From: njs@cbnewsh.cb.att.com (nicholas.j.sauer)
Subject: Re: More Cosmic review (Very Long!!)
Organization: AT&T
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 13:52:37 GMT

In article <MemAzAC00VpCADX1Jj@andrew.cmu.edu>, "Joseph E. Beck" <jb8n+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
> 
>Self-balancing?  Yeah, Prophet gets 4 bases very quickly and then
>everyone else has to keep throwing challenges to stop him from
>winning.  Sounds like loads of fun.
>
>and someone else writes:
>>        Yes, but long term average isn't useful in predicting performance.
>>She could still easily miss three in a row at the start, and then she's
>>in a horrible position. 
>
>Yes, you could also draw 7 challenge cards all less than an 8 at start,
>and never draw anything better the whole game.  I think it's more
>realistic to look at what tends to happen.
>
>By my estimation of 2/3 chance of guessing correctly, there is a 1 in
>27 chance of being hosed.  That's about 4% of being hosed, if you
>consider this something that can happen easily please let me know.  
>The chance of other things going wrong is much higher.
>It's much more likely he'll have 2 bases after 3 challenges have been
>taken.  3 bases out of 5 challenges is being conservative. 

My response to this is that your group (and Julian's) are playing far too
predictably.  In one of our games I have seen the Prophet guess wrong for
five challenges before he finally predicted one correctly and, I believe
that was the only correct guess that he made for the entire game (I 
recall the Prophet having the most tokens in the Wrap/Praw fairly constantly
that game).  Now, granted Andy (who was playing the Prophet) may not be the
best guesser but, there were a number of challenges were people played 
Compromises semi-randomly enough to hose even the best Prophet player.  Hell,
I have been known to play Compromises when I have four tokens and eight ally 
tokens just because I happen to feel like raping my opponent's hand.

I think the overall problem here is that people don't adapt quickly enough
to each game of CE.  The one difference CE has from most other games is a
dynamic versus static strategy.  More specifically, a game like Chess (not
to hammer chess, it's just a convienient example) has a static strategy to
it.  Every game of chess is set up the same way with the pieces starting in
the exact same positions and all the pieces having known movement and 
capture rules.  CE, on the other hand, has every game set up with a completely
different set of alien powers which effect the various rules in the game.  
The net result of this is a strategy that worked great in one game might prove
to be disasterously bad in the next game.  Thus, CE forces you to adapt rather
than fall back on old previously learned strategies.  This is the essence (to
my mind) of CE and is why I like the game so much.

To discuss the above idea in more concrete terms, almost every alien power in
CE has a way to be hindered (the Eon people call it learning how to beat the
powers, I call it debugging the powers).  For example, Prophet can be debugged
pretty easily by just throwing an occaisional challenge for no real good 
reason.  If enough people do this his power gets hosed.  Connoisseur, which
was considered extremely powerful in our group, can easily be debugged by
not allowing him to ally where he has a chance to get rewards.  Ironically
enough, once we figured this out and began doing it the Connoisseur became
a less popular power to play and became an "average" power like the rest.
Even Virus, which is one of the tougher powers to halt, has a weakness.  
His power is token centered so keep him as token poor as possible.  Plague
him and never, ever play a Mobius Tubes if he has tokens in the Warp.  If 
he has only one token per base and gets no allies he has no power.  Like
I said, he is tough to debug but, even he can be hindered if you know how.

I guess the other key to the game is that you have to be a good poker player.
Keeping table talk to a minimum helps but, lying and bluffing are absolutely
necessary.  For example, I am in the habit, whenever I draw cards from the
deck of saying "great, more garbage for my hand" in my best annoyed voice
as I am pulling the Attack 40 and a kicker out of the deck.  Likewise, I
will tend to say things like "you're all fucked now" and laughing as I pull
four Compromises from the deck.  I guess I'll have to start mixing this up
now as enough people I play CE with read the net (and I don't believe they
had figured out I was doing this yet).  The point is to use facial expression
and subjective statements to your advantage.  If you don't do this each of
your challenges will be way too predictable and powers like the Prophet will
walk away with the game.

Anyway, I guess I've rambled on long enough here.

Nick Sauer
 




Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA