by Steve496
davypi wrote:
I'm honestly trying to understand why you think such negotiations don't belong in the game. To start, in any game, any interplayer negation is allowed unless the rules specifically prohibit. Regarding TM/Gaia specifically, our group is often negotiating during setup. The start player doesn't exactly know where to put the first dwelling, so there is often talk of like, "I will put my first hut here if you put a hut there." Power leech is such a critical part of winning that securing neighbors on the first round is essential. I have no sympathy for players who do not want to co-operate towards this and then end up losing. I suppose I can see the difficulty of these kinds of negotiations on snellman, but IRL it doesn't take that long to establish these kinds of deals. (We've even had games of "I will take race A and let you have race B as long as you leave this income time for me.")
I have friends that assert that "all multiplayer games are to some extent Diplomacy. And, to some extent, they're right - almost any game you play with multiple players can turn into a negotiation over who is going to do what to help who.
But sometimes, people don't want to play Diplomacy - they want to play, for instance, Terra Mystica. And so playing it as a game focusing on one's ability to make the right strategic decisions as opposed to one's ability to persuade opponents to do the things you want them to is not an unreasonable choice.
In the specific case of your example: yes, the first player is at a bit of a disadvantage because they have to place their first D without information about where other Ds will be. If you want to perform negotiations to mitigate that fact, you are of course welcome to do so. But in a competitive setting the 1st player is already at an advantage, so if you remove one of the few disadvantages that afflicts them, that's bad for game balance, at least from a "strategy game" perspective.