Having seen in the gunboats I’ve played and read about from everyone else here I have some observations and suggestions:
The single worst situation in a gunboat game is a drop early, or a dormant players for 2-3 turns.
Three man teams, especially on the dark side where character (Agent) abilities tend to allow nations to gang up against the enemy are the root cause of the unfairness/collapse in gunboat games.
Drops on the free side are almost invariably worse for the team than drops on the dark side because the three man free team most commonly can not do a 3 nation on one gang up (unless the free get two nations right next to each other).
Those things said. I feel the following solutions are perhaps the better situation:
All gunboat games are no drop. If a person drops they can not play gunboat again for a year. However, if they can find a friend to take over both nations this penalty does not apply.
Gunboat groupings can not be enlarged to three nations per team/person.
If a nation’s player drops the nation’s turn pdf is sent out to all allied players so they know the situation in that arena. This allows the team to attempt to recover chracters and information.
This prevents the nasty inevitable pairing of the cloud lord with someone when rhudaur falls/quits, helps the team to know how bad a regions collapse is, etc.
I suggest it is worse for the game to give a three team pairing then it is to simply allow a nation to collapse. Of course it could bring MEPBM game less money in the short term, but would likely keep eople playing more often and keep people from quiting the game overall.
See ya,
Ken
As an aside from what I have seen/heard the most common dropped pairings are arthedain/woodmen and north gondor/dunland. (wonder why, hmmm) on the dark side I am guessing it is rhudaur/cloud lord but later in the game.
Also note the drak win against the free 2 to 1 roughly and do not need augmentation of rhudaur.
I totally agree, G19 (ongoing) has been ruined by the FK-CL being given
the QA on turn 5(ish)… How can one fight against such a 3 nation
combination?? Very unhappy with ME over this; QA should never have been
given to CL-FK. If it hadnt been a no drop game I would have dropped.
Lets see give the best DS agent and military power, the QA with double
scouting and fantastic emissaries!!! Ridiculous, has completely
changed the game and has lost the game for the Free. Let’s see I’ve
paid over 180 pounds for a game which ME won for the DS.
These may be strong words but I believe them to be right and true. A
rule change is badly needed. Certain nations MUST NOT be given to
other nations. Why isnt there a small pool of players willing to take
dropped gunboat positions?
Lets say the QA/IK player drops:
– ME tries to fill spot with another ME player not in game. If that does not
work, than ME have the other team vote on where the other 2 kingdoms should be assigned (if only 1 kingdom than vote on the 1). This will allow the goods in this example to make sure QA is not paired with CL ect…
Other option is decide how the nations will be assigned if there is a drop so that everyone knows. No randomness. Problem here is does a player want to take on cost of 3 kingdom?
Three kingdoms in one player is always an advantage to whoever gets it so we have to come up with ways to minimize the effect. Lets not kill a kingdom because WK or Rhu gets knocked out so than there is not CL or DrkL due to drop. Image if CL or DrkL was taken out due to drop. That changes the game a huge amount also.
I also think ME should not list on your turn results email what nations are out or pairings (only list it as the “starting pairings”). The first thing I do in GB games is see if there are any single kingdom players and attack them. If you did not find out on your own within game rules (using mages, recons, scouts, doubles ect), you should not know that WK just got knocked out so now DrkL is a lone kingdom.
Forgot one item to Guy’s comment:
“Why isnt there a small pool of players willing to take
dropped gunboat positions?”
–Most of the time it is for 1 nation and as you know if you play 1 nation in GB you have little chance to live at all. 2 nations available I would guess is not a problem for pickups.
John
Personally I would give a 1 nation gunboat a shot, ofcourse you will never
become a power but sometimes thats not the point. But in this case it
was a 2 nation drop and 2 DS players ended up playing 3 nations each.
If the rules aren’t changed or without any ME assureances of non repeat
I won’t be signing up for any more GB games. All that hard work and
cost to be beaten by ME? No thanks.
I agree except as somebody mentioned already, losing the second nation as well in a pairing because the player dropped is unbalancing as well. The ideal solution is of course for the player not to drop and perhaps pick up a 2nd nation again at some point in the future. But barring that, I like Guy’s idea of having a pool of players arranged beforehand who would be willing to take over a lone nation. Perhaps MEGames could give some kind of price break to encourage that to happen. And if the decision was made to drop the nation then certainly sending out the last PDF to the team helps recovery.
1) Drops have invariably left the team at a disadvantage. This can often be a big disadvantage as 2 nations have often SSed for 2 turns. The reason that players SS in that situation is that regularly they are in a weak position (ie under heavy attack) so their nations are in a weaker position again - these factors multiply up to cause a big disadvantage for the dropping player side.
2) Solution to drops: i) No drop games - as we’ve seen they reduce the impact of drops but don’t stop it. (So far 4 sets of positions have been dropped like this).
ii) Use GSI system of no drop pick-ups. I think this kills games and players enjoyment - when there’s no competition left on the other side what’s the point in playing (well for many I can see that this would be enjoyable). I’ve gone into this in detail in the past why we don’t like it (and why we think it’s bad for you guys as a game as well).
iii) Pick-ups. Okay one thing to address is the impact of the pick-ups. Given that in 1) above there is a big impact from missed turns/reduced effective positions then allowing a trio helps brings the “balance” back - ie an even, competitive game which is what I think the majority of you want. (If we go with ii) above the game generally ends in around 5 turns due to snowballing drops and it was basically kills most games of GB when we can’t get replacements). We can certainly limit duos and their allowed triplet - I think that is one solution that would be very pertinent here.
