The “every coal burned contributes to global warming, past a certain cap everybody loses” approach is not going to work in an otherwise competitive game. Instead, it will create a race to use up the coal budget as fast as possible so that your opponents can’t benefit from it.
This raises an interesting view. There’s no reason it should do that, but if you give it to an unprepared group of competitive boardgame players, that is how they would be have. It wont occur to them that they should start the game by creating a coal rationing tribunal with material enforcement mechanisms. Bad norms would breed bad norms. Probably, the player who broke the norms most often would tend to get ganged up on and lose, but it is hard, even, for experience, to overcome a bad social norm.
This raises an interesting view. There’s no reason it should do that, but if you give it to an unprepared group of competitive boardgame players, that is how they would be have.
There is a pretty simple reason: these games are zero-sum.
Players in engine-building games don’t optimize for “the best society” within the diegesis of the game, especially since these games almost never have any mechanics keeping track of things like population happiness.
Given that, there’s no incentive to create a coal rationing tribunal by default. If every player benefits equally from the coal, then no player benefits from the tribunal. (Unless the players agree that keeping the coal longer makes the game more fun, or some players have a long term strategy that relies on coal and want to defend it, or something like that.)
Conditions where a collective loss is no worse than an individual loss. A faction who’s on the way to losing will be perfectly willing to risk coal extinction, and may even threaten to cross the threshold deliberately to extort other players.
Related, I noticed Civ VI also really missed the mark with that mechanic. I found that a great strategy, having a modest lead on tech, was to lean into coal power, which has the best bonuses, get your seawalls built to stop your coastal cities from flooding, and flood everyone else with sea-level rise. Only one player wins, so anything to sabotage others in the endgame will be very tempting.
Rise of Nations had an “Armageddon counter” on the use of nuclear weapons, which mostly resulted in exactly the behavior you mentioned—get ’em first and employ them liberally right up to the cap.
Fundamentally both games are missing any provision for complex, especially multilateral agreements, nor is there any way to get the AI on the same page.
The “every coal burned contributes to global warming, past a certain cap everybody loses” approach is not going to work in an otherwise competitive game. Instead, it will create a race to use up the coal budget as fast as possible so that your opponents can’t benefit from it.
Citation: Twilight Struggle
This raises an interesting view. There’s no reason it should do that, but if you give it to an unprepared group of competitive boardgame players, that is how they would be have. It wont occur to them that they should start the game by creating a coal rationing tribunal with material enforcement mechanisms. Bad norms would breed bad norms. Probably, the player who broke the norms most often would tend to get ganged up on and lose, but it is hard, even, for experience, to overcome a bad social norm.
There is a pretty simple reason: these games are zero-sum.
Players in engine-building games don’t optimize for “the best society” within the diegesis of the game, especially since these games almost never have any mechanics keeping track of things like population happiness.
Given that, there’s no incentive to create a coal rationing tribunal by default. If every player benefits equally from the coal, then no player benefits from the tribunal. (Unless the players agree that keeping the coal longer makes the game more fun, or some players have a long term strategy that relies on coal and want to defend it, or something like that.)
Conditions where a collective loss is no worse than an individual loss. A faction who’s on the way to losing will be perfectly willing to risk coal extinction, and may even threaten to cross the threshold deliberately to extort other players.
Related, I noticed Civ VI also really missed the mark with that mechanic. I found that a great strategy, having a modest lead on tech, was to lean into coal power, which has the best bonuses, get your seawalls built to stop your coastal cities from flooding, and flood everyone else with sea-level rise. Only one player wins, so anything to sabotage others in the endgame will be very tempting.
Rise of Nations had an “Armageddon counter” on the use of nuclear weapons, which mostly resulted in exactly the behavior you mentioned—get ’em first and employ them liberally right up to the cap.
Fundamentally both games are missing any provision for complex, especially multilateral agreements, nor is there any way to get the AI on the same page.
I meant “get players to cooperate within a cooperative-game-with-prisoners-dilemmas”, yes.