So I've been thinking a bit on how we can best organize and make decisions in a timely manner. This is supposed to be a democracy game, so we should be looking for opinions of everyone as much as is possible. However, it's probably good for us to start thinking about how we're going to make decisions on a regular basis, and by extension how we want to organize the forum. There will be many scenarios/decisions that arise where waiting for a clear majority will just not be feasible.
Example: our turn player logs in at the start of our turn and sees an enemy axe came out of the fog to threaten our worker and city that only has an archer in it. We need to make a couple decisions immediately - whether or not to whip another defender, what to do with the worker, etc. However, surely we don't want to create a thread with a bunch of poll options like "move worker SW-SW" - that's crazy. Also, there may not be time to wait for a full majority. We may have 13 members on our team (not sure on exact #), but waiting for 7 to show up and confirm something may also not be realistic. At some point we're going to need to put somebody in charge of making an executive decision. Maybe we don't want them just making a snap decision, but we DO want them popping into the turn discussion thread, outlining the scenario, presenting options, and asking for an opinion. I'm thinking they should have the authority to make SOME decision based on an approximated consensus rather than requiring a clear and official majority.
This is the topic we should probably discuss now while we wait for things to get started. We need someone to have final say in a "presidential" kind of way to always to try aim towards the consensus, but have some authority to break ties and/or assume a consensus before we technically have a majority if necesssary. The problem we'll run into is not all team members will be active all the time. We may eventually have a roster of 15 players but only 7-9 consistently contributing in the forum in a few months. This might come up on T0 - we may find some amazingly good spot to the north. We may need our turn player to be able to look at 6 opinions and say "it's 5-1, so we're going with the 5" rather than say "well we need 8 for a majority" and we end up pausing and holding the turn while we wait for people to show up and vote. So should we try to quanitify levels of decisions? There's different types. Let me take a stab at it, something like:
A) Major long-term decisions. Example: What tech path for next 25 turns? This should be a team-wide decision. We should be discussing this stuff ahead of time, and we literally have days to discuss this, so this should require more of a consensus, with maybe only one person as a "tie-breaker" and nothing else. Official votes may be worthwhile for these.
B) Short-term decisions with impact. Example: Axe harassment mentioned above. This should be treated very similarly to A, except we are on an accelerated time-table. Decision maker should seek opinions and do his best to go with the consensus, but there is not necessarily time to hear from every member, so he may have to make some judgment calls.
C) Decisions with trivial to minor impact. Example: worker action needs to change due to surprise forest growth. I do think we should have a worker plan discussion thread and someone in charge of being primary planner of worker actions, but something may come up where the worker plan needs to change because a forest suddenly grows. We don't really need much of a vote here. A turn player could choose not to consult everyone on a minor adjustment here, right? I just don't want to see a thread poll for something like this
.
Any suggestions for how to organize this kind of thing? Seven/Mack, did you guys have something in mind when you talked about being the captain here? I would assume the default is that you guys take charge of a lot of this stuff, but we haven't actually discussed it yet so it's best to at least get on the same page about this.
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I also want to talk about forum organization some. I think we're going to want to err on the side of threads with specific purposes rather than a couple giant threads where things get missed. Based on past demogames I've seen, we may want something like this:
-Reported turns: Turn player/reporter dumps relevant screenshots from each turn in a somewhat uniform manner. No discussion in this thread and only the reporter should be posting - that way there's a nice central place for everyone to consult rather than digging through 20 pages of posts to find that barbarian screenshot from 15 turns ago.
-Turn Discussion: General discussion on reported turns. Good place for quick reactions and informal votes on little things that come up. A misc thread of sorts. Maybe a good place to debate the merits of galley vs worker next in a given city.
-Diplomacy thread: We'll want a central place for correspondence with other teams to be documented. If it gets unwieldy and huge, we may want a thread for each team, but that may not be necessary.
-Worker micro: A thread dedicated to making our worker plans. I think we'll want a primary planner and this can be a place for that person to get input.
-C&D thread: I think we have a C&D whiz or two. Cyneheard, still interested?
-Metagaming: General place for metagame discussion. Stuff like cracking the map, predicting opponent wonder plans, analyzing likelihoods, etc. This will probably be a bit more busy thread early in the game and less active as the game progresses.
