Changes to Convincing Players into a Family

This game was designed around the idea of convincing other players into your family. We still believe that this is a sound foundation to the game, but we have some proposals that we feel make the game much better.


1. Game Over when 51% of the Players In the Same Family

We have noticed that the game seems exciting as families are starting to form and everyone is frantically trying to help their family get on top. But as one family becomes dominate, we have seen that play seems to drop off. People seem to realize the result of the game and feel that there is really nothing left to do. We would like to keep everyone excited until the very end of the game.

We believe that ending the game at 51% allows for 2-3 families to feel that they have a chance to win the game right up until the game ends. This means that there is lots of strategy all the way to the end of the game, and provides a feeling that "if I just did this different, we could have won". This will spur excitement to join up with people from the last game to win the next game.

Mechanics:
This pretty straight forward. We will be adding checks to stop the game as soon as a family reaches 51%. We will freeze the game in that position, and inform all the players that the game is over. No more challenges will be resolved and no more money or troops will be given. The players will not be able to make any more moves, but will be able to view the final state of the game.


2. Don't Lose Business Level when Convinced

Currently, if you are convinced into a family, you will lose one level of your highest business. We have found that this is a very large penalty, and greatly discourages people from joining up into families. We will be removing this, but we will still keep the benefit of gaining a business level when you convince a player into your family. Players can still lose levels to their businesses through sabotage.


3. Underdog Respect Bonus

Everyone has experienced bad luck early in a game, and in some games that means that you are always behind and might never be able to catch up. We are proposing an ability to overcome this disadvantage, and to provide a way for late joiners to feel they still have a shot. We are proposing adding an Underdog Respect Bonus. This will not effect the mechanics of a challenge, but allow the Underdog to receive larger amount of respect for out witting a better player with more respect.

Mechanics:
All players will be able to up to 100 points of respect per challenge. This will be constant throughout the entire game. We will then take the difference between the 2 players respect and use that value to determine the Underdog Bonus. The bonus will at a max allow the player to make up 25% of the difference. If the difference is less then 400 respect points, there will be no Underdog Bonus.