OOC: Out Of Character
Turn #6
Every game of Alamaze has its own twists and turns. Things happen, and players have their own individual reasons for why they do the things that they do. Tonight, in between a variety of different tasks that I hope to finish (someday, even if not tonight), I find myself browsing my kingdom's turn results for Turn #6 in Game #5736.
The village of Neptune, located at area NS, has now returned to the Demon Princes' fold. Of course, how long I retain control of it, this time, remains to be seen.
If Pine Needle, player of the Fairy Folk in this game of Alamaze, is inclined to share with me, why would you risk a war against your kingdom's Southern neighbor, at the same time that you are faced off against DuPont and his Cimmerians in the North?
I grasp that numerous different experienced veterans of many Alamaze wars in the past like to gain total control of their home regions. I get that. I understand it. But not every Alamaze player, myself being one of them, subscribes to the philosophy of, if another kingdom starts the game with a population center in one's "home region" (the region where most of a given kingdom's assets are located, when the game begins), then the "expectation" is that it is simply OK to just go ahead and root that other fellow out.
It really didn't even cross my mind, when I sent my kingdom's turn orders in for this turn (Turn #6), that it was going to be a turn where our kingdoms received their current "score" for the game.
Out of ten kingdoms still being actively played in this particular game of Alamaze, it comes as no surprise to me that my kingdom is way down near the bottom of the pile. I really don't care about the numbers, and I definitely don't care for numerical scores in wargames. But the Fairy Folk score of 308 being lower than my Demon Princes' score of 550, it really pokes at my brain noodle. Is it typical for the Fairy Folk kingdom to have such a low score on Turn #6 of most games of Alamaze that they are being played in? Hell, I don't even know what is an "average" score for any kingdom that I am playing in any of my games of Alamaze.
DuPont, by comparison, he always has his eye on the scoring system. Hey, he wants to win, right? So, he always starts blasting out a very high score, in any game that he's in, I have no doubt. I really do need to read up on the Fairy Folk kingdom. I don't know that much about it, but I do like the concept of having a fairy kingdom available for Alamaze players to choose from.
I'm sure that over the span of the next six turns, there will be many other different twists and turns that will take place. Hell, my kingdom could potentially be eliminated in the next six turns.
In games of Hyborian War that I have played over the years, I tend to pay as much attention to the players that I am playing with in a game of Hyborian War as I do to the kingdoms that they are playing. I'm not trying to pry away any "state secrets," but there's probably no quicker way to ignite a war with a kingdom that I am playing in a game of Alamaze, than to just come barreling out the gate, and boot me out of a lone population center that lies far away from any real way for me to assist its plight. I don't subscribe to what I view to be a sense of royal entitlement (or whatever it should be called) on the part of others to population centers that the game places under my control at game start.
Some of you guys have played a wide variety of different kingdoms, before, or maybe even all kingdoms, as well as having perhaps played the same kingdom, time and time and time, again. For me, this is the third time that I have signed up to play the kingdom of the Demon Princes. While I don't tend to go hog wild on role playing kingdoms that I preside over, I do have a very hard time coming to grips with actual Demon Princes considering early snatching of their kingdom's population centers to not be a big deal.
Dispatching a Demon Prince character to "recover" this village of Neptune wasn't a particularly complicated undertaking. But prior to that village being seized through the wielding of direct political influence, I really hadn't even decided upon what kingdom or kingdoms out there that the Demon princes would be going to war with. Now, I'm not mad at Pine Needle for "volunteering" to go to war with the Demon Princes kingdom, but I would like to better understand where individual players come from in their thinking, on making decisions of this nature.
In browsing my turn results for Turn #6, even though I've searched for population centers in all of my starting region of The Untamed Lands, and even though I seem to now control every population center in this region that I can see, I noticed that while I have gained control of this region, I do not have tight control of it. This, of course, indicates to me that there's one or more additional population centers in this region that are hidden -
and which will have to be revealed through other means.
Which indicates to me that, perhaps there is a Lizard-controlled population center in my home region after all. Do kingdoms routinely begin the game with hidden population centers located in regions other than their starting home region(s)? I was thinking, correctly or incorrectly, that when your kingdom started the game with a hidden population center, that it would be in your home region.