betiko wrote:1) because you know that if you have small chances of winning, you just stack andhope that others will attack. you just stall there, do nothing and try not to be the next target. If you are leading, it's not in your interest to attack too much either, basically a waste of troops. Hell, in an escalating game you can choose from the start to never attack and only stack; that way you never hold a single card and no one will ever go after you!
That's not 0 risk taking, because when someone eventually kills you, you will lose points anyway. So the risk is not 0 at all.
betiko wrote:2) do you really need a picture?
As I said, I love you too.
betiko wrote: if you join a terminator with your swords vs only stripers tell me what happens. they all go after you for your points! even if it means they'll get killed after killing you, they get a net point gain from it. In this case, as TFO points out, it's even worse cause everyone gets a bounty from your death and the highest bounty possible as you are the highest ranked.
I don't use to join Terminator games because I find them unfair, not because of my high ranking. If you check my games you will see that I have plenty of games with low ranked players, so I am not afraid of playing against low ranked players. And as a I said, if you can't play low ranked players, do you really deserve that high rank?
But as Donelladan points, killing a high player first would mean sharing the reward between more players, so it would be a choice between killing skilled players first before they get too big or waiting with the hope of getting more points from them.
betiko wrote:3) as greenoaks points out; sometimes you might have one of the most unaccessible stacks; or maybe you're just as good as dead but you hold no cards so a player with more cards and more armies can get killed before because he will make the attacker cash/double cash. Not to mention playing with friends and killing them last to give them max points even if they didn't deserve it.
Again, it makes no sense to affirm that the second player can be second just to luck bet the first player is first just to skill. If luck has influence, it has influence for all players.
As some other players have said, escalating games (which seem yout only concern) are not clear almost until the end. cashing so many armies it is possible to make a come back. If you choose not to get cards then you are at the expense of the other players. They can not attack you, or you might happen to be in the way to their cards so you are killed anyway.
betiko wrote:4) how can you possibly not see this as wrong? this is cheating! basically if you join one of those games, you are very likely to find players that know each other with pre-made alliances that others don't know about, ergo secret diplomacy. This can inflate dramatically some bad player's score as there is no skill required in cheating. It is completely wrong that a player could find benefit finishing second by doing everything to let another player win. mostly now that you have 12 player games!! this is completely fucked up. So dominant player gets 2 minions pre-game (preferably low rankers), he protects some of their territories and they do all the dirty job for him. they finish 1,2,3 and they all win like 50 points each. you really don't have a problem with that?
The behaviour you describe is cheating with any option. With the standard scoring rule you could join lots of games with friends and then just share the victories. It is no more cheating with Survivor. Again, you are describing an existing problem and pretending it would be a new problem under the new option.
betiko wrote:this idea isn't bad; it's terrible!
I love your constructive criticisms, based on a partial way of looking at the game, and bringing problems that already exist as if they were new