by Dulkal
dyepbr wrote:
As said before by turn 5, if two players are clear winners, above is moot, as 1 of the 2 alliance players that are dominating should win the game.
I am not talkikg about clear winners, I am talking about military strength.
My point is that part of the balancing mechanism in the game is that military is only part of the victory condition, because military can only take you so far. If you try to win by crushing other players completely, you will eventually be facing an informal alliane against you. If nothing else, the defenses you have to break will be the armies of more than one player. To effectively eliminate all other players, you have to be stronger than all of them combined. That is never ever going to happen with enough time left on the clock to acually execute the finishing moves.
With an alliance, the two of you have to be stronger than the two of them combined, which will be possible very often. This is different from the free-for-all with two strong players beating on two weak players, because in the latter case, both strong players know that one of them will lose, so they have to guard against each other. To dominate militarily, either of them will have to destroy the other.
That the gamestate is normally fluid does not matter, because it will be a slippery slope. If the two strongest players on turn 3 attack the weaker players mercilessly, the weaker players will still be weaker by turn 5. It will, in effect, be similar to a two-player game, only the military forcu is even greater because the teams are stacked and the distance between players is smaller.
What this risks doing is strongly emphasizing the military aspect of the game at the cost of all other sources of VP, because military domination by itself becomes a viable victory condition regardless of VP scores.
Of course, if you accept a metagame where certain kinds of victory are inferior to others, you can discount an allied domination as an inferior victory. But a game mechanic that only works on the assumption of unspoken metagame mechanics that are not universally adhered to is unfortunate.