Cool spreadsheet! (words I thought I would never type together ;))

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).

@ariallito B

It might be nice if a table could opt not to kick a player when their timer expires (but maybe they should still take the karma hit to discourage ignoring the timer).

Thanks, somehow managed to overlook that button!

If it's still possible, I would like to join too.

It is a: your local time.

I think it would be nice if you could have the app pick the 4 factions that will be auctioned off randomly. That way you get to play all the permutations of factions, which is really cool (and that greater kind variety is kinda the whole of the point of having the auctions) and you could never get deliberate trash picks.

Thanks for organizing this, was a lot of fun!

I'm also really disappointed about the disappearance of the previous style of bidding.

Really like the idea of bidding on randomly selected factions.

@testrun said in Improvement to the auction ?:

F1) "sabotaging" games with a bad faction*-- this was OP's key point (and most people's concern), and no one has really addressed their suggestion directly

I did suggest this:

I think it would be nice if you could have the app pick the 4 factions that will be auctioned off randomly. That way you get to play all the permutations of factions, which is really cool (and that greater kind variety is kinda the whole of the point of having the auctions) and you could never get deliberate trash picks.

Which I still think is a solution to the "trash-picking" problem that should be pretty easy to implement (and also saves some time, as players do not have to contemplate what faction to introduce into the auction). It's how I usually play offline and would choose to play here if it was possible. It is a lot of fun to see, for example, how a game where gaia-forming is heavily rewarded develops when the factions are Lantids, Taklons, Nevlar, and all those strange combinations can come up when you have random selection of the factions + auction.

@ariallito count me in!

@testrun ah, of course, should have picked that up from your discussion of @oelepetoetje's suggestion below that

I think a good closed bidding system would be a nice way to solve what you've termed F3) -- the delay caused by slow incremental bidding -- which I don't terribly mind, but definitely could do without (also agree that this is completely independent from and could be combined with randomizing faction selection). Do worry such a system might not be intuitive for a lot of players though.

Love the new additions to the UI , especially the overview of the numbers of planets still available for the different planets types and the bit about the sectors occupied by different players.

Helge Ostertag anwsers this question here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1909662/can-you-take-powerqicspecial-actions-if-you-cant-r

Is it legal to take the 1 free step or increased range booster tile actions and not actually place a mine (or a gaiaformer, in the case of the range tile)? NO!

In this game: https://www.boardgamers.space/game/Euro-Cup-final-group2, one of the players (Wy) was dropped from the game, even though none of the other players kicked them (their time was expired though).

This is rather unfortunate, because this game is part of a tournament that we've been playing since January (fun experiment where we each play every faction on the same seed). It would be really sad to see it end because of this. It would be really great if there was anyway for someone (developer/mod) to undo this.

Points for the top of the gaia project track are also counted under research.