RE: [eia] impasse

["James Helle" <jhelle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not dead set on bidding caps, I was just throwing mud on the wall.  :)

And I agree with Kyle wholeheartedly that we will never finish a game if we
continue to start over.  That was my reason for stating that we need to
decide on a mechanism to prevent it, whether that mechanism is UMPs or
something else.  I am content to continue our current game, but if the
majority opinion is to start over then I'm not entirely opposed either.

One of my primary concerns is that a player leaves the game after making
decisions that make winning either impossible or nearly so and then handing
that major power over to a new player.  (I'm not talking about Nate or
Austria, just generalizing).  That was the reasoning behind the group
starting over when I first started playing Prussia, and again when Everett
left.  I think it's inevitable, given the amount of real time we put into
this game, that if a player can't win (or feels so) that they may leave the
game and leave the new player that gets their country in an undesirable
position.  This is primarily what I think we need to address in order to
have a chance at a full game.

-----Original Message-----
From: eia-bounces@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:eia-bounces@xxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of
Joel Uckelman
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 8:31 AM
To: public list for an Empires in Arms game
Subject: Re: [eia] impasse


Thus spake "Kyle H":
>     First, I hope you are not counting me on the side of wanting to start
a
> new game.  I was opposed to restarting last time (when Nate joined the
> game), and if we just keep restarting as soon as someone quits the game
(for
> whatever reason), we'll never get beyond 1807.
>     Second, a placing a cap on bidding is not going to work.  Suppose your
> cap is 25.  Then you have 5 people who bid 25 for France, let's say.  Then
> you have a competitive die roll.  So the lucky person who gets it now has
an
> easier time of winning the game.  Same goes for Russia.  This is
completely
> wrong-headed.
>     The bidding system is there for a reason, to force people who bid high
> to make tough decisions and to force people to "pay" what a country is
worth
> "on the open market".  If you don't think you can win bidding 40 for
France,
> but somebody else does, then that person should get France.  In our
current
> game, Jim thought he could win with France by bidding 47 (or something
like
> that) and now he is seeing that he was overly optimistic.  In our first
> game, I had bid 42, and I learned that was a mistake as well.  But just
> because Jim and I couldn't win bidding as high as we did doesn't mean
> somebody else out there couldn't do better than we did.  If someone else
> thinks that Jim and I played France all wrong, then they should bid higher
> than we are prepared to.
>     You shouldn't have to *force* people to make reasonable bids.  Either
> they will make reasonable bids, or they will lose.  It's that simple.

I concur with Kyle's analysis of bidding; saying that we bid too high is not
the same as saying that the bidding system is broken.

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