Good read, like many I'm sure it's enlightening to read about other games going on, like any fan, I suppose.
But something has been bugging me for a while now, and no, I don't think the first article planted the seed, it's been nagging for months....
The vast majority of comments in regards to VP's and the "Individual Win" are negative. "It's a team game" and reminders of the bad old GSI days when allies would pillage allies, supposedly for the highly valued GWC's. But, everywhere I go I keep hearing about "winning". The diatribe against agents and the play-by-play of the Gunboat game both mentioned either winning or placing. Almost every game I've been in in the last 2 years has seen players openly discuss the concept of being the "winner", either neutrals or allegiance players trying to woo my neutral nation.
So what is it? Are players like me who care not a whit for VP's, and actually shudder at the thought of having their nation listed on the front of allies pdf's for fear they'd consider my efforts less than stellar and selfish in some miniscule minority? Do the rest of the players simply roll their eyes as we sanctimoniously natter on about our "childish" prattle, and then simply continue along their attempts at securing top spot once we've moved off? I'm serious! Recently, I picked up a neutral in the Early Game and an allied player was quite confident that I would have the best chance of "winning" if I joined their side. I was so moved I attacked them immediately thereafter...and, in what might only be a coincidence, the "superior" "team" dropped within 2 turns...
So as to come clean with my potential snootiness, I consider VP's to be merely a transitory guage of relative strengths within the game that are only meaningful in the remotest sense of triviality and only rarely make an impact on a serious player's strategy. I've done some work in this regard myself, one game I tracked the VP's of all nations for the first 15 turns, including the 12 players on my side and an average of 5 enemy players after I'd made the request for the information for purely academic reasons. I wasn't able to make any meaningful determinations between the numbers and the real game situation, and was actually led towards devising a completely different turn-by-turn based scoring system based on the actual orders given and their results (some may remember this...). Just to go on record, my proudest game netted me a disappointing 500 VP's...500 was disappointing because I'd have rathered my DS Duns with their 4th allied-supplied new capital would end up with 400, but some randomly assigned (stupid) "VC" for a randomly (stupidly) assigned character death must have occured to net me the unwanted extra 100. I've also been in a game where I ended up 2nd and resisted to the end various allies attempts to stack my nation for victory simply because it would have been a neat result (a DS Rhudaur). I consider it uncouth to even discuss VP's and the concept of an individual "winner".
Am I really as alone as I feel these days?
Regards,
Brad Brunet
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have an opinion on the