Pawn Cap?

[Rob Lang]

One way to stop a runaway win is to cap the number of pawns to 5 or 6. As the game puts in around 3 pawns per player, this means that the spread of power will be more even.

[stalflare]

Mmmm could be a nice improvement, it would stabilize the game in a good way, but in that case I would remove the "diminishing return" (3 pawns give 100% resource income, 4 give less and so on) that we had talked about in a different post...

[Junior Geek]

Does it no remove one of the aspects of the game though? The aim is to get as many as possible, if you get to the maximum then there will be almost certainly someone else in the same situation, which is less likely when there is no limit. Alternatively, have a limit but make it higher. Bearing in mind there are roughly 40 pawns in the game at any one time (subject to change with number of players obviously) why not have the limit as 10, so there's a 25% limit, bit like the monopoly limit in business terms...

[babychaos]

I can't see this achieving much. You'll end up with <i>x</i> players sitting on the pawn cap, and a small number of players on a low number, with no option but to wait on more pawns being added, and then trying to bid, while the top-ranked players will just kill ones added, or horde funds

You could also end up with all sorts of weird situations where people could bid on a pawn, but not actually own it.

You may as well give everyone 6 pawns, and don't add any more to the game...a last-man-standing sort of situation.

[Junior Geek]

I think it would be fairly easy to prevent someone bidding on new pawns if they were already at the limit... and then if you've bid on multiple and one of them carries you up to the limit then any further auctions would go to the previous bidder...

I think the trick would be to find the right amount for this limit, but it would be useful to include to level the field a little (I would maintain my idea for 10 as it takes some effort to get there, but it is achievable)...however the use of pawn batches also hampers the ability to buy all of the pawns, as you would almost certainly not have the resource available to commit to multiple pawns in one batch, so maybe you've solved the problem with an alternative solution

[babychaos]

We've already covered the ground that "going to previous bidder" is a bad idea. You cannot be sure that the previous bidder has the resources, or even wants the pawn any more (they may well have bid on aother one instead). The best you could realistically do is null and void the auction, and start again, however that favours the player who failed to get the pawn, as;

1) They are gaining resources from the ones they _did_ win
2) They can just kill the pawn rather than let someone else have it

I honestly think that diminishing returns on pawn volumes will have a far better impact that an arbitary cap, and the issues it brings with it...

[Rob Lang]

Yep. I'm with babyc. Diminishing returns is going in, Pawn Cap is not required.