Nuclear Spoils (and more!)

[pacmule8]

Sounds great! Will have to try!

[conquerhero]

I sending this regarding nuclear: nuclear is fun! great to knock off an opponents armies! however, there is 1 drawback: since no new armies are received, once you get behind in a game, you can't catch up. consider having nuclear and giving armies at a flat rate also. thanks for your consideration!

[DJ Teflon]

Nuking yourself is so stupid!!

Can we not at least have the option to not nuke ourselves? I'm sure it wouldn't take much coding?

Even a war monger as stupid as George Dubya wouldn't nuke his own troops!

[natty dread]

But you have the option not to nuke yourself.

a) be smart enough not to leave your troops to a territory you are going to nuke

or if (a) proves impossible,

b) don't play nuclear games.

[DJPatrick]

Question for the masses...was recently in an escalating terminator nuke game...I had one territory left but could cash...I owned the territory so I wld have nuked myself...given that you can nuke your own territories, does this version of CC allow you to nuke yourself out of existence and if so, do you get points, or at least no point loss, for taking yourself...
I know I should have just done it to find out these answers but hey, I'm not emo enough to take that step yet...lol!!!

[nippersean]

DJ look a page further up the thread, somebody did this. Looks like you get no pts and kill goes down to neutral player Game 6246450 not sure if winner of the game got them tho - it's terminator i assume

[DJPatrick]

6246450...sorry don't know how to make this active...looks like you lose no points by eliminating self...
there are other precedents which may be set with this one; it hasn't finished yet...but anyone playing a lot of NUKE games should keep an eye on it...
thanx nippersean

[2dimes]

Better names for that option would be. Freindly fire spoils, Suicide spoils, Rebellion spoils, Repeating cards spoils...

[joriki]

I may have missed the response, but I mentioned earlier that the game stats now tell more information than the log in fog/nuc games in the territory colum. you can't tell who lost terrs by a cash in nuc games by the log, but it is taken into account in the statistics.

Came to the thread to say this. Is anything being done about it?

I was also going to say the same thing. The information gap only lasts until the player's next turn, since then the log tells you the territory count, but still, it might be valuable.

On the other hand:

When statistics were introduced, they were designed to only contain information that could be deduced from the log, in order not to change any of the existing game types. But nuclear spoils didn't exist then. So the requirement that the statistics don't contain any extra information isn't as important in this case -- the statistics don't "change" how the game with nuclear spoils works; there was a choice what the statistics would contain when the nuclear spoils were introduced, and it wasn't constrained by backward compatibility. Given what the log says when you nuke, there were basically three options for the statistics:

a) always display the territory count (the current behaviour)
b) never display the territory count in fog+nuke games
c) display the territory count in fog+nuke games whenever it can be easily deduced from the log

Both options b) and c) have disadvantages -- b) is a bit of an overkill, and c) would involve more programming and would lead to the territory count column being an ever-changing mixture of numbers and question marks. Another solution would have been to put more information in the log. The straightforward way of doing this, saying for each card whose region it nuked, like for a bombardment, would actually have disclosed even more information; to disclose only the information that's currently being disclosed in the statistics, the log would have to say something like ", annihilating A's troops in two regions and B's troops in one region", which again would involve more programming and would seem a bit artificial -- tayloring the log to correspond to the statistics rather than putting what one would naturally put there.

So all options had some disadvantage, and it might be argued that violating the principle that the statistics shouldn't disclose more than the log (the main reason for which had been not to change existing game types) was the least of them.

I'd be interested to know what others think about this. If you want something "done about it", please specify what exactly should be done. The only option that wouldn't change the game now (in the same sense in which introduction of the statistics didn't change the game at the time) would be the one putting something like ", annihilating A's troops in two regions and B's troops in one region" into the log -- every other option (in particular every option that would change the statistics so they don't reveal more than the log) would now, somewhat ironically, violate the principle underlying the principle "statistics shouldn't go beyond the log" -- namely, "the game shouldn't change"

[j35t3r.us]

DJ look a page further up the thread, somebody did this. Looks like you get no pts and kill goes down to neutral player Game 6246450 not sure if winner of the game got them tho - it's terminator i assume

Hey that's my game, hahahaha!

I have a World Famous game!!! I'm a Celebrity!

[stahrgazer]

Has it yet been observed what possibilities are now present in assassins? has there yet been a game where two people's last territories are nuked simultaneously?

I understand the answer to be "Yes," though I don't know which game. The card that had been in the hand longest when turned in gets killed first; whoever owned that terr got killed first so whoever was left for the split-second, wins.

[stahrgazer]

So all options had some disadvantage, and it might be argued that violating the principle that the statistics shouldn't disclose more than the log (the main reason for which had been not to change existing game types) was the least of them.

I'd be interested to know what others think about this.

Since everyone gets stats now, it's fair. Consider the disadvantage of cashing a non-nuke owned terr in fog; the log enables any player to know a terr got the +2 owned bonus; the point of fog was to keep things invisible, so the log violated the terms of fog. Similarly, now the new stats are violating the terms of the log in nuke games. In both cases, everyone has the opportunity to check, so everyone has the same advantages or disadvantages. Whereas, with the analyzers found with bob, only those with the special explorer engine and add-ons can use the monkeywrenches; those that can only run winex are at a decided disadvantage, tho less of a disadvantage with the stats.

That said, and even tho this part's off-topic, I really do dislike the stats layout; I wish everything were below the map or beside the map, not some below and some above.

But back to the topic: no change needed. Just awareness.

[Magiw]

Thanks for moving the card and game info back below the map!