Improvement to the auction ?
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There was a thread (https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2481347/which-setup-better-lantids-terrans/page/2) on board game geek about the Lantids explaining how to make sure no one gets saddled with a trash pick in an auction. Basically the idea is that instead of choosing all the factions first and then bidding, the first player chooses a faction with a bid (can be 0), then the second player can either outbid the first for that faction or choose another faction. So the person who intentionally chooses a bad faction will be forced to play them, because no one will outbid them and they won't be able to switch. I think this would solve the issues raised above.
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@FlyingDadBomb I agree with auctions being horrible due to trash picks. But i dont see how hadsch halla and lantids are bad picks with this board and victory conditions. Geoden is horrible though.
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@cneessen yup. Just pick Lantids, open with PI +2 parasite mines (qic needed for the red/orange cluster) and go for the eco track 2x :)
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@cneessen My point about the Hadsch Halla was really that the Ivits were in a better situation. That was more minor. Similarly the Terrans would I think clearly by a better pick that the Lantids. The have immediate adjacency to three Transdim planets on top of an attractive Gaia Track. Combine that with the perception of the Lantids as such an undertuned faction, and it seems like a troll pick.
Glad we can agree on the Geodens! haha.
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@FlyingDadBomb not to insist, but Lantids are very strong at federated structures, and literally invincible at sectors :)
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@FlyingDadBomb 'I see players all the time artificially inflating their ELO because all they have to do is ensure they don't get stuck with the trash faction that they themselves put into the pool.'
I see players all the time artificially inflating their ELO because all they have to do is just choose a very strong faction, good for beginner players, for example Ambas, and win the game against the 'weakest faction' that's good for advenced players, e.g Lantids. It's especially easy without auction.
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Oooooor.... we could just stop using auctions altogether.
I still need to read a convincing motivation for the implementation of auctions. Any pro-auction player willing to explain that to me?
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[edit] that is, taking into account that the "last player rotates sectors" option is always available, so that whenever a random setup clearly favors one faction/color, that can be fixed before the game begins
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@Molfo But the "last player rotates sectors" option is extremely flawed too, because it only works when the last player acts in an optimal manner. If the last player somehow favors the player who picked the best faction anyway, player 2 and 3 are left in the dust through no fault of their own.
I think a good solution to the auction problem is already in this thread - the post by AntoineBR. It is an improved version of my initial idea.
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I love the auctions because they make the game less random: there's no benefit to drawing the first position when there's an obvious pick for a faction, nor to drawing the last position when there's none and only one great booster.
It also serves to make the weaker factions more playable. I like playing all the factions (love the Lantids, but even like the occasional Gleen game), but its quite rare for it to make sense to pick Gleen over the Taklons or Ivits when there's no bidding.
I also don't really like picking a faction first when there are three more players to pick and you've essentially got no idea what game you'll end up playing (I know it is still technically a perfect information game, but it clashes with the 0 randomness aspect that I love about Gaia).
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@AntoineBR It is cool idea but also has downsides. If you don't know which other factions will be picked, you can't correctly estimate the power of your faction in that particular game. You need to know in advance about your neighbours, their terraform distance, potential starting positions, gaia formers capacity, etc. Otheriwse you can't bid correctly. Image bidding for Itars which were picked first. It may appear as a great faction for the game, but if someone would picked Terrans as their last faction, Itars power dramatically drops as they gets another gaia planets competitor and very close neighbour. So last players has a big advantage as he has full game information and can correctly estimate which faction is the best for the game.
Anyway, no matter in which system factions will be picked, it never will be perfect. Bidding seems to be the most fair as each player has an opportunity to pick the best faction. And of course, it is annoying when someone picks bad faction for bidding. And maybe it is not fun to play such a faction as you know you won't get a good score, but still it is possible to win when you start the game with 20-30 points advantage.
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@Spooky I get your point, but what are the chances that, in your example, no one else bids on Itars and they end up being the worst pick ? Even with Terrans in the game, they will still be very strong and it is likely someone will outbid you for them, giving you the chance to bid again for any other faction.
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@oelepetoetje well in auctioned games you need not one but four players to act in an optimal manner, so, that's even more unlikely to happen.
besides, the 4th player who rotates has no idea what factions will be left when their turn comes, so, it is in their best interest to create a map that offers the best possible balance (so that, whatever is left for them to play, it'll still be playable). on the contrary, many people in auctioned games try to do the very opposite, throwing in a terrible faction and trying to create the worst possible conditions for other players (at least one) to play.
also, if starting position did matter in the outcomes of the game, some correlation should show with final games results. is this true? has somebody looked into this? do we have at least anectoditcal evidence that this is the case? i have never noticed anything of the sort and my impression is that my win/lose rate remains constant no matter what initial position i get. i might wrong but in this case i'd like somebody to show me wrong.
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I don't think one position is always stronger, but I do think a position can be a lot stronger in a given game.
As I wrote above, sometimes I think the starting player has a significant advantage, sometimes the last player, depending on the (number of strong) available boosters, factions, etc., which would make the pattern harder to spot. -
It's so strange to me that there's so much talk of picking "trash" factions no one would ever want in this thread... The whole reason I like auctions is because I can pick a faction that's enjoyable to play but would never win otherwise, and actually have a chance with them. I want the opportunity to play Lantids without feeling at a disadvantage the whole time, want to have games where it's not just Itars Ivits and Ambas again, etc...
