Two long-term problems

David desJardins (
Wed, 28 Sep 94 22:04:08 EDT

Greg Lindahl <> writes:
> At one noble per turn, if it's oath-1, then you can buy NP's 16 times
> faster than you get them naturally. Even if you could only swear once
> per game-year, that's twice as many NP's as you earn naturally.

Actually, you can only SWEAR once per turn, but you can receive any
number of nobles per turn via this route if you can persuade several
players to sell them to you.

I agree, SWEAR is bad. I see situations in which it would be good, but
the limitations on NPs are too fundamental to allow loopholes.

> Yes, although it's still possible to attempt to buy nobles by having
> the seller form a contract noble, and have the buyer try to bribe him.
> Since the chance of the noble becoming unsworn is pretty small, and
> you can capture them to prevent them from escaping, this works
> uncomfortably well at the moment, surverting the design purpose of
> NPs.

Other methods work even better. This is the biggest argument against
eliminating SWEAR; that you can't keep people from accomplishing similar
things by other means. At least it wouldn't work for oath nobles,

Maybe a partial solution would be that if you SWEAR an oath noble, the
oath is to the previous owner and is lost, so the noble has a new
allegiance but only has contract or fear loyalty. Alternatively,
disallow SWEARing of oathed nobles entirely.

David desJardins

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