Dixie's Lua Thread

[Anonymissimus]

another thing about the rules:
It seems unbalanced to me that the limit for the resources sum is always seven and does NOT depend on the number of players; because with 8 players there are 8 side turns giving resources until your next chance to reduce your resources (with the exception of accepting a domestic trade maybe) so you'll have a lot of resource halfings since with that 7 other players the probability of the robber getting moved increases too...

[Dixie]

Yeah, that's a possibility. To be honest, the basic game is for 3-4 players only, and although some extensions exist for 6 players and I've read about some people joining two basic games for up to 8, I've never done it myself. I think the ezxpansion has some special rule about a "special building phase" to spend resources, but I've read a few posts on various forums and I've not seen many good opinions. I guess an alternative could be, as you suggest, to crank the limit up to 9/10 for 5-6 players and 11/13 for 7-8. Or something along those lines, anyway. The best would be to play-test a bit and find a good balance, either way.

EDIT:
On further thought, maybe the limit could be increased to 9 (for 6) and 11 (for , but not much more than that, imo, because if the limit is too high, players will be able to build like madmen when their turn comes up, leading to short game/giving more of an advantage to the first player(s).

On the other hand, leaving the 7 card limit would inevitably lead to quite a few losses to the robber, but it might increase the luck element and force the player to select his cards carefully when discarding, thus increasing the strategy element.

So a few tries would tell better, maybe the best is to leave it as it is, maybe the best is to find a balance between the two extremes, I dunno.

[Brilliand]

Yeah, that's a possibility. To be honest, the basic game is for 3-4 players only, and although some extensions exist for 6 players and I've read about some people joining two basic games for up to 8, I've never done it myself. I think the ezxpansion has some special rule about a "special building phase" to spend resources, but I've read a few posts on various forums and I've not seen many good opinions. I guess an alternative could be, as you suggest, to crank the limit up to 9/10 for 5-6 players and 11/13 for 7-8. Or something along those lines, anyway. The best would be to play-test a bit and find a good balance, either way.

EDIT:
On further thought, maybe the limit could be increased to 9 (for 6) and 11 (for , but not much more than that, imo, because if the limit is too high, players will be able to build like madmen when their turn comes up, leading to short game/giving more of an advantage to the first player(s).

On the other hand, leaving the 7 card limit would inevitably lead to quite a few losses to the robber, but it might increase the luck element and force the player to select his cards carefully when discarding, thus increasing the strategy element.

So a few tries would tell better, maybe the best is to leave it as it is, maybe the best is to find a balance between the two extremes, I dunno.

You could raise the limit and raise the price of construction - or reduce the chance of gaining resources, i.e. rolling d12s instead of d6s. Indeed, since this is a computer game rather than a board game, you could make the die size directly dependent on the player count - i.e. d(players*2). That should keep the resources-gained-per-turn about even for any number of players. Oh yes, I like that last idea - die size dependent on player count...

[Anonymissimus]

You could raise the limit and raise the price of construction - or reduce the chance of gaining resources, i.e. rolling d12s instead of d6s. Indeed, since this is a computer game rather than a board game, you could make the die size directly dependent on the player count - i.e. d(players*2). That should keep the resources-gained-per-turn about even for any number of players. Oh yes, I like that last idea - die size dependent on player count...

Have you played it ? This would imply additional "number" terrains. Also, I'm not quite certain about the effects on probability, it would require some analysis in how many ways each dice sum can be achieved then. I'm sorry, no, it doesn't make much sense after all.

[pauxlo]

If we really want the players to get less resources, we would need some dice results where nobody gets resources. Like use a DX+D6, and when the DX shows more than 6 nobody gets resources. This way no new terrains are needed.

[Brilliand]

Have you played it ? This would imply additional "number" terrains.

Only twice as many as the maximum number of players - which prevents unlimited players, but raising the limit to 9 wouldn't be too hard. The real burden here is tweaking the map generator to provide locations for all of those numbers (though a larger map would be necessary anyway to make room for all of those players).

Pauxlo's suggestion (which in this context amounts to having the extra possible roll values be nothing-happens rolls instead of adding new terrains) would also work, and would allow for unlimited players, although it's unsatisfying to me because large numbers of players would require the space provided by a bigger map.

Also, I'm not quite certain about the effects on probability, it would require some analysis in how many ways each dice sum can be achieved then. I'm sorry, no, it doesn't make much sense after all.

I've considered this. The chance of getting the robber each turn (which would come up on a roll of [player count*2+1]) is 1/the number of players, or an average of once per round. The only meaningful difference here is that the worst tiles will become marginally worse as the number of players increases, but with the larger range of available tiles, it becomes less likely that players will have to accept taking those worst tiles, so the rate of resource gathering will decrease only slightly more than the rate at which the robber is rolled. Of course, that isn't a super-detailed analysis, but it's enough to know that the resources-per-robber-roll balance (as well as the resources-per-turn balance and robbers-per-turn balance) for each player will not depend very much on how many players there are under this system.

[Dixie]

Personnally, I am not really sure I like the whole number-switching idea. Yes, it would be possible to have more numbers, probabilities would change but the range would be wider. Bigger maps are theorically already taken care of (they were at the time I passed the add-on anyway, so they should still be). My main point would be:
1) The game is already balanced, why risk it all? Assuming your calculations are exact (which they are not, by the way, as the robber should be activated on 1/6 of the rolls, not 1/4), with eight players, the robber would be activated twice per round on average. Well, as far as I can see, not gaining ressources once in a while amounts to pretty much the same as getting more ressources but having to throw some away more often. On the other hand, I think we raised the maximum amount of card treshold before throwing half away depending on the ount of players, so this kinda invalidates my previous point.
2) Ressource-wise, having more number variety (bigger dice) would not be much of a bother. But the robber would proportionally get out less often with bigger dice. For exaemple, if you have 2 D8 and activate the robber on 9s (the most frequent number), you get the robber 1/8 of the time instead of 1/6 with D6s. For me, this is the biggest no-no.
3) Players know a certain set of rules. Changing them could bug them. Also, the help text would get much, much more complicated if we had to keep track of all the die size for each amount of players, numbers the robber is activated on, etc.

By the way, your other idea of increasing the cost of stuff seems pretty tricky balance-wise, and I would personally not try it.