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[Gold Ergo Sum]

Cull, try Nakor. He is looking for someone.

[sunrise089]

I'm pretty sure we have the same understanding on this but are using different terms.

I think you're right. Sorry, we've been talking past one another a bit. I favor picking leaders rather than traits, and without duplicates. So in my proposal there isn't any need to define the set other than "civ leaders."

I'd be OK with traits, as I don't think it hurts the auction idea much. If people value trait synergy it does create a little uncertainty ("do I bit high on trait X hoping I can get synergistic trait Y?") but it isn't anything like a dealbreaker IMHO.

Because if the amount is say, only 250, would anyone give an Ind/Cha team a chance long term against a Fin/Org team just because they started out with 250 extra gold? I am hardly an expert, but that doesn't seem like much of a choice to me.

No, and your idea is certainly correct. The goal is, IMHO, to offer a meaningful choice between gold and leader (or traits). But one thing you're missing - the guy who burns gold on Darius may not get as good of a civ. If the Ind/Chm guy had a top civ that would help balance things.

And, the 10th best leader is > Ind/Chm, so the better question is like how much difference is there between Fin/Cre/worse civ and like Fin/Spi/better civ or Cre/Agg/better civ. That difference should be made up in gold.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

And, the 10th best leader is > Ind/Chm, so the better question is like how much difference is there between Fin/Cre/worse civ and like Fin/Spi/better civ or Cre/Agg/better civ. That difference should be made up in gold.

Well, I didn't figure that we would just select the best 10-12 leaders and make them the "pool" to be auctioned. Then there really might not be much reason to spend gold over just taking the 10th best. The community seems to want to play/lurk games with atypical leaders/civs involved instead of the same old group. At this point, everyone pretty much knows which leaders are the best and how they play. But this is really a decision for the players in the game.

I think it would be much more interesting to auction traits and civs, than leaders and civs. If you bid enough for financial, you will likely only get a middle-tier second trait or civ, and a lower-tier whatever for your third option. I think that would be balanced and interesting. Especially, like I said, if you just offered two of every trait. At least by my estimation, the real synergy in picks comes less from matching traits, than matching a civ to one or both of your traits, which you should still be able to do, or try to do, which is more the point.

[Nakor]

Ok, another thought... forget the gold and do a "draft". GES decides the leaders and civs to be drafted (number of players +2 or so) and we snake-pick/draft them. Then we all know what is in the bag and what we can get.

[plako]

I like the auction idea, but it seems pretty hard to do properly. Maybe we could spice up the normal snake pick we could do 3 rounds. Trait-trait-civ (one must only pick existing trait pairs). Pick order for nation that goes 1st could be e.g. 1-10-5. In every round traits would be available only once. No duplicate leaders allowed.

Edit. Btw. I would be alright using Sunrise's system for auction.

Concerning the above suggestion since the pick positions can't be totally equal value. Here is suggestin how picks could be randomized

1: 1-10-9
2: 10-1-10
3: 2-9-7
4: 9-2-8
5: 3-8-5
6: 8-3-6
7: 4-7-3
8: 7-4-4
9: 5-6-1
10; 6-5-2

[Gaspar]

Whether we're doing an auction or a draft, I like the idea of spicing up the selections in someway. If its just a straight snake draft you're going to get the same Willem/Pacal/Sury/etc of whatever that we get in any other unrestricted game. Also, unless there is an opportunity cost associated with the Civs India/Inca are so far superior to the other Civ options they need to be axed IMO.

The reasons above are sort of why I like the idea of the auction as you're not just picking India or Pacal and happy about where you fell in the pecking order, you're making a real honest decision with consequences: Is picking, say Agg/Exp worth sacrificing Fin/Cre/Spi to start with 200 gold? Or is paying 230g for India worth getting stuck with Chm/Ind, and 0 gold? And so on and so forth.

I'm not really opposed to a snake, so long as there's an exclude list or some other such twist, I just find an auction to be much more interesting.

[Cyneheard]

Auction idea that doesn't require using a chat room:

Maximum 11 players. This is a sealed-bid second-price system. With 10 or 11 players, there is a theoretical possibility of weird things happening.

