Collusion: elections

I mentioned two minorly worrisome things in the last post, and the second of those is voting for baronial control.  

Now I should be worried about this in general because of the potential for a kingmaker effect.  Say that it's the final baronial election of the game, players B and D are candidates, and the barony is worth 5 VP.  To whom are you, player A, going to gift with your votes, and 5 VP?  In a game with 1 VP victory margins this may seem like a swingy decision.

I'm not actually worried about the elections themselves, for a few reasons.  First, because players have the ability to cut deals.  If your votes will give someone the barony, you can try to get something in return, and there are many kinds of deals to strike.  Second, because at least part of your scoring potential must remain secret and so no one exactly knows how well everyone else is doing unless they're paying really close attention and making several good inferences.  Most players will find the outcome of this decision uncertain.  Third, because you know from the beginning of the game the order in which baronial actions are going to take place for the whole game, and have ample opportunity to shape the board state in such a way that that final election doesn't "swing" the game at all.  You play a role in deciding, not just who gets the points, but how many points the barony is worth in the first place.

My concern is actually with the configurational aspect of the elections.  Each player gets votes from the factions they influence that are present in the barony.  Players cast votes in clockwise order, and the candidate who receives the most votes gets the barony.  If there's a tie, the player who received the most votes earlier gets the barony.  This introduces a turn order effect that has a weird consequence.  Let's say that B and D are candidates, and voters have the following votes to cast:  A-3, B-0, C-2, D-1, E-0.  A will vote first.  

Now this means, essentially, that only A's votes matter.  If A votes for B, B will have gotten to 3 votes first, and D can't exceed 3 votes, so it's a done deal.  If A votes for D, again, it's a done deal.  This means that C's votes don't really matter.

My only thought for a change is that if there's a tie, instead of resolving in order, resolve based on the votes of the players who are not candidates.  But that doesn't change things in this case.

I think it just needs more study at this point.  Getting influence is supposed to mean having power in elections, either to vote yourself in or sell your votes to an opponent, but if it's often the case that only one person's votes matter, then that's less fun for the other players.

On the other hand, getting lots of votes consistently usually means that you've gained influence over a bunch of factions, or a bunch of buildings for factions you influence have been built.  Thus if other players don't want you to get more votes than they, they should stop supporting your influence actions.  

This is one of the fun subtleties I've been discovering about the game, actually.  Compared to board-altering actions like "switch barony" or "build a faction", which interact directly with schemes, the influence action seems indirect and harmless by comparison, and sometimes you'll support an influence action for that reason alone.  But do that often enough and one player can become very powerful indeed come election time, and can sway every election.

It's interesting to watch what that power over elections looks like in practice.  During setup, each player is given one barony.  Although the baronies grow and shrink, usually maintaining parity seems like a wise course: giving someone a second barony seems to make them very powerful, unless you're somehow sure that one of their valuable goals is definitely going to go bust.  Thus the elections aren't always about big swings of power; rather, they're often about, how much are you going to pay me so that I keep you in power and maintain parity?  It's as much about what you can get out of the current baron as anything else.

This is why one of my other concerns about elections may be allayed.  Necessarily, an election needs two candidates to be interesting, but additional candidates only come through successful use of the estate action.  I've biased that action in a few ways to make estates easier to add.  And the aforementioned considerations make it advantageous to support other players' estate actions: if you can get a second candidate in a barony you don't care about, that just means that one more person to potentially bribe you for your votes.  But even if there's only one candidate, there's still an incentive for that person to cut some deals, to help secure his/her position in later elections.  For example, maybe I'll take one of your heirs as a courtier in the baronial court, because if you later depose me, that heir leaves the board, costing us both 1 VP.  Thus, my accepting your heir early biases you slightly toward wanting to support me later.  And this is important because the ability for territories to change ownership from one barony to another sometimes means that candidates pop up 'unexpectedly' in different baronies as the game unfolds.

I think there are all sorts of little considerations and heuristics like this that come into play in the game, but because it's so interactive the ones you rely on should change every game.  At least I hope that's the case.