It would be nice to be able to thumbs up/down players after a game, to remind you of players you had good matches with or mark players you don't want to play with again.
e.g., played a game where 3/4 players voted to cancel at the beginning. The fourth never responded, so we kept playing -- but then they suddenly voted to cancel and ended the game R5. It'd be nice to be able to mark that player to make sure I don't play with them again.

(ftr I'm "oedipusSkywalker" on discord)
As it stands, the new auction system tanks the replayability of the game for me, as fewer factions are viable in each game.

Random factions with either auction system should help solve the main problem I'm looking for auctions to solve, which is enabling more factions to be competitive in more setups. Without auctions to balance the faction picks, the replayability plummets and it just gets boring seeing Ivits, Itar, Ambas/Taklons again and again.

I think some form of auction is necessary to play competitively, because otherwise you're relying on one player correctly analyzing every faction's possible paths and map position when rotating sectors, which is effectively impossible. And that's if they even bother to rotate at all.

I'm very hesitant about changes to the factions themselves without ample playtesting, because it's far easier to break it more than it is to fix it. And some of the "common sense" changes I've heard (letting gleen use qic from the start, changing Ambas income, etc) go too far in my opinion.

And for what it's worth, there was a long involved conversation on auction formats in this thread - I was advocating for a closed bid, optimized payment system which is apparently what they'll be using in the app -
https://forum.boardgamers.space/topic/148/improvement-to-the-auction

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)

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.

@El-Temblo said in Improvement to the auction ?:

Ok but I frankly can't see how

• give Lantids a normal power system

meaning their PI gives them 1 token? meaning they start with 4 tokens in bowl 2? meaning they start with all 6 tokens? Changing any one of those three things might be enough; change all three and they may end up too strong

• make Gleens use qics, ffs

So, completely change the nature of the faction, removing their one major weakness entirely? Gleens can already be quite strong, they're just easy to bomb if you start off on the wrong foot. Take away their one major weakness entirely and they'll probably be unbeatable in some setups (as well as boring to play)

• remove the dang extra ore from Itars

That one's probably right, but even that I'd want to see how it actually works in practice before we force all players to do it.
All of this is an aside from the actual point of this topic though, so I'll leave it there (happy to discuss more via DM if you want)

Regarding rules confusion: there already are two rulesets for GP, with or without auctions.

...except that the actual rules of the game are identical. Nothing about how you play the game, or how a faction works, changes. There's just one additional setup step; after that the actual game play is identical.

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.

That is a shame. When I throw in lantids, or gleen, or whoever, it's not to force other people to pick them-- I hope I end up with them, I just also want to make sure I have a reasonable chance of winning.
The timing of auctions in 4p games is definitely a problem. I'm starting to accept the risk that I "overbid" a couple of points to move things along-- if I was willing to pay up to 15 for ambas, and jump the bid to 10 when 7 would have been enough, oh well, that's still within the range I thought they were worth.

What do you think of the idea of the last player setting values, instead of/in addition to rotating sectors? It would cut out the multiple days of "bid+1"ing you mention...
A sealed bid format may make it more playable, e.g. each player selects a maximum bid for each faction at the start, and then the auction happens automatically based on those bids. There's a ton of ways for that to play out-- the simplest that comes to mind is that the highest bid overall wins the given faction; other bids from that player and faction are removed; the highest remaining bid wins the next faction; and so forth.
(You could also go with the Vickrey model, where the winner pays the second-highest bid, to help avoid the winner's curse and overcome people's fear of overbidding)
Or, if the developers are up for it*, there are more intricate game theory-based formats that could be applied. ex: implementation described for the digital app here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2486355/article/35619027#35619027

* I'm going to be using a couple of week of PTO in December with nowhere to go, so may be able to help out in that regard...

@Molfo - I do see what you're both saying, yeah. In my mind an optional, pre-game homerule is far less of a departure from the design than a faction change etc. that actually changes how the game is played, but it seems not everyone sees it the same way.

Deciding on the right auction format is critical. The one implemented here is a reasonably "safe" implementation, other than that it frustrates people (which does kind of defeat the purpose of playing a game...). You're right that bidding in a truly accurate way is practically impossible; but so is predicting the end state of the game without bidding, especially in a 4p game... but you're already doing that to some degree when you pick a faction in the first place, and when you pick a starting planet, and especially when the last player rotates sectors. That feels like a much bigger leap in terms of necessary prediction than an individual player estimating the worth of a faction after the board is locked in.

Agreed 100% that the faction balancing needs to be a separate issue.

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...

@JenniL said in Improvement to the auction ?:

@JenniL said in Improvement to the auction ?:

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

anybody thinks this could be a viable idea?

