Hi,
I've been playing Warzone for a few months now with a small group of friends (5-7 players), as it's the best way for us to scratch that itch to play games together now that a few of us are looking after babies or have moved away. We've played about a dozen games, and I'm starting to notice a repeating pattern of a type of king making.
What usually happens is that the second-place player will form an alliance with the first-place player, foregoing their own chance of winning, and together they will slowly eliminate the remaining players. In this arrangement, the second-place player has no chance of overpowering the leading player and winning themselves, and for the remaining players outside of the alliance, there quickly comes a tipping point where they cease to have any real agency over the outcome of the game. It's not very fun using the few resources you have left to pointlessly defend all your borders when you can see that the two leading players are sharing large, undefended borders with each other.
From a game theory point of view, if the second-place player were committed to winning, their best chance would be to (temporarily) team up with the other players so that together they have enough resources to prevent the first player from winning. What I suspect is happening is that the second-place player is thinking: there's no guarantee that I'll win in that plan, but if I align with the winning player, I can continue to have fun playing the game and eliminating other players until the end. A guaranteed second place is more fun than a chance of winning with the chance of being eliminated early.
Now, obviously alliances and diplomacy are very much part of the game, it’s impossible to eliminate them, and I wouldn't want to. What I’m looking for are ways to encourage players to try different tactics and strategies, and to reduce the impact of an agreement between two players from having the largest impact on the game’s outcome.
We just played our first game with commerce enabled, and I think it's something we'll keep using, as it adds another layer of strategy to the game. I just bought premium for the ability to use mods, and for our next game, I intend to enable the Gift Gold/Armies mods. I'm hoping this will encourage the leading players to use the smaller players for proxy wars instead of just eliminating them.
What I’m wondering is if anyone has any ideas for combinations of rules and/or mods that help achieve one or more of the following:
- Discourage the leading players from aligning with each other
- Encourage the leading players to attack each other instead of smaller players
- Speed up or avoid the mid-to-late game where the outcome is largely decided
- Give smaller players ways to still have agency over the game’s outcome
A few ideas I’ve had myself are:
- Turn fog all the way up + "Highest Income Disadvantage," so that all players know who to focus their attack on, and it’s difficult for leading players to specifically target others.
- "Extended Winning Conditions Mod" — grants victory once a single player holds more than 50% of the territories/bonuses, eliminating the boring late game where the outcome is largely already determined.
- A "Buy Cards" mod that makes card cost proportional to the number of territories held and restricts more spicy cards (e.g., Bomb) from the leading players.
