The rules for Lost Players have two phases:
If the player's departure is announced, then the Preliminary Phase is skipped. But if the player runs out of timeouts, the Preliminary Phase gives the player a little extra time to return to the game. The Preliminary Phase is implemented when the last timeout runs out, and the Final Phase is implemented at the start of the Lost Player's next turn (if they don't show up in the meantime).
In a sense, the implementation of the Preliminary Phase is equivalent to a declaration by the player that he/she is leaving the game: both set the stage for the Final Phase to be implemented if the player does not declare otherwise before his/her next move.
Thus, the preference is to use an Active Sub if it's early in the game and a new player would want to join, yet wouldn't make a big change in the game strategy of the other players. If it's not early in the game, then doing anything will be a big disruption to the game, and the preference is to go with a Static Defense since that will keep things from changing too quickly, while not requiring a lot of tedious human intervention.
After implementing the Active Sub or Static Defense, the game will continue. Games with an Active Sub are played normally. In the case of the Static Defense, here is what happens:
After the moderator has set up the Static Defense, the game file will continue to be sent normally. When it reaches the Lost Player, simply skip him/her and send it to whoever used to come after the Lost Player. The person BEFORE the Lost Player will do the following each turn:
Finally, it is forbidden for players to take items from a hero who is in Static Defense. The purpose of the Static Defense is to keep as much of the Lost Player's stuff out of the hands of his/her neighbors for as long as possible, and to come as close as possible to the sort of defense one might have with an actual human sub. The bottom line is that no human player would intentionally let his hero be killed and give up his hero's items, and most good human players would find ways to keep their items out of enemy hands, so a Static Defense's items should also stay out of enemy hands. (Idea from Bill Irwin.) However, the Static Defense does not start until the side's builds have been set to "enhanced" and there is no chance of the player returning to the game. So the hero items are not "off limits" until the full Static Defense has been implemented.
[ Note: Once a Static Defense runs out of gold, it permanently stops building new units, even if it later loses enough units that it could start building again. The main idea is for the moderator to intervene only on one or two turns, and then set up a reasonably strong defense which can run automatically thereafter.]
[ Note - "Overbuilding" of expensive builds is no longer a part of the Static Defense, because the PC-Classic version does not allow it. ]
[ These rules are not yet 100% definite; suggestions are welcome.]
Subject: On the lost-player rules >Frankly, I think