Each player gets 300g, to bid for 3 things: Two traits and one civ. No one can end up with the forbidden combos (Cre/Cha, Phi/Ind, Org/Pro).

This will done in three rounds: trait, trait, and then the civilization.

For round 1, all teams will post in their own personal threads their maximum valuation for each of the 11 traits.

Example post by Team A:
Financial: 145g
Expansive: 144g
Creative: 140g
Philosophical: 100g
Spiritual: 90g
Aggressive: 60g
Organized: 30g
Imperialistic: 80g
Industrious: 40g
Charismatic: 40g (Preferred over Industrious)
Protective: 0g

If you put the same maximum bid for two traits, have some way to clarify which trait you prefer if you're the high bidder on both of them.

How the bids will be resolved:
Take the highest bid across all traits. Let's say that was Team A's Fin bid of 145g. So, Team A will receive the Financial trait for Round 1. They'll then pay the SECOND highest Fin bid + 1g; sealed bids need to be second-price auctions.
Now, for Teams B through J, we'll take the highest non-Fin bid, and repeat the process, removing a team and a trait, until all teams buy one trait. The last team to get a trait pays 0g for it.

Note: For round 2, you'll only be able to put bids in 9 (for Cre, Cha, Org, Phi, Ind, Pro) or 10 traits (everyone else). So if there's 10 or 11 teams, there's a chance that a team won't win any of the traits that they can bid. How to resolve it, if that happens:
Break the 2-trait rule. Let's say that the Phi civ doesn't win any of the 9 traits they legally could. They'll get the legal trait that sold for the least amount of gold at that same price, say, Protective for 10g, but the Phi civ was only willing to pay 0g. The Phi civ would be Sitting Bull, and have paid 10g for Protective. It feels unfair to force the team that had legally bought Pro in the first place to take a different trait.

For civs, bid as many civs as you like, just be sure that it's at least as many civs as there are teams. Same rule applies, until all civs are sold.

[plako]

Cyneheard's system would be alright to me.

[SevenSpirits]

Cyneheard's suggestion is good. Some comments:

- Just ban a player from making identical bids on any two items. Simpler.

- The illegal trait problem can theoretically be compounded by the person not having enough money. To almost completely remove this possibility, give everyone $200 to start and another $50 each in the second and third round.

- I think it would be more fun to do trait1, civ, trait2.

- This is not necessarily an excellent idea (like the above ), but I think it might be good: Instead of resolving the auctions in order of most expensive to least, do in in the order of largest disparity between first and second bids to least. Why?

Well, theoretically, people will bid $ for traits equal to how much they value them. So winning a bid at cost nets them zero value. Winning a bid below cost is how they profit. If you execute the auctions greedily doing the most profitable one first, it does a pretty good job of maximizing profit and thus making everyone as happy as possible. This system incentivizes everyone to bid their true value of all the traits, which helps out the second-price bidding and is generally desirable.

For comparison, if you do priciest to cheapest as you suggested, people who buy the pricey ones are going to tend to overpay, as the fact that they are resolved first removes price pressure from all of the less expensive ones. Therefore, the players would be incentivized to underbid their true value on more expensive items, else they remove their opportunities to get fantastic deals on cheaper ones.

- Whether you go with that suggestion or not, there must be a tiebreaker for what to do when there's more than one item due for resolution (either since they're tied for highest bid or for highest difference). I suggest that in each case, you use the other one as the tiebreaker. Additionally I suggest that if both are still tied, resolve them simultaneously (i.e. each before removing the winners' other bids, which might be propping up each other's prices).

[Gold Ergo Sum]

That seems pretty simple and doable Cyneheard.

The general consensus seems to be that there needs to be some way to spice it up and avoid the Willem and Pacal hegemony.

I think bidding traits separately will lead to some really interesting combos. Is it possible that someone could even get Phi/Ind without having to do a major mod? If certain combos would require a mod, we can use the civ selector once everyone has bought one trait and say that teams cannot bid on any second trait which would lead to a disallowed combo. Simple enough I think. There shouldn't be very many.

I said sign-ups would stay open until the 23rd, so there are four more days available. It looks like if Rego and sunrise get off the fence, and a few people looking for teammates join together, we should be in the 8-10 team range for the game, which should be small enough to move pretty quickly hopefully.