resolved ties

[astroglide]

this could be user error, but i had a tied kingdom in one of my games. the lower summary still showed my name split with the other, but they had the elector. when something comes down to an emperor's tiebreak, can the name of the winner be highlighted so that it's clear that the effects have gone off? i ended up looking in the game log just to be certain.

[MaBi]

Ok, I will look into this, thanks.

[jmilum]

also, I don't think that ties should automatically be given to the emperor, their could be an occasion where the emperor would prefer to let another person win instead such as in Game #3986.

The emperor automatically won the tie in Koln, but did not have an aristocrat in the region and so no one gained a vote from that region. I actually would have voted for the emperor in the election and he would have remained on the throne instead of being deposed.

[MaBi]

Hmmm... I didn't consider this possibility, the automatic win for the emperor seemed to be the obvious choice in all cases, but I can see your point in that game. I could remove it, but this would introduce more turns (in a game which is already too long). So for the moment I prefer to wait a bit, play more games and check if there is a significant percentage of cases where the emperor would prefer to lose a tie.
Thanks for pointing it out though, it adds to the list of things I'm not sure how to properly handle :?.

[jmilum]

Here is another case where i would like to have had the chance to try and strike a deal w/ the current emperor to allow me to win a tie that was against him. he might not have accepted in this case (although he would have scored the same amount of points plus been able to place an empire city) had he allowed me to win the tie and i supported him in the election. It was in game #4314 in brandenburg.

[MaBi]

This case is a bit different, essentially you want to give the Emperor the possibility to lose a tie in order to use it as 'trading good' in making deals. Here we could start arguing whether Shadow of the Emperor is a negotiation game or not. Personally I think it is not, as it is suggested by the total lack of 'trading goods' (players can't trade money, VPs, power, anything), and it's only the voting mechanism that can lead to think about negotiations. But it's really no different than turning any other game into a negotiation game. For example, in Puerto Rico you could start making offers like "I will take the Mayor if you then take the Craftsman", or "I will take Captain if you don't ship tobacco". I wouldn't like to play a PR game in this way, but this is just my personal opinion and I can see how other players prefer to play differently (but there is no doubt that negotiations don't work well in online gaming, especially in Play-by-Web).

Anyway, I am convinced now that it's better to stick by the rules, so I will change the code in order to remove the automatic win for the Emperor. It will take some time though: there are more than 60 games running now, and I need to be extra careful at introducing changes.

[HappyProle]

Even if 98 times out of 100 the Emperor chooses him/herself, that leaves 2 times where it would be extremely frustrating to not have a choice.

I would think that on average, this isn't going to add a significant number of turns to the game.

[MaBi]

I have just introduced the change: the Emperor doesn't get anymore an automatic win in case he is involved in a tie.
This applies only to multiplayer games (I think it's safe to assume that in 2-player games the Emperor would never choose to lose a tie!).

[jmilum]

Cool, that works very well. excellent catch about the 2 player exception, very nice :)