So imagine how much richer expressions of character could be if you had this whole other dimension of gameplay design to work with. That would be cohabitive.
4X games and engine-building games have a lot of that. For instance, in Terraforming Mars, your starting corporations will have different start bonuses that radically shape your strategy throughout the entire game. In a 4X game, you might have a faction with very cheap military production that will focus on zerg-rushing other players; and a faction with research bonuses that will focus more on long-term growth.
Even in a MostPointsWin system, these differences can make different factions with very different “personalities” in both gameplay and lore.
Actually, I feel like a lot of engine-building systems could go from MostPointsWin to cooperation by just adding some objectives. Eg you could make Terraforming Mars cooperative just by adding objectives like “Create at least X space projects”, “Reach oxygen level Y”, “Have at least Z trees on the planet” and having each player pick one. Which is basically what the video game Terraformers did (since it’s a single-player game, MostPointsWin can’t work).
Some other game designs elements:
One easy way to get players to cooperate is to give them a common loss condition. You mention having a Moloch player, which can be pretty cool (asymetric gameplay is always fun), but it can be environmental. Something like “everyone must donate at least X coals per turn to the communal furnace, else everyone freezes to death”, or the opposite, “every coal burned contributes to global warming, past a certain cap everybody loses”.
Like you say, binary win/lose conditions can be more compelling than “get as many points as possible”. (I think this is a major reason the MostPointsWin systems are so common.) You can easily get from one to the other by having eg “medals” where you get gold medal for getting 20 points, silver medal for getting 15 points, etc. Or with custom objectives, The Emperor’s gold medal is having 12 tiles, the silver medal is having 8 tiles, etc, while The Druid’s gold medal is preserving at least 8 trees, silver is 6 trees, etc.
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.
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.
4X games and engine-building games have a lot of that. For instance, in Terraforming Mars, your starting corporations will have different start bonuses that radically shape your strategy throughout the entire game. In a 4X game, you might have a faction with very cheap military production that will focus on zerg-rushing other players; and a faction with research bonuses that will focus more on long-term growth.
Even in a MostPointsWin system, these differences can make different factions with very different “personalities” in both gameplay and lore.
Actually, I feel like a lot of engine-building systems could go from MostPointsWin to cooperation by just adding some objectives. Eg you could make Terraforming Mars cooperative just by adding objectives like “Create at least X space projects”, “Reach oxygen level Y”, “Have at least Z trees on the planet” and having each player pick one. Which is basically what the video game Terraformers did (since it’s a single-player game, MostPointsWin can’t work).
Some other game designs elements:
One easy way to get players to cooperate is to give them a common loss condition. You mention having a Moloch player, which can be pretty cool (asymetric gameplay is always fun), but it can be environmental. Something like “everyone must donate at least X coals per turn to the communal furnace, else everyone freezes to death”, or the opposite, “every coal burned contributes to global warming, past a certain cap everybody loses”.
Like you say, binary win/lose conditions can be more compelling than “get as many points as possible”. (I think this is a major reason the MostPointsWin systems are so common.) You can easily get from one to the other by having eg “medals” where you get gold medal for getting 20 points, silver medal for getting 15 points, etc. Or with custom objectives, The Emperor’s gold medal is having 12 tiles, the silver medal is having 8 tiles, etc, while The Druid’s gold medal is preserving at least 8 trees, silver is 6 trees, etc.
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.
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.