Ooh, lovely!

I'm in. How do we determine the games? Should teammates gather together and cooperate, or be separate and fight alone?

I personally think it's very fun when you aren't continuous with yourself. It's why I like the Colonial 1885 map despite it having major other flaws (stalemates up the wazoo). So I think we say, the 9 teams are country ABCD (for example, making this up, France Tunis Lithuania Norway), and then with random country assignment, and those guys are your team.

Win condition would need to be if your team would solo. Last time we tried to do total domination and we didn't even get close lol

Also, we should probably emphasize that individual players don't matter for the team winning; you can die but if your team wins, it counts as a win. and if you die, perhaps you can still chat and stuff and try and be useful?

I'm in!

Maybe we can let RNG determine the teams. This is easy but may cause imbalance.

Or maybe we can choose four leaders and let them pick their teammates. The variant "Greek Diplomacy" has a good bidding system we can use. After the countries are assigned, the leaders get 8 tokens each to bid for teammates. A country is with the leader who paid the most tokens for them, or remains available if there's no leader being the only one to pay the most. After each round of bidding, each leader is given tokens equal to teammates still missing, to use them in the next round of bidding, until everyone gets 8 teammates to play with. Well this is hard to understand but it should be fair for everyone.

ooh interesting. This would add an element of fantasy draft as well since you'll be drafting both the country and the player...

RNG for teams is kind of what we did last time, if I remember correctly, but with some rules attached. There were some people who were not happy with the way it was done. We'd have to do the bidding in the forum, but it could work! Or we all agree on a reasonably balanced set of teams beforehand

i am in

lets do it

I know I'm probably going to regret this....but screw it, I'm in.

I'll regret it too, but I'm also in lol

Sure

Oh boy, I am getting flashbacks to getting picked last at kickball. I'm in

If we can agree on a better method of deciding teams than last time, I'm down to try again.

I do think that known teams is going to be a disappointment though. It's going to be way too easy to see a team getting too strong and everyone just drops wars to stop them. The unknown aspect of it last time was cool IMO.

Yeah, I remember all the speculations about who was teamed up last time, it was interesting to see who was right. I'm in.

And I'm ok with whatever system you choose for assigning teams/nations.

I'm in! I'd personally prefer the voting method; does the RNG method mean that the position of your team members relative to you is entirely up to luck?

This seems fun!

We should probably clear a general idea of what we want to do, and then we can work out finer details... I don't think there's a way to create a poll, so maybe everybody rank their preferences from A-E, with high preference first?

A. I think last time for random team assignments it was just that no two of the same team could touch each other. That got a little hairy with countries like Genoa and what it meant to be "bordering". Somebody (non-player) generated the teams and then DM'd each of us who our teammates were. There are other rules we could implement or we could better define "bordering".

B. If we do unknown teams, I think it would be worth it to consider truly random teams; while it probably won't end up balanced, this game is for fun anyhow. A true mystery.

C. We determine 9 "captains" before the game starts, and once we get in-game, those captains draft or bid on their teammates. Further details TBD if we pick this one.

D. We sort out which countries go into which set of teams before the game starts, and go in with random country assignment.

E. Something else I missed/didn't think of! (And then explain the idea)


Players I have recorded that want in:

1. erikip107
2. MagicalSand
3. han-shahanshah
4. Xenon Radon
5. hakureimarisa
6. Lei Saarlainen
7. ingebot
8. drano019
9. MiraiNikkiSan
10. Orange
11. Mitomon
12. mouse (maybe)
13. Samj
14. DungDefender
15. halfasleep

My personal vote right now:
D - B - C - A - E

My personal vote is a Modified C. 9 Captains are known ahead of time, but the draft/picking of teams is done through a person not in the game. Therefore, all players all know the 9 captains, but each team only knows who the 4 members of their team are. That way there's still a bit of uncertainty? Or even better, figure out a way to do the 9 captains anonymously as well!

So I guess I'm:

Modified C - B - D - A - E

I guess my preferences are: B (true luck of the draw), D (if someone determines teams, someone else will always think it was unfair), C (are we chosen by player or by country? Are countries assigned before or after the draft?), A (just a more limited B), E

Novgorod has to form an alliance with Scotland, though, right?

In terms of necessity of playing Novgorod? Or in terms of they should be on a team so it's balanced?

I'd say CDBAE. B is easier to do than D though, so they're about tied in my mind.

Count me in. I think BCDAE.

Drano, interesting idea with modified C - would the captains know every team, then? Alternatively each captain does NOT know who the other captains are, and rather just knows which countries are not available to choose (and we have a very involved middleman who does not get to play the game).

If the captains know each other, then the second captain will know who the first captain picked with 100% certainty; and at the end, the second to last captain will know with 100% certainty who the last captain was left with.

If the captains do not know who each other are, then the first pick will just have 8 countries they cannot pick - and know that none of them can be on the same team. Then second captain will know the 9 countries they cannot pick, third captain will know the 10 countries they cannot pick, etc. So long as the captains themselves do not know who is before and after them in the order, this will avoid the problem of the last pick of the draft knowing which team it's assigned. But, again this will need a very involved middleman.

@erikip...in the underlying video game, Novgorod and Scotland used to always form an inexplicably alliance at the start of the game that made no sense for either country.

ohhh I see lol

Erikip -

To make it fair I assume it'd have to be all or nothing. Either all 8 captains know what powers the other 8 are, or none does.

In your example, the first picker knows exactly which 8 powers are on separate teams. The second picker only knows that 2 of the 9 are on the same team, but does not know exactly which ones are separate. The last picker only knows 17 powers are picked and each one is paired up. That's unequal information IMO.

I imagine it something like this:

Blind captains (assigned by involved middleman) who only knows what power they have. In the first round each captain puts in 2 or 3 ranked choices. If possible, they are all assigned their first choice. If not, they get second, or third. If none of that works somehow, we do another round of it and try again.

Repeat for second and third rounds. In these rounds, they get a list of what 18 or 9 powers are left. That way information is equal for all.

Thoughts on that?