Rotate players deterministically

[317070]

Old title: Turn order

To come back to the turn order: The current solution is too complicated.

Suggestion: Use the mechanic of spheres of influence: cards go into a pile. Every player gets 3 cards in the pile. Every time your card comes up, you may choose to take your action, or wait for a later one. Upon conquering move tokens, you put one (or more) of your cards back into the stack and shuffle the remaining cards in the stack again.

Properties:

• Player order is revealed during the turn and is not known up front. So losing players could take gambles that they will come up 2 times in a row.
• Players with fewer moves can still go last with an equal chance to all the others.

But, I'm afraid this suggestion might make the game slightly too random for my taste?

[Tantali]

Maybe first list what an ideal solution would entail:

1. Promote general/flexible strategies that don't depend on/exploit turn order.
2. Give everyone the chance (or choice?) to go first/last
3. Randomness shouldn't be the main determinant of the end result
4. Easy to understand

The current suggestion would solve 1, 2, 4 (except that conquering move token will be tricky to explain and execute). But I too think 3 might be a problem.

[317070]

When formulated like that, there will never be a solution though. Either the order is deterministic and thus exploitable (so not 1), or it is random (thus 3). The only other option I see is to let the players influence order in secret.

We did it before through bidding, but maybe we can work out something more insidious? Like, is there a way we could let the players influence the location of their cards in the stack?

[Tantali]

I listed this to be able to compare solutions, but yes I agree, most likely a solution needs to compromise somewhere in this list.

I would say the current mechanic in 'master' is somewhat decent on 1 and 3 but fails a bit at 2 and 4. The advantage I see in this mechanic is that it switches consistently between the teams (until you run out of moves). Having chance result in a player to go 2 or even 3 in a row would violate point 3 completely in my opinion.

I'll think about your 'insidious' suggestion.

[317070]

An idea, are we willing to go back, and retry the default 'rotating player' approach (so no more randomness)? It would be going back to square 1, but I wonder (with the immediate healing) if it would still be as bad?

[Tantali]

I'm definitely pro the simplistic rotating player, assuming other things fix the problems we were having. (where the removal of wounded in some way, shape or form might indeed help)

But I do think that deterministic player order will make the planning phase take longer, as players will take time to think of every step, instead of aiming at a general planning.

[nymanjens]

I'd be willing to try the old rotating player rules again. We have pretty accurate time measurements for the last 30+ games so we can compare to new games.