king achilles wrote:Basically, these all came from a game that the players agreed it to be a stalemate or a deadlocked game. There lies the problem. You guys are responsible on how the game will turn out to be and yet, when faced into a 'do-or-die' situation, no one is daring enough to take the risk of trying to win the game that all of you brought this unto yourselves.
You, like some others here, seem not to understand the problem we are talking about.
In an Escalating game, where the cash values have reached 150 and every player on the board has 350+ armies, what risk is there worth taking ? It is not 'do-or-die', but 'do-and-die', because any 'daring' move will weaken you so much, that you become target number 1 yourself. At this point even killing another player & taking his cards for a mid-turn cash will leave you weaker than before.
As someone pointed out already (here or in one of the related threads), nobody really likes these stalemate situations, and everybody tries his best to win the game. This however includes not making yourself vulnerable & staying as strong as possible. The only 'daring' move, that makes sense in Escalating is going for a kill / sweep. That is, what you are working towards with every move: Getting in a position, that will allow you to go for a kill / sweep.
At the same time, you try to prevent other players going for a kill / sweep, cause them winning means you losing. So you for example set blocks in their attack ways. If everybody does that (with other words: if everybody plays it smart), it will come down to drop / positioning, turn order, dice & cards. Most of the time somebody will get a shot at someone else and consequently take the game. But sometimes the game goes stale. It simply happens, when everybody is playing it smart.
If the top players of this format all agree, that stalemates / deadlocks / draws can happen in this games, then maybe you should just give them the benefit of the doubt ?
king achilles wrote:So, to resolve the dilemma you guys put yourselves into, you all agree to make another one to settle the original game.
To resolve the dilemma we put ourselves into
by playing it smart and not making dumb moves / mistakes, we agreed on a tie-breaker. As it has been done countless times before.
king achilles wrote:It can make things complicated because one repercussion about this action is that one or more players involved is forced to give away games just so he can pay the "rightful" winner, should things go in the wrong way, such as in this case, RL_Orange had to make a bunch of 1-on-1 games to pay some points for Karlo Veliki.
Even if things go perfectly smooth & according to plan / agreement, all but the winner will give away the stalemate game.
It has been discussed now, that the whole tie-breaker business might technically be against the rules, since it involves throwing a game, but that it is very questionable, if it constitutes "abuse" of the game. No one is point dumping, everyone tries to win.
Nobody likes to be in the situation in the first place, but it is the best solution for this recurring dilemma, that the players of this site have found. If CC would for example offer a "Draw" button, that when clicked by all participating players, would simply end the game as a "draw" (giving no points to anybody), we wouldn´t need to find solutions like this ourselves.
king achilles wrote:What if one of these players changes his mind and does not hold up his end of the bargain? Should a mod step in an agreement that you just made between yourselves?
I don´t see any problem here. I have never seen a player break the agreement. This kind of thing usually only happens between skilled & rather high ranked players, in private games. Most of these players play each other regularly, and all of them know how the tie-breakers work.
If someone would break the agreement, he´d simply land on a lot of Foe lists and practically be banned from participating in high ranked Escalating games. End of story.
king achilles wrote:Karlo Veliki and RL_Orange has been warned.
If you all agree to make a deciding game over another game that you think is already deadlocked, be sure your actions, whatever the outcome may be, will still be within the rules and guidelines.
If we agree to make a tie-breaker, we automatically agree to throw a game, i.e. the stalemate game to the winner of the tie-breaker. People have been discussing for several pages in 2 or 3 threads now, if this in itself actually is
within the rules and guidelines, and it would be nice to get a real ruling here.
Either the tie-breaker practice is ok & tolerated by the site. Your ruling seems to say so, since you are talking about future tie-breaker games. In that case, I am wondering, why Karlo & Orange were warned. If tie-breakers are ok, and if you understood the whole situation (it being an accident, that is), they should be cleared.
Or the tie-breaker practice is deemed against the rules, cause all tie-breakers involve the throwing of a game. Then the warning would make sense, but it should be given to everybody involved in the original stalemate & tie-breaker games.
EDIT: Fast-posted by several others. Probably cause I´m a slow-poster ...