Hear Hear!
I say "Neutrals are fine as is, as long as there are not too many or too few
of them."
In game 145 there were only THREE Neutrals -- two Kingdoms and one regular
Neutral. The Kingdoms split up, NK joining the Free and SK joining the Dark.
It doesn't get much more balanced than that in terms of a split -- with 3
Neutrals, the best you could hope for was the Kingdoms splitting and the third
Neutral adding a slight advantage to one side. (Well, you COULD hope he just
got disgusted and left -- but you don't want to set up a game based on the
theory that the odd man out will indeed just drop before having an impact...)
There was no real option for the Neutrals to stay Neutral -- just not enough
nations to make it a viable way to go. Certainly you couldn't have any
fewer Neutrals and have it note be a 12-vs-12 situation. We DS did get that
regular Neutral on our side, so we got "most" of the Neutrals, by getting one
extra Neutral to join our side. But that is not what is winning the game for us.
Personally, I LIKE Neutral nations -- I play all allegiances, varying
between them, and some of my most interesting games have been as Neutrals -- in
some of which I stayed Neutral, in others of which I joined an allegiance.
Sometimes I ended up joining an allegiance that was getting the advantage through
the number of Neutrals joining -- but I didn't join them for that reason.
Sometimes I ended up joining a side in order to balance things out and keep
the game interesting. Yes, Neutrals have an impact on who is gonna win. Duh
-- every nation in the game has an impact on who is gonna win!
There are advantages and disadvantages in being a Neutral -- and there are
advantages and disadvantages to being DS or FP. In most cases I have found
that when the Neutrals mostly join one side, there is a decent reason for it --
reasons which in part also contribute to the fall of the side that failed to
recruit them. A side that is communicative and cooperative with the
Neutrals and each other tends to defeat a side that in non-communicative and
non-cooperative with the Neutrals and each other -- the fact that the former also
tends to get more Neutrals to join it merely tends to speed up the process, the
factors that convince the Neutrals to join also tend to be factors that help
a team win the game more often.
I do tend to dislike the tendency of many 4th Age Neutrals to think that
they can get a huge amount of "stuff" as a bribe to join a side, which they may
have been used to in 1650 or 2950. In 4th Age there is more to consider, I
think -- for instance staying Neutral and becoming a third allegiance is a
possibility. Unfortunately it is a tough one -- because both DS and FP tend to
feel betrayed if you decide to stay Neutral after talking about joining one
or the other or both. BUT in 4th Age the decision must be made by turn 12 or
it will be made for you -- if you have not changed allegiance by turn 12 then
you are stuck being a Neutral. In addition, once that has occurred you may
well find yourself the target of both DS and FP nations, who may well even
put their differences aside to go after you! So a Neutral in 4th Age must be
careful but not too deliberate in making that decision -- and DS and FP
nations should take that deadline as an advantage to them, in that a Neutral cannot
string them along for 20-30 turns and then join a side just for a win, as
they might try to do in 1650 or 2950. Personally, I never ask for a big bribe,
and often don't ask for anything at all, when deciding which side to join.
I have usually found that once I have joined a side, my new allies are often
quite willing to give me what I need if and when I need it, and that is the
sort of thing I appreciate. I effectively become one of them -- which is even
easier to do if you do not try to extort as much as you can from those
nations before hand. Even if they agree to give you a bunch of stuff, they may
resent the fact that it takes away from their own capabilities to do so,
especially if they need the resources too -- and that doesn't count the fact that
they may be using orders to do the hand-offs or whatever that would be better
used fighting the known enemy. In 1650 and 2950 it may be more important to
get certain Neutrals on your side -- the Neutrals often have a lot of
potential to turn the tide in the war, and in return, the non-Neutrals often have
more artifacts than they know what to do with, so artifacts make sense as a
bargaining chip.
In 4th Age it is different -- all nations except the Kingdoms start out
potentially of equal power, and that power is not great, and everything the
nation has, it has because the player payed for it one way or another... But even
so, a small bribe is often worth giving in order to recruit a Neutral -- in
game 144 as a nation with a decent mage who had pretty mediocre numbers on
her spells, I nonetheless gave a minor mage item to a Neutral as part of a deal
in order to get that Neutral to join us, and I used up a bunch of troops
fighting a specific enemy without getting anything of that enemy's pop centers
for the same reason.
I may not always do the negotiating that I should do to woo a Neutral -- I
failed to do any decent amount of such in game 69, and as North Gondor I am
paying for that. But I don't blame the Neutrals for mostly going the other way
-- it is our fault as the FPs for not doing enough to court the Neutrals.
And I have a lot of respect for the Neutral who did join us despite the odds.
Even if we lose the game, I will appreciate that player's desire to make it
a good game. I have less appreciation for the way some of my allies have
handled things -- and that goes for myself, as I have not been playing that game
as well as I should have been. It is not the Neutrals' fault that I didn't
do as well as I should have done, or paid more attention to things not right
in my own front yard...
But I mostly play 4th Age for a reason -- I really like the variation from
game to game, the fun of creating a new nation from scratch and finding out
what the rest of the world looks like -- so much more interesting than another
"chess match" of move and countermove where everyone knows all the bits and
pieces of each others' nations except for exactly which character started in
what location... And Neutrals are a big part of the fun of 4th Age, as far as
I am concerned. They should be kept! I think that GSI's original game
setup constraints were pretty reasonable -- every 4th Age non-grudge game had
either 8 FP, 8 DS, 7 regular Neutrals and 2 Kingdoms or 7 FP, 7 DS, 9 regular
Neutrals and 2 Kingdoms, yet very few games ended up as Neutral Alliance
victories, and most games did not end from a preponderance of Neutrals all going
the same way. There were enough Neutrals that it was feasible to consider a
Neutral victory, yet in most games, some Neutrals decided to join one
allegiance or the other, which led to others deciding to do the same, not necessarily
to the same side, and most games were a lot of fun -- or at least I tended to
enjoy them myself, cannot speak for everyone of course.
I think some of the "problems" seen today are due to too few Neutrals -- the
five in 1650 and 2950 means that anything other than a 3/2 split is seen as
too unbalanced, and even a 3/2 can be "unfair" depending on which 3 vs which
2. But in most games, it is really your starting allies that determine your
long-term fate... In 4th Age, in a game with enough Neutrals, you can make
up for that.
Enough babble, right?
-- Ernie Hakey III
In a message dated 5/30/2005 3:30:40 AM Eastern Standard Time,
bbrunec296@rogers.com writes:
This is all quite funny. Really. A thread was started because of the
perception that the Open Game quality is deteriorating. And we end up with
neutral bashing.
Consider the possibility that anyone who believes they like neutrals, but
are only offering up ideas and/or options, are really neutral bashing also.
Consider the possibilty that there are only 2 options, as I've previously
mentioned and nobody has addressed:
1) Neutrals as is, end of discussion full-stop.
2) No Neutrals, open 12v12 setups.
Anything, I ask you to consider that Anything that isn't #1 is, for all
intents and purposes, simply a precursor to #2. No gray area will ever be agreed
to amongst the player base in significant numbers to warrant implementation,
and even IF it were to be, it and all possible gray area ideas are somewhere
between #1 and #2. Once you start, there's rarely any going back. Move off
the #1 Point on the line and you are simply closer to and now have movement
in the direction of, and therefore momentum towards, #2.
My point? Unless you agree with the statement "I believe we should elminate
neutrals from MEPBM", then you reply with a "Leave the neutrals alone!" or
simply avoid any/all discussion of ideas/possiblities completely.
Thanks for your reading,
Canadian Brad
Neutral
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