Incentivizing aggressiveness!

If you look at the fundalmentals of war (any war), one part always has something the other part wants - or maybe neither have it, but both know of a limited supply, and therefore fight over it.

What you are describing is a situation of abundance. If everyone has enough space and access to whatever they need easily, there will be no need for agressiveness.

But let's say all the units in your game needs to have access to water, but there is only a small waterhole in the middle of the map. And it's obvious to everybody, that there is not enough water for all. So someone will die of thirst, and it's less likely to be the one who is the most willing to survive (agressive) - or at least that's what you'd think..

If we take your description of the 4 player game, where the less agressive player won, it would be the same as the 3 guys fighting over the water, while the 4th guy quietly started drinking the water, and in this case won (survived), while the others died.

This would not have happened if all four started fighting, so the obvious answer is not that hard to figure out.. Why did the quiet guy win? Because he had access to what he needed. Simple as that. If the game wanted to reward the most agressive player, this would have been accounted for. Maybe a simple rule saying something like "while any players are engaged in fighting, all non-fighting players loose X (ability, resource or something else).

Or maybe the game would just make sure that the winner of any fight, would be plenty rewarded to have advantage enough to win, unless anyone else starts fighting.

Maybe the winner of the first fight will get a great bonus of some sort, then the winner of the next fight a lilttle less of a bonus, the third even less etc. This is when it starts to become a sport - and in my opoinion that's the thing you should be aiming for. Everyone would need to "get in the game" to have a chance at winning. The ealier mentioned tactic, of waiting for everyone else to obliterate each other, simply wouldn't work in this case.

- when boiled down, these are strongly connected to each other.

(abundance) Many and easily accessible resources = low risk, high reward
(scarcity) Few and hardly accessible resources = high risk, low reward

Not that anything your are saying is wrong - not at all! It's just a layer on top of my point i guess.

What I think is the difference between how players will utilize this (use judgement to decide if fighting is doing them good or bad), is a matter of how clear it is to them what the (most likely) outcome of the fight will be.

In your example of the game Eclipse, where both the winner and the loser gets to produce resources from the planet in the same round, the outcome (reward/loss) is quite clear, so this is what causes the judgement from the players to engage in fighting. No matter the outcome, they are still rewarded with the resource they need, so why not just go for it? Although they are still faced with a potential loss, fighting is rewarded with access to resources, making it maybe medium risk, medium reward at worst. So it's not difficult for the player to decide to fight.

Depending on what you want in a game, fiddeling with this is bound to have the effect of more or less agressiveness from playes. It depends on what you want.

But back to the question of how to induce agressiveness early in a game, I don't think it's enough to make the risk of fighting less. I agree it could be a way of making more fighting take place overall, but not particularly in the beginning of the game. In this case, 3 players could still be fighting with each other, while the 4th player silently grabbed enough resources to be able to claim victory.

Therefore the risk/reward ratio needs to be off balance (or at least during the start of the game). If the first aggressor could claim enough resources to win the game, if noone else is fighting during the rest of the game, it becomes pretty clear to the non-agressive player, that he/she MUST fight to have a chance at winning.

Turtling (which is what the fourth player did) is only practical when the turtle can gain more by sitting, than the others can gain by fighting.

In the course of discussing "The Three Player Problem", in the book Tabletop Analog Game Design, download free from http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/content/tabletop-analog-game-design, I also discuss problems such as turtling and sandbagging.

In terms of the water hole analogy, if the players who are fighting can get some of the water as or before they fight, and the 4th player cannot gain access to the water without fighting, you have solved the problem. In other words, if players gain access to more resources than they lose by fighting, the turtle falls behind as he stays out of the fight. If players get none of the water until they've finished the fight, surely they'd be foolish to fight when one player can sit on the sidelines.

In the Vampire: The Eternal Struggle card game, they used the concept of "The Edge" to encourage agressive play. If you successfully attack your opponent, you take control of the Edge. If you still have the Edge at the start of your next turn, then you earn a reward. It's a not a big deal when the Edge changes has hands frequently, but if players start turtling, the one with the Edge will soon have enough power to tip the balance back in their favor.

