Thanks for that.

One question: you said that we will use auctions with 0 bid in order to maintain the right faction/player order.

But couldn't we get the same result simply deselecting the "random player order" option when creating new tournament games?

In this way, players will play in the order they join the game, so all they need to do is (A) wait for their turn to enter the game and (B) select the correct faction

Hi everybody!

Thanks Ariallito for all the work you're putting into organizing this.

I just wanted to say, to three misterious people I'll be playing the first game with, I won't be able to play much the coming weekend. But don't worry! I'm normally very present on BGS so we'll make up for the lost time, starting from monday.

Also, I'm in for organizing sessions of live play, if the others in my group are willing to do that.

Good luck to everyone!

We experienced a bug in federation forming too. Yesterday our firak player was able to form a 9 satellite federation, while only having 8 power tokens (and no other resource he could convert into power).
This was the last action taken by the Firak player before passing in round 6: https://www.boardgamers.space/game/Un_gaia_tecnico

@Babbuc49 <3

@Spooky If tournaments were to be introduced here on BG, the I'd like to have two parallel sessions running, one with auctions for those who believe they work and one with "last player rotate sectors" for those who don't.

@Molfo That way of playing was existing in Terra Mystica for quite long time, so there was no reason to not implemented it in Project Gaia. It just a mode, you are not forced to use it. If you don't like auction games, don't join rooms with auction mode enabled or create your own room. Simple as that. I don't see any reason to reduce available options how to play the game.

Could you please not "simple as that" me?
That's what I already do, thank you very much.
Btw your suggestion that "experienced players prefer auctions" is questionable, I have played hundreds of games of GP over the course of the years and deeply dislike auctions (for reasons that I took the trouble to carefully explain above) .

My point in discussing the validity of auctions is relative to competitive contexts (tournaments or, in general, rankings). As far as these are concerned, I think the question poses itself of how the game should be managed and organized. Are auctions to be made a part of it? Yes? No? How? Why?

It seems to me there is plenty of room for a debate on the subject, since this thread alone is enough to show how even people who are pro-auctions do not agree on how auctions should actually be implemented.
Unfortunately every time anyone brings that up somebody intrudes in the conversation with the charismatic line "oh wouldn't you just shut up, we used to did that for terra mystica" - as if that was a valid argument. I'm honestly a bit fed up with ex TM players who think they can come and nerdsplain GP to me. So, more constructive approaches are welcome.

Player starting order -- there are general benefits to being 1st and 4th, yes, but I think auctions are mostly important for specific instances. e.g. there are starting set-ups that are dramatically better for specific factions, and first choice may be a large advantage there (even if the last player rotates sectors as best they can). Handwaving the numbers, you could have a reasonably fair game without auctions in 4/5 games, but 1/5 first choice could effectively decide the game...

One thing that can perhaps be considered is that the more games you play the less the exceptional scenario - in which there's a faction that is clearly going to outscore everyone else - matters. I mean, if I find myself in a similar context and i'm not the first to pick, I can still compete for 2nd position and then try to win all other games (this is a consideration that works well in the context of a tournament, for instance, or with respect to rankings here on BG). Though to be honest I think these cases are very rare... even if there is a faction that has a big advantage in a certain setup, the end results will still depend on what factions the other players pick and on what strategies they will adopt in-game.

@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).

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:

1. 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)
2. 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.

I have to say that after last update everything went back to normal, for me at least.

@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.

[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

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?

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.

edit: I've tried using different browsers (chrome, firefox...) but I always get the same result. Weird thing is, I get notification, I can access the options sidebar and even the in-game chat, I am just unable to visualize the games themselves

Hi everyone,

since a few days (I guess around the time the last update came up) I haven't been able to play from my phone anymore. The site works normally if I want to look at the homepage or my profile, but when I try accessing any specific game the page just keeps loading forever.

I'm using android on a motorola phone. Is this just me or has someone else been experiencing the same issue?

I agree. The opposite scenario is also problematic, and keeps happening: I open a new game, three players with really low ELO join, and at that point I risk losing points even if I end up 2nd (and I get only a handful even if I win).

Being able to set a min/max ELO for players who wish to join would be useful.

about itars: i think their 3k academy is ok because it's really hard to use effectively that AND their PI ability in the same game... so it's actually a very versatile faction because you can either open ac and get lots of "k"s from early on, or you can open PI and start burning power to gain techs early on. Both options are viable, and give rise to totally different games, which adds variety to the game.

As for their extra starting ore: yeah that makes no sense at all and should just be removed. It's the only nerf to any faction on which I'd agree, I think.

About the Lantids, I think the idea of giving them very little power was to compensate their ability to form federations very easily. This however turned into a major nerf because it also means not being able to access power actions as easily as other factions, especially in the early game. The two lesst starting credits are just overkill imho, and makes it nearly impossible to open AC with them, which is what normally dissuades me to pick them.

NB: to be clear, yes, you can build an academy in R1 with lantids, with the right booster, but at a very high price, which imo is not worth paying.

@MasN said in Stats on factions:

Gleens - On the other hand, for the most part its brainless. Your expansion is so constrained you rely more on the opponents to not be paying attention than actually playing well.

lol. yes, i mostly agree with this

in general, yes, what you said, i probably have to focus less when playing taklons because i played them a lot, while ambas for instance not so much.

i 100% agree in particular that ivits require a lot of planning ahead.

in general, though, thes kind of things are also heavily dependent on the player and their specific styles of play and preferences

I'm not sure i agree that Itars, Ambas and Ivits are absolute no-brainers. Maybe it's just me who don't play these 3 specific factions a lot, but I have to put in a lot of thinking when using them (while my Taklon, Terran or Firak games are much more streamlined). But then again, this might be a matter of being more or less used to play a certain factions.

The real strenght of Ambas, Taklons and Itars is that they are very versatile. They adapt well to a very high number of scenarios. This is why they get picked a lot (and often perform well, I'm not denying all these races have powerful abilities).

Other factions (e.g. Geodens, Firaks) are also good, imho, but can be picked in a more restricted number of settings. In the right context, however, they can be as powerful as the others.

I'm just not sure the same can be said about gleens, bescods and lantids. The last two in particular I've seen perform abysmally even in settings where they should have theoretically done well. But as I said, I'm not sure about this, would gladly hear other opinions.

I'm not sure I would say that Itars and Ambas are OP (not without including Taklons in the lot, at least).

I agree on the fact that gleens and lantids are UP in most contexts, however. I don't think Itars and Ambas need to be nerfed, but a few other factions could benefit from a small buff to get on level (this includes the Bescods, that imho suffer from the same limitations as gleens an the dolphins).