new-to-old being spread across multiple teams, I think private diplomacy will work just as well. 

[Denzi]

autocratic captains

Wasn't saying we should have the captains determine what their team is playing but rather the team figure out what they want to play and the captains try to get that to happen.

Fine with the teams too

[Delta Foxtrot]

You guys should probably do most inter-team diplomacy through specific diplomats (most likely the team captains). It's a lot easier to keep track of things when there are four people talking instead of twelve. Whether it's public or private, it keeps things simple when you know who you have to contact whether it's for trade or more intricate scheming.

A few disciple games have had the problem where left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing. At best a failed gameplan, at worst some forum drama.

And definitely have a team discussion or two before you make nation picks. I prefer IRC (or some other IM software) for realtime communication, email works in the absence of that. Forum PM software here isn't really conductive to discussions about game strategy if you ask me. But whatever works for you guys.

The way I've done it in my few disciple matches (all used roundrobin method) is that we discussed some general strategy we'd like to take. Then we all thought of two or more nations we'd like to play in accordance with the discussed gameplan so that if we didn't get our primary pick, we had a well thought backup ready. In my specific case, we wanted Grade-A thugs, so we were gunning for Jotunheim but were willing to settle for Vanheim or Eriu if things didn't go our way.

Some things to consider while making teamwide nation choices:
-Magic diversity: you can get three nations' worth of paths for rituals/forging, use them
-Recruitable or feasibly summonable thug/SC's
-Can you get a bless that benefits everyone?
-More general national synergies: 1-gem forging goes well with thugging, sloth nations work well together, as do production nations.
-Can you do meaningful resource pooling (might go together with synergies): can you get more bang for buck if you pool gems/gold/gear to a single player? Ulm is probably resource locked so it can finance others first fort, or Bandar Log can gather useless gems of his teammates to have twice as many Gandharvas for example.

Oh, and one more tip: Having a Cold/Heat 2-3 pretender and Heat-0 disciples, the pretender can take 80-120 almost 'free' points by taking heat-0. You can put that to other scales or a stronger bless. It might not be immediately obvious so I thought I'd mention it here. It's not mandatory but certainly something worth looking into. You're only weakening one nation out of three while getting more income/research/luck/bless as a team to compensate.

[E. Albright]

All right, it looks like the vocal majority is for private diplomacy. I suppose we need not add complexity given that this is a first or second MP game for a lot of us. Speaking for my team, we'll be doing diplomacy through one player (not necessarily me, but not necessarily not) for the sake of maintaining clear communication, but I'll be insistent on having the non-diplomats see what's being discussed for both instructional purposes and situational awareness.

I'm going to leave the question of nation selection open over the weekend, but with a strong presumption that we're going to do a round-robin draft. Our teams are fixed, so go ahead and start trying to come up with team strategies. We'll pick the map based on the nations we end up with; i.e., if we have 4 water nations, Argatha, and Ermor, we're gonna want a very different map than if we're all landlubbers.