My suggestion given iii) would be for you guys to fill in the gaps below: 1650 FP (I’ll look at 2950 later if this fits players approval)
1/4 not allowed with: eg 1/4 n/a: 5,8,9 (my initial thoughts but more as an example)
2/8 n/a:
3/7 n/a:
5/9 n/a:
6/23 n/a:
10/22 n/a: 1650 DS
11/20 n/a:
12/21 n/a:
13/15 n/a:
14/24 n/a:
16/19 n/a:
17/18 n/a:
My assumption here is that we’d aim to keep character based nations apart (particularly double scouters with CL it seems to cause the most ire) and ditto economic/army based nations apart but feel free to put in some feedback and what you’d like to see.
Quick note on pick-ups - we send out an email asking players if they want to pickup a nation if we can’t get a player to pick up the duos (sometimes that happens) without giving out the nation duos. We then divy up those nations as follows: i) players with least nations get 1st “refusal” ie they get a 2nd nation if they come back at this time, ii) we then give out the nations that most don’t fit their present situation. Only when this fails do we then email again with the nations that have not been picked up and list those nations and you can ask for a specific nation (this happens 0% of the times for the first duo dropped, but subsequent duos there’s an increased chance we have to fall back to this situation).
2nd thing: I intend that for future games we not allow old turns for the 3rd nation. Thoughts on that (and other ideas on how to move forward on this) welcome?
Game 19 - I can’t comment at present as it’s still on-going and you should not comment in anyway about it please.
I can talk about generic concepts here at best but I think they’ll end up being discussions about current games and I want to avoid that at present (for obvious reasons). Ideally I’d like comments from players that have played the game as they are clearly the most important here and we’re to help you guys enjoy the game.
Hi ME, I think you are doing an excellent job with gunboat games, and I enjoy them.
My only grudge is that you do not immidiately list which nation-combos are being played with. I play in game 97 and has been playing 3 nations for 10+ turns. However the list of nation combos does not reflect that, even though you state that you intend to update it every 3 turns. I feel it gives me an unfair advantage that would vanish if my opponents knew what they were going against.
Gunboat games will never be fair. They will be unpredictable and at most times very satisfying. No killer combos will ruin the games. Basically your teammates decide if you win as you cannot hope to kill all opposing nations by your self.
I find that picking up the 3. nation (as I always does) is fun because it is typicaly in a hopeless position and requires the immidiate and full support from from my 2 original nations. It typically takes me 6-8 turns to bring back the 3. nation to life again and make it valuable to me. But that time could also have been spent making life really difficult for some other nations. Sometimes it is hard to evaluate if the 3. nation should just be gutted or kept alive.
And the idea of a pool of players to takeup dropped nations? This would
eliminate most of the problem and I would be the 1st to put my name down
for it.
If ME understands the ‘ire’ it causes why was QA given to CL-FK in the
game we can’t mention? Surely they would have understood it would
lead to a victory for the DS. With that 3 nation combo only a poor
player would’nt be able to win the game.
Guy Roppa
G95 DkLts & FK
G30 CL
G5 EO
G32 Dog
G34 SG
G19 ? & ?
G45 SK
G48 ?
I think it is a bad idea to not pick up the dropped nations, as Clint mentioned the game will end shortly if you let two nations drop. You have to allow some type of pick up to make the game viable. The only real limit I can see would be for the Cloud Lord to get the Dragon Lord or QA and possibly the Noldo to get the woodmen or Duns. Gunboat game 70 is an example where we picked up a third nation yet by turn 30 there was only one other free pairing left playing. The game just wasn’t fun anymore although all three positions we had were still very viable. Had we only had two nations the game would have ended a lot sooner. And the outcome was still the other side winning although they had a few three pairing nations as well.
I would be a fan of paying for the first ten turns in advance with no refund. That way if you drop, you have already paid for the turn. If you bankrupt the nation, oh well that was an expensive game. I really don’t understand how someone drops in the first five turns of a game. You really ruin the game for everyone else involved.
Yes, an agent nation can’t be paired with a scouting nation either side.
But surely a GB player pickup pool can be created to stop the 3 nation
teams from creation in most cases…?
Paying for the 1st 10 turns sounds plausible but if the nation is knocked
out in the 1st 10 turns (regular with Rhuduar, EO, Coriars and Harad) the
remaining turn fees should be returned.
Hey Guy looks like we are on the same page here for once. I was personly so upset about this issue I found it hard to even look at my turns, they sat for days in my mailbox I never opened them. I’ll not go on more as the game is still active. But I do have a lot to say about it…
I know Clint tryed to make it work for us but, I feel that sometimes if there is no right way to fix somthing then just don’t, let the nation (or at least one of them) drop. Whats going to happen in this game is that the true winners, the FP, are going to lose becasue the DS where giving a huge edge, becasue their teammate failed to man up. Simply put, thats not right. I know that I would have been much happier even if the game was just called there. Or if the game had just been opened up and let us talk to each other. One thing was clear it was no longer a Gunboat.
I have never played Gunboat so it occurs to me to ask, why do players get 2 Nations ?
Seems the easiest way to resolve the issue of double drops is to assign 1 Nation per player ?
It was GSI policy that no one played more than one nation. That is how the game creators envisioned the game. Harley feels it must be the un-GSI and substitutes their judgement for the game’s creators.
My understanding is in a no-communication environment, some nations start off in really, really bad positions and thus no one would likely ever want to play them and wouldn’t last long if they did. Thus you give each player 2 nations and pair the weaker nations with stronger ones in order to create a more balanced game.
Hi John, sooner or later we had to agree over something. When I saw
the QA had been given to CL-FK I knew it was over on T5. I completely
agree, the Free were the true winners in this game and have been let
down by ME. Sorry Clint and co, I like you guys but you have to concede
it was a game winning decision QA-CL-FK. It cannot happen again.
Surely they would have understood it would
When I saw