Improvement to the auction ?
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When I first heard of the auction rule, I thought it was great.
But having experienced it now a few times, I find that what often happens, is that one player picks a particularly bad tribe (for that map), and then starts bidding heavily for a better tribe.
Now I understand that this can add another interesting strategic element to the game : try to stick someone with a bad tribe, and see if he blinks in the bidding.
But I do think it is kind of contary to the intention of the auction, namely: to prevent the players who have to pick later from having a disadvantage in picking the best tribes.
So I wonder if the following improvement to the auction was ever considered : whenever someone bids zero for a tribe that he did not pick himself, he is allowed to change that tribe to one of the tribes that was not in the initial selection.
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Tbh this is one of the (many) reasons why I deeply dislike auctions. People tend to throw in terrible factions planning on somebody else to pick them, turning the whole process into a desperate competition to the last point for the three remaining factions. This basically adds another meta-layer to the game, which has nothing to do with Gaia Project and much to do with... poker, I guess? Which is perfectly ok but I mean, if somebody likes bidding games they should stick to them and probably avoid gaia-like games.
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@Molfo said in Improvement to the auction ?:
Tbh this is one of the (many) reasons why I deeply dislike auctions. People tend to throw in terrible factions planning on somebody else to pick them, turning the whole process into a desperate competition to the last point for the three remaining factions. This basically adds another meta-layer to the game, which has nothing to do with Gaia Project and much to do with... poker, I guess? Which is perfectly ok but I mean, if somebody likes bidding games they should stick to them and probably avoid gaia-like games.
This, a million time this. I'm done with auctions, also because of many other reasons I can't properly explain here, swearing being forbidden.
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I couldn't agree more with this. 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.
That loophole honestly makes Auction Factions a TERRIBLE variant. It's not Gaia.
Something needs to be done. I'm not sure if giving a zero-point bid a free pick is the best, because I don't think it will solve the problem. Like, what happens if people put two really bad factions in the pool? Maybe that second-worst faction gets a one- or two-point bid but then becomes the absolute worst faction because the other person got a free swap.
I wonder if the solution might be to give each player a ban beforehand. So either they can ban a really great faction that has a huge advantage, or they can ban terrible factions that they don't want to see in the pool. With 4 faction bans, it's probably very difficult to get a pool that's too imbalanced.
I just accidentally joined an Auction game after swearing off them and it immediately proved me right. This game: https://www.boardgamers.space/game/Menacing-picture-2540. I picked first and looked at the map and tech track and scoring tiles and figured that the Ambas have a pretty good game, so I put them in. The next pick? The Lantids. Unreal. The Lantids are already considered one of the weakest factions, and in this game in particular there are no obvious huge planet clusters, and two of their home planets are on the edge. Then the next person inexplicably chose the Hadsch Hallas over the Ivits, who would clearly be better. And then the icing on the cake is the Geoden pick. The Geoden's have three home planets on edges and a fourth just one hex away from the edge. It's a total joke. In this game, the good choices are clear: Ambas, Ivits, Terrans, Itars, Xenos, Taklons. But no, let's feed the bad factions in so I don't have to face any of those.
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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.
