Subject: MN: Re: Year 2 Week 45 Proposals

From: "Kevan Davis" <kevan@z...>
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 19:32:03 -0000

>Since the only other option is Pass, Rushton
>must remain at Beckton (and, incidentally, breaking the Loop).

Tangentially, such is an unintended side effect of the Loop becoming based
on the "previous Active Player's piece position"; you can easily break a
Loop with a Pass. Remiss of me. Hmm. I'm not sure how much I like that.

>> Proposal 650 - We Are Normal And We Want Our Freedom [Multiple]
>
>I was going to complain about this, but of course the wording excludes
>Straddles which is rather nicely done.

I did wonder whether it was worth applying Charge to Straddles or not,
really. I suppose it's good to have a few cases where Piece movement doesn't
necessarily tally with Charge modification.

>I would have thought that applying this change would sufficiently fix the
>Charge win.

Only the Wild victory - it still leaves the rather worrying prospect of a
couple of unpredictable Moves that just happen to hit the right Stations and
allow a victory. Charge Victories unnerve me because they're so hard to
predict, and can only really be anticipated a Turn before their completion
(unless you're willing to double- or triple-calculate potential Charge
modifications for every Player, every Turn).

>I'm a little sad about this - the Electroplating itself is a splendid idea,
>well worth using, but I'm terribly unhappy about losing the Charge win.
>
>Whilst I accept to a certain extent the point about the fiddliness of the
>maths, the whole point of introducing it was so that we had more than one
>way to win. It just seems a little sad to take that away, to my mind.

Mmm; rather a drastic solution, its repeal, I know, but at the end of the
day, a Charge Win isn't really that different to any other sort of Win - the
aim of the game is always, of course, to get to Mornington Crescent. Boiling
it down and stirring it a bit, the Charge Victory can be reworded to "If
your Charge would be 18 when you Moved to Mornington Crescent, you may
perform the pre-Move Action of [Charging] to gain three Golds." (And for
some reason, it suddenly sounds a lot more powerful and dangerous, worded
like that.)

The three-Gold requirement is quite a nice thing, I think, because it means
we can implement a variety of way to collect Golds (a variety of ways to
Win, in essence), and it serves as a fairly blatant "Player X is about to
Win" alarm. Also, rather usefully, by the simple step of making the more
dramatic Gold-gaining Actions into post-Moves, it's easy to put a one-turn
delay on victories, giving opponents a chance to respond to whatever's
happened.

Kevan

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