Keep in mind, the players only needed one successful attack no matter how minor the damage to obtain the Edge.

As this applies to your game, maybe there could be some kind of similar system that rewards attacks on other players, but does not reward attacks on neutral territories.

Can you tell us what the goal of the game is? How do you win? Is it:

o The player who controls most territories (first to x number of territories or most after given time frame)?
o The last player standing who wins the game?
o Other?

If there is no defined goal, coming up with a solution to your problem is pretty much shooting in the dark.

Thanks.

How about this:

When fighting over a territory, in stead of just losing your units when fighting, you could add a mechanism so that winning players could take (wounded units?) prisoners after the fight is over. The winning player could then put the prisoners to work in the mine, thereby making the mine more effective, providing more of x resource pr. round.

This way, the more units someone has in a territory to protect it, the more an opponent could gain from taking it over.

I think this should be quite easy to balance, and would make the game a bit more agressive.

It would also make the most fought over mines the most valuable over time.

Here's an idea that springs from the ancient idea that war "turns your boys into men."

After a battle, any units remaining become "Veteran" units. These could be powered up in some way, probably not in terms of brute strength, but more strategically. This would benefit both players, but would more strongly benefit the winner, who of course would have ended the battle with a larger number of survivors. This system could be extended further (Recruits - Soldiers - Veterans - Special Forces), but that might be going overboard. Either way, when you "produce" units, however that's done in this hypothetical game, they always start out as the lowest rank, and have to be battle-tested to move up.

Just a quick thought: Perhaps some neutral territories can produce a limited number of higher level units from the get-go. Just another pseudo-resource you could have floating around in the game.

Another version of this that doesn't reuire as much tracking as what you propose, is to simply have a winning unit get a bounty on their head that would increase for every successfull battle the units has in a row. This way, in stead of an other player thinking "oh my, it's a veteran unit - I'll get my ass kicked", they would more likely think "If I beat this guy, I'll get a bonus!"

Then ask yourself which is more agressive. I'd say the bounty, but the upgrade to veteran etc. could also be implemented as well, since the player with the veteran units would also be more agressive, thinking "I've got a veteran - I'll beat his ass!".

So maybe both could work at the same time and potentially double the agressiveness? But could turn out to be very complicated to keep track off..

In addition to my recent post, I had some other thoughts:

When gaining "slaves" from another player, the winning player would simply keep these, and choose to deploy them or not - use them in the mine right away or keep them for later use - which would make sense, because maybe the fighting is not at a mine location.

You could even make a prison-location for each player. This would make for some interesting choices; Do you reinforce the prison because someone is approaching it, and you plan on using the prisoners right after you capture your next mine, or do you plan on getting enough prisoners out of the fight you are getting into, that you can afford to lose what you have in your prison?

And if you could do both (keep what you have in the prison and gain more prisoners), you would be able to put maybe close to double the amount of prisoners to work at the new mine.

- again, I think this would be quite easy to balance, as players would want to balance it themselves (if they can - ie. go for both keeping the prisoners in the prison, while also gain more prisoners when fighting, if it's possible of course).

in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3ed there is the Stance Meter for mesure the attitude... you can use something like that?
each turn without attacking the Stance Meter goes down and the player is less efficient to do the actions. if he attacks recovers efficiency

I think it's true that scarce resource is a good way to encourage aggression, but it is problematic in that it provides strong incentives for defense as well...if you already have the scarce resource you are encouraged to turtle. A good way to solve this problem is to produce a scarce resource arc over the course of the game, so players are encouraged to shift their aim at different resource sources as the game progresses.

We've talked a lot about creating incentives to aggression, but the other side of the coin is creating disincentives to defense. A depreciation of the territory's value over time held would be good, or the extreme measure of only losing troops on defense (like Smallworld).