Player Feedback requested - Edicts, propositions, and challenges.

[Mick]

Right, I think it's a subtle difference though between "your goal is to cause chaos" and "your goal is to deal with chaos but your actions will inevitably lead to chaos."

Like you have a rat infestation, so you get some snakes to eat all the rats, but now you have a snake infestation(!) so you...

[madcow]

I wasn't talking about in alancing things. I was meaning more expanding the sides, if you can expand while keeping things balanced you're good. The inherit imbalances in factions will make that difficult, not necessarily the player purposely doing it. Then again, the cataclysms themselves might force expansion to be able to deal with them as is.

[x4000]

I'm not sure if that example was meant to be positive or negative, but that's kind of what I have in mind, yeah.  My expression of the positive side would be "your goal is to deal with chaos but your actions all have positive and negative consequences when it comes to that chaos."  So the rats and snakes things would fit into that, so long as ALL actions didn't have a completely negative outcome.  Sometimes you just have to let loose the snakes, knowing you'll have to clean them up later.

I think that the more appropriate expression of negativity here would be "your goal is to deal with chaos but more chaos comes no matter what you do, and so you're just kind of bailing water out of a ship that is sinking no matter what you do."

[Mick]

Oh yeah, my example was definitely meant to be positive. I'm just saying, if the player is able to properly deal with chaos with the exact right touch (which should be very very hard to do), he should not be punished for that.

[x4000]

@madcow: Yeah, I get what you're saying.  I just think it's a matter of making sure that there are few enough vectors for chaos-increases that they can actually be evaluated without a postdoc in mathematics, heh.  Which seems to be the conclusion you're tentatively coming to, as well.