Proposal for a new piece - burrower to prevent stalemates

[bmike]

I haven't seen this yet, but can see a situation where each party has one attacking piece and can cover the other's spawn point. I could see this where one party has a medic and the other doesn't choose to get off the spawn and attack.

Would it make sense to add a burrower piece that can drill up and spawn even when the point is blocked? I would imagine a wit value of 11 or something higher so that it doesn't needlessly weaken the need to defend your spawn position well. (but gives incentive for the opponent to go on the offensive before risking destruction from below.)

Alternatively, I suppose if all spawn points are covered - a tie breaker of wits could be used assuming that also isn't a tie at the point where the system goes to break this potential deadlock but I like the idea of the person with enough wits could somehow gain the advantage to break any deadlocks. Perhaps a cost of 25 wits could summon a thunderbolt out of the blue that can strike the opponent's house (or any piece fro that matter) for 1 damage would also work to not disrupt normal game strategy, but penalize an inactive playing style and circumvent a situation where no other avenue for attack exists. This could be added as an easter egg should someone ever get to the point where they had that many points in the bank just to see if this ever happens.

I suppose the developer could just poll the database and see any games with >XX wits to see why and how this happens in practice before making any change.

[Harti]

Any of your ideas are strongly affected by Player 1 going first. If we assume roughly equal levels of skill both spawn points will be blocked with roughly the same amount of wit left. Hence, P1 will be the one to spawn the burrower or lightning first and win the game.

The tiebreaker sounds quite fair but then again, you'd expect P1 to have a little more wit because they could have abused FTA in the early stages of the game, leaving them with wit/unit advantage and/or forcing P2 to make pragmatical but kamikaze buys.

[bmike]

(07-13-2012 04:43 AM)Harti Wrote:  Any of your ideas are strongly affected by Player 1 going first.

I wondered if the system lets you go first in half the games you initiate or if it's random so that you could get a streak of games where you go second if others are filling the pipe with requests before you ask for a game.

Either way - each board has quite a few pieces, so these stalemates can't happen at the beginning so I'm leaning towards being fine leaving the advantage to the one with enough wits in the bank to reach a threshold that's high enough.

[Harti]

Which is why I emphasized to assume equal skill levels. =P

But you're basically right, this usually won't happen. It's about as unlikely as it's unlikely to have a such a draw situation.