It would only work for experienced players, but it could be an interesting format if instead of having an auction, the last player assigned values to each of the four selected factions-- similar to rotating sectors to balance the options as well as possible. It would speed up the auction process (which is almost unusable in 4p games), and it makes everything a known quantity upfront rather than the poker-style bidding game some people mention... (It would put a lot of burden on the last player though)
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But if the problem is that certain factions are better and certain factions are worse in absolute terms, and the game needs to be homeruled to make lantids or gleens playable, then why auctions? Auctions create a huge amount of problems because:
- either all players know exactly what they're doing, and how good every faction is able to perform in a given setup, or the game is going to be fucked up from the start because certain factions will be over/under priced (and i think that it's everybody's experience here on BG that you almost never end up in a game with 4 skilled players)
- auctions create another meta-layer, a game within the game, that has nothing to do with gaia project. Apart from the fact that some players willingly pick factions that are awful in a given scenario, the whole balancing of the game at that point relays on every player's attitute towards risk-assessing. Which is a very interesting mechanism that several games use, but not gaia project. Anyone who like bidding games is free to go playing them, but I really don't see the need to spoil a game that depends on totally different dynamics by adding other variables that are totally alien to it.
So as I was saying, if the games needs to be homeruled to be perfectly balanced, auctions are one of the worse ways to do this that I can think of. Slightly buffing the underpowered factions would make way more sense.
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I dunno. Evaluating the worth of a faction for a given setup is already part of the game, auctioning is just a way of putting that valuation in real terms to a) balance the player order and b) balance the factions given a particular setup of the game. It's not much of a leap from "I think geoden will be better than bescods on this board" to "I think geoden will be 10 points better than bescods on this board". And it has effectively zero overhead-- you keep the entire game as designed, with one optional change at the start after which everything plays as normal.
I'm all for tweaking the factions to balance them, but that requires a concentrated effort to playtest and get accepted alterations in place, and it's potentially gamebreaking. There was a huge amount of playtesting for Gaia and there's still what turns out to be significant differences between factions. And look at snellman with TM-- they made 5 different versions of a faction and still didn't get it quite right, and that was with ~50x the number of games played to provide data to backup decisions for a less complex game...
And once you decide how you want to balance the factions, you then either force players into using an unofficial version of the game if they don't have an option to use the original factions anymore; or you make players learn (and developers maintain) multiple versions of a faction with minor differences, which will cause headaches of all sorts...
And, even if you figure all that out, it still doesn't actually solve the player order issue that auctioning does (imperfectly) since that's about more than just the factions themselves. -
i also think the factions themselves shouldnt be touched, cuz:
1.) its incredible hard if not near impossible to balance those things, even when we think we could be capable
2.) it just creates a rule-mess, for example how should i play otb then?i have a different solution in mind trying to fix the flawd auction system
How would it be when there is a cap for biding vp, like 10 or 20 or whatever, and when there is a tie on a certain faction, the player who choosed that faction gets the tiebreaker
with that system the player who picked a less favored faction for the map constantly has to think about playing that faction himself and we would still get the benefit of seeing other then the top tier factions each game, cuz the player who tries to give a lesser favored faction to others wont pic the absolute worst but something in the middle
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Ok but I frankly can't see how
- give Lantids a normal power system
- make Gleens use qics, ffs
- remove the dang extra ore from Itars
could unbalance tha factions, honestly.
Regarding rules confusion: there already are two rulesets for GP, with or without auctions.
Personally, I think I'm done with auctions; I have enough of people throwing in Lantids just to have other players pick them out of boredom after three days of bidding. It's just a dumb way of spending my time.
If you have fun in clicking "bid x+1 for Ambas" for three days then, great, go for it; I don't, and won't.This means I won't cross a lot of other players who, instead, play exclusively with auctions; and that, in my view, is a shame.
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@testrun it's not that i don't see what you're saying. I actually agree on several points. However:
- as el temblo and I are saying, the question is not "gaia with auctions vs. gaia with homerules". auctioning IS homeruling (and as this thread shows very well, even when it come to auctions, different versions of the auction exist, and not everyone agrees on how auctions should play out. again, because this is a homerule)
- i don't agree that there isn't much of a difference between "i think X is better than Y in this setup" and "i think X is 10 points better than Y". this is actually one of the things about auctions that always leaves me very puzzled. It is utterly impossible to determine how many points a given faction is going to score at the end of the game before the game has even started. So this whole idea of "i'm bidding 17 points for terrans because i think they will outscore everybody else by at least 18 points" is just ludicrous. And I keep seeing people bidding 25, 30, 35 points for a faction... how can that be even remotely balanced or accurate? At that point the game is entirely non-deterministic, there is no way you can know what faction is going to win (pace a few really really exceptional scenarios) , let alone that that faction is going to outscore everybody else by such a massive amount of points
- the "factions aren't balanced" problem has to be kept distinct from the "player starting order" problem. In the case of the latter, I'm not even sure there is a problem. I guess the argument of pro-auction players is that either 1st position is the best one, because you have more choices+first move, or 4th position is the best one, because you have more information+turn booster. This, however, is just a vague intuition that nobody has ever proven true. My direct experience with the game tells me otherwise, in the last 100 4p games or so I have played here, I think I ended up winning around 50% of the times, while i guess the distribution of my starting positions where roughly 25% each. If position did matter, I guess we should see some type of correlation that I'm not seeing. But this needs to be tackled in more detail so I'll try to have a look at some data in the next days.
- finally, yes, tweaking the factions takes playtesting. as asymmetric games go, gaia is amazinlgy well-balanced, and you can see how they really put some effort in playtesting. however, after years of gaming, we now know the balance is not perfect. so i think it is reasonable to say that it is now time for some changes to be introduced (and i agree with everything el temblo has mentioned above).