Any thoughts? I do wonder if some of this is redundant or some categories may be too broad, but I figured again, now is a good time to discuss. What we don't want is a new player to join in 4 months and to just see 3 enormous threads and be completely overwhelmed and have no idea where to start.
Example: our turn player logs in at the start of our turn and sees an enemy axe came out of the fog to threaten our worker and city that only has an archer in it. We need to make a couple decisions immediately - whether or not to whip another defender, what to do with the worker, etc. However, surely we don't want to create a thread with a bunch of poll options like "move worker SW-SW" - that's crazy. Also, there may not be time to wait for a full majority. We may have 13 members on our team (not sure on exact #), but waiting for 7 to show up and confirm something may also not be realistic. At some point we're going to need to put somebody in charge of making an executive decision. Maybe we don't want them just making a snap decision, but we DO want them popping into the turn discussion thread, outlining the scenario, presenting options, and asking for an opinion. I'm thinking they should have the authority to make SOME decision based on an approximated consensus rather than requiring a clear and official majority.
This is the topic we should probably discuss now while we wait for things to get started. We need someone to have final say in a "presidential" kind of way to always to try aim towards the consensus, but have some authority to break ties and/or assume a consensus before we technically have a majority if necesssary. The problem we'll run into is not all team members will be active all the time. We may eventually have a roster of 15 players but only 7-9 consistently contributing in the forum in a few months. This might come up on T0 - we may find some amazingly good spot to the north. We may need our turn player to be able to look at 6 opinions and say "it's 5-1, so we're going with the 5" rather than say "well we need 8 for a majority" and we end up pausing and holding the turn while we wait for people to show up and vote. So should we try to quanitify levels of decisions? There's different types. Let me take a stab at it, something like:
A) Major long-term decisions. Example: What tech path for next 25 turns? This should be a team-wide decision. We should be discussing this stuff ahead of time, and we literally have days to discuss this, so this should require more of a consensus, with maybe only one person as a "tie-breaker" and nothing else. Official votes may be worthwhile for these.
B) Short-term decisions with impact. Example: Axe harassment mentioned above. This should be treated very similarly to A, except we are on an accelerated time-table. Decision maker should seek opinions and do his best to go with the consensus, but there is not necessarily time to hear from every member, so he may have to make some judgment calls.
C) Decisions with trivial to minor impact. Example: worker action needs to change due to surprise forest growth. I do think we should have a worker plan discussion thread and someone in charge of being primary planner of worker actions, but something may come up where the worker plan needs to change because a forest suddenly grows. We don't really need much of a vote here. A turn player could choose not to consult everyone on a minor adjustment here, right? I just don't want to see a thread poll for something like this
.Any suggestions for how to organize this kind of thing? Seven/Mack, did you guys have something in mind when you talked about being the captain here? I would assume the default is that you guys take charge of a lot of this stuff, but we haven't actually discussed it yet so it's best to at least get on the same page about this.
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I also want to talk about forum organization some. I think we're going to want to err on the side of threads with specific purposes rather than a couple giant threads where things get missed. Based on past demogames I've seen, we may want something like this:
-Reported turns: Turn player/reporter dumps relevant screenshots from each turn in a somewhat uniform manner. No discussion in this thread and only the reporter should be posting - that way there's a nice central place for everyone to consult rather than digging through 20 pages of posts to find that barbarian screenshot from 15 turns ago.
-Turn Discussion: General discussion on reported turns. Good place for quick reactions and informal votes on little things that come up. A misc thread of sorts. Maybe a good place to debate the merits of galley vs worker next in a given city.
-Diplomacy thread: We'll want a central place for correspondence with other teams to be documented. If it gets unwieldy and huge, we may want a thread for each team, but that may not be necessary.
-Worker micro: A thread dedicated to making our worker plans. I think we'll want a primary planner and this can be a place for that person to get input.
-C&D thread: I think we have a C&D whiz or two. Cyneheard, still interested?
-Metagaming: General place for metagame discussion. Stuff like cracking the map, predicting opponent wonder plans, analyzing likelihoods, etc. This will probably be a bit more busy thread early in the game and less active as the game progresses.
Any thoughts? I do wonder if some of this is redundant or some categories may be too broad, but I figured again, now is a good time to discuss. What we don't want is a new player to join in 4 months and to just see 3 enormous threads and be completely overwhelmed and have no idea where to start.
