koontz1973 wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:I'd be fine with making it a function of player size if that's what it takes to reach a compromise.
What about a trench or adjacent reinforcements, they can also slow down a game. Settings would need to become a factor as well then. So what would you say, all 2/3/4/5 player games that are not adjacent or trench must have this? What would happen if a player did not want to play escalating like this?
Settings don't have to be a factor if we don't want them to be. I think it's much cleaner to have one version of escalating spoils that applies to all games. I'll compromise a little on that if I need to, but I'm not going to turn this into a different version of escalating for every game type.
Metsfanmax wrote:Actually, I join an escalating game expecting full well that the game will end with a sweep.
Amazing how few escalating games end in full sweeps.
Perhaps more escalating games would end in sweeps if the spoils escalated faster
Metsfanmax wrote:We're talking about escalating here. I assert that if an escalating game ever reaches a point where the spoils become irrelevant, then it's not really an escalating game. That's what we need to fix.
But you are trying to fix something that is not broken. Escalating spoils work exactly like they are supposed to. More games in flat or no spoils stalemate over esc but at no point has anyone suggested they need changing.
What exactly do you mean by "escalating spoils work exactly like they are supposed to?" I think that is empirically denied by the real possibility of games where the spoils become basically irrelevant. Remember that the current system is analogous to the Risk board game -- but no real life Risk games ever make it into the hundreds of troops on cashes, because people give up and go to sleep before that. The board game instructions had no reason to consider that we would take the concept and apply it to games on larger maps or for longer periods of time, and so there's no reason to think that the variant works 'correctly' in general. We have full control over this site, and we can make the variant whatever we want as long as most people would like the change.