There are legitimate times when a faction could be worth far more than that, but I guess it would discourage people from picking a faction they think is worth >20 points less than another faction... I personally wouldn't like a hard limit like that, but it could be a middle ground to make everyone only somewhat unhappy :)

@Spooky good questions. There's a ton of ways to handle relative value and ties, depending on what you want to emphasize. To my knowledge, the main approaches either go for simple face value (e.g. top-down, you pay the lowest winning bid for each faction), or maximizing efficiency (true value/optimizing bids)

Example auction and bids:

Factions: Ambas/Terrans/Firaks
Player A: 10/8/0
Player B: 0/8/5
Player C: 15/10/0

The simple face value approach would basically follow a "highest overall" system, i.e.: 1. highest bid overall wins, and pays 1 more than the next highest bid for that faction; 2. remove the now excess bids for the winning player/faction; 3. repeat 1&2 for the rest. In the case of a tie, the best tiebreaker is likely to compare to the next highest valued faction, and resolve based on that.

So in the example:
Player C wins Ambas for 11 (their value was 15, but they get it for +1 over the next highest bid). Remaining bids:

Factions: Terrans/Firaks
Player A: 8/0
Player B: 8/5

Player A and B both bid 8 for Terrans, so look to their next bids.
Player A values Terrans over their next option more than Player B, e.g.: (8-0) > (8-5), so Player A would get Terrans for their max bid of 8, and Player A gets the last option Firaks for 0.

There's obviously some downsides to this, which is to say how a player values the factions in comparison to each other is actually more important than how they value them compared to other players, and that's only used as a tiebreaker above. So maximizing efficiency / optimizing bids based on game theory is probably a better way to go.

It would effectively boil down to: people pay the minimum they have to so that it isn't worth paying any more for another faction. Using the same example:

Factions: Ambas/Terrans/Firaks
Player A: 10/8/0
Player B: 0/8/5
Player C: 15/10/0

The optimal solution is likely:
Player C gets Ambas for 5; Player A gets Terrans for 3; Player B gets Firaks for 0.
(Values might change by a point depending on how you handle ties / "bidding order", so we'd need to decide a standard approach there.)

Effectively, it's as if people bet as follows:

A bid 0 on Ambas -- their highest valued faction
B bid 0 on Terrans -- their highest valued faction
C bid 1 on Ambas -- relative value 4 over next best faction (15-1=14 for Ambas vs 10-1=9 for Terrans vs 0 for Firaks)
A bid 2 on Ambas -- relative value 1 (10-2=8 for Ambas vs 8-1=7 for Terrans vs 0 for Firaks)
B stays on Terrans
C bids 3 on Ambas -- relative value 3 (15-3 vs 10-1 vs 0)
A bids 1 on Terrans -- relative value 1 (10-4 vs 8-1 vs 0)
B bids 2 on Terrans -- relative value 1 (0-4 vs 8-2 vs 5)
C stays on Ambas
A bids 4 on Ambas -- relative value 0* (10-4 vs 8-2 vs 0)
B stays on Terrans
C bids 5 on Ambas -- relative value 3 (15-5 vs 10-3 vs 0)
A bids 3 on Terrans -- relative value 1 (10-6 vs 8-3 vs 0)
B bids 0 on Firaks -- relative value 1 (0 vs 8-4 vs 5)
(Done)

* My instinct is a tie in relative value between factions for a player should be broken by their face value, e.g. if they originally valued Ambas more than Terrans, they'd take Ambas over Terrans assuming the same net value after bids. It could also be broken by which board they picked at the start, if relevant (face value could be the backup tiebreaker).

Ties between players could either be broken by player order, as above, or by defaulting to the faction they picked at the start-- e.g. if the optimal value for Terrans over other options is 3 for two players, it would go to whoever selected Terrans as an option.
(In rare cases you may end up with a true tie that can't be broken by meaningful distinctions, and then it would have to be random. e.g. if it ends up with two faction that have the exact same bids from two players who didn't pick either faction at the start, you just assign them at random since the players didn't differentiate between the two.)

It's a more complicated algorithm to implement, but doable and should get as close to optimal results as possible.

@lucasrrr sorry, when I said "no one has really addressed their suggestion directly", I meant their suggestion for an improvement- the option for the zero bid to swap boards

I played similarly in person too and still usually randomize when playing with friends on here (we hit random twice and pick between the two results). I definitely like seeing new combinations of factions and trying to play a faction in unusual conditions.

Re: randomizing all four boards here- this is technically possible already through coordinating in the chat, but it might be nice to formalize it. As far as whether it fixes trash picks-- the question is whether people dislike the "spirit" of it, what they see as deliberate metagaming; or whether they just don't like a bad faction being there because of how it influences the bidding / not wanting to get stuck with it. Randomizing would of course fix the first, but not the second, as there's a 4/14 chance the worst possible faction still gets selected and the same bidding war to avoid it happens anyway.

In my mind, it's possible to resolve the bidding war part of things with a closed bid system, but still preserve the ability to have unusual factions in the game.
(And these two options could always be combined-- randomizing factions would work as an independent option you could select during setup)

I'd like to think Gaia players can handle some complexity :) but yeah it's definitely less intuitive and the purchase prices might make people go "huh?"

It would probably work best if the game logged the individual bids similar to how I demo'd above in order to be transparent about why people got the factions they did for the price they did.
If the text at the start is something like "Select the maximum price you would pay for each faction", and then the game log at the bottom showed bid-by-bid how it played out, I think that would be pretty clear. (And obviously, there could be a page explaining how it works, like there already is for the existing auction)

(The downside of needing to log step-by-step would be you couldn't take shortcuts in the algorithm, but I don't think it would be too much of a burden on the sever. There's the chance people could deliberately / coincidentally place matching very high bids which could add a few hundred "moves" to work through but as long as you batch them for writing to the db that shouldn't slow things down)

i'm going to avoid getting into the "objectively better" rabbit hole re: "good ol' rotation". the pros/cons of rotation aren't really relevant here.

this post is about "Improvement to the auction", so it seems like the only relevant feedback is along the lines of "what could make auctions better for more players?" people may dislike auctions, or be dead set against them, and that's fine, they never have to use them. (going the full mile of rebalancing factions can easily be a parallel effort, and if last sector rotation works great then, hurray! auctions should be less appealing and effectively go away on their own...) but this thread should probably stick to constructive feedback.

the intractable issues people mention with auctioning seem to be that it's too non-deterministic / difficult to predict, and that gaia isn't supposed to be about risk-assessment.
i'd argue that every selection during setup requires a similar magnitude of prediction to bidding-- and rotating sectors a magnitude higher-- and that risk assessment is a fundamental part of every decision in the game-- am i giving power charge too soon, can i wait to take that planet, how much do i have to rush this track to get that adv tile, etc-- but: if you view those as unique or excessive issues with auctioning, they are intractable, so you should avoid playing games with any form of auction implemented.

the main potential goals of auctioning people focus on are:
G1) evening out the impact of player order re: faction selection-- OP's point
G2) evening out / making more factions playable in a given setup

the main potential flaws with auctioning people focus on are:
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
F2) the possibility for other metagaming -- seeing what factions people are aiming for (or aiming to avoid), trying to push their prices up, etc.
F3) the delay to the game -- going back and forth on bids for days, especially with 4 players

@oelepetoetje's suggestion was "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." @AntoineBR had a related suggestion, that factions are picked and bid on one-by-one.

• Superficially, this will address F1 in full; and partially address F2 and F3 as not being shoehorned into the "bad" faction should reduce metagaming and lower the peak value of bids, thus speeding the bidding process up.
• This will address G1, but G2 is largely unaddressed -- the relative value of a faction-with-replacement can still make the selected faction unplayable. You'll still end up with the four strongest factions in every game if people are playing (roughly) optimally
• The other concern I have (and others voiced) is that the value of a faction can change dramatically depending on what other factions are in the game, because of planet color, likelihood of gaiaforming, etc. Once people are "locked in" on another faction, they may get severely bit by a faction swap, which can be taken into account but then many of the issues with auctioning are increased-- the ability for metagaming, the difficulty of prediction, etc. You're now making more decisions with less information.

Overall, I definitely would not prefer this; but if most players only care about G1 and not G2, then something along these lines could work better overall.

My preference would still be switching to a closed bid format-- every player makes one and only one bid for all factions at the start, and then factions are assigned automatically based on the relative value of the bids.

• This completely resolves F2 and F3; there's no delay and there's no metagaming as there's no counter-bidding.
  It also completely fulfills G1 and G2: the impact of player order is now completely mitigated, and any faction can be involved
• F1, the issue of sabotaging with bad factions, is partially resolved-- those factions can still be introduced, but because bids are closed and factions assigned automatically, the person picking them has no way of guaranteeing they don't end up with the faction they tried to sabotage others with. So if you're picking it, you have to be comfortable playing it.
• The main drawback I can see for some players is that the final choice is taken out of your hands. In every other setup, you get the final decision about what faction you are, even if it's at an absurd cost. So if you just reaaally don't want to play Xenos or whoever, in the current auction you can always just keep bidding even if it's 50+ points. With closed bids, you can't absolutely guarantee that you don't get a faction (even if you can make it very likely by bidding high). How important this is will obviously vary player-to-player; I'm personally fine with it.

*as mentioned before, what people see as trying to force other players to play a bad board, I think is more often players picking factions they're interested in trying themselves; but I'm predisposed to view it that way as that's why I do it

you probably know, but just in case: if you make the mines in s10/4 part of a different federation first, it will then be legal to make the academy-tp fed you wanted