Ok guys, I like all your posts.
About the heart issue, yes it is preventing NMRs & CDs obviousely. But, as I said, Mods are already working on the main causes, although new ideas are welcome, especially if we discover a new cause nobody's working on.
What I'd like to do, if everyone agrees, it's discover causes on why people don't take over CD quickly. This is useful, because I believe that CDs will never be completely eliminated. Someone should work on it, why don't we?
So let's find the causes, first. Solutions like the ones Leif & Devo proposed might be very useful later, when we'll have clear enough the causes of the issue we're working on.
Also working on it, might lead us to find something useful for the different problems, same way Schönbein discovered guncotton while working on a minor issue. Who knows.
Well, now I try a first recap (correct me if you don't like it):
1. taking over a CD is very rarely a good buy (most of positions suck for several reasons).
1.1 high profile CD's are too expensive
1.2 if buy in is too high, chances of reward are often slim
1.3 many of the countries on the open list are either screwed or perceived to be in an untenable position
2. Even if you take over a good-looking position, you might find yourself in a bad diplomatic situation (if I fully understood Shep's good point: "Sometimes people don't deal as well with the new guy or won't call off their attacks if they were taking over the undefended centers"). We could call this 2nd section: "Even good-looking positions are risky because of unknown diplomacy situation"
Ok, this looks a good start.
BTW, Nobody said anything about the timing of TOs.
Once, in a game I was playing, a player NMRed. Lucky him, I thought, nobody seriousely attacked him. But he NMRed again and CDed. Again, only some usupported attack that didn't dislodge anything, while other players were even going in the opposite direction. It was a 36h/phase gunboat on a large map. You could read that position like:
- many neighbours going far away from me ("allies" or easy to attack)
- rest of neighbours just keeping me under control (like NAPs or at least I'm not the main enemy for them)
- average position or slighly better than average
- it was the 3rd or 4th year, so most of the game yet to play
- low buy in for playing with 10-11 units (something like 8 or 9
)
So I thought "that's a wonderful position! It will be Taken Over in 10 minutes!"
But nobody did it. (Well, nobody did it immediately. It was taken over 2 years later, the position was already screwed, the player who did it CDed as well: he joined the site, joined a couple of open games and then disappeared forever)
Any idea on why, in a site where several hundreds of active players are, nobody took over that wonderful gunboat position? Neither in the first 10 minutes (as expected) nor in the first 2 hours nor in the following 34 hrs? Items 1 and 2 can't explain this so even if we remove causes 1 & 2 we'll still have a problem.
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Why don't you usually take over CDed Countries? Why almost nobody does it? Why, even when they do it, the thing is almost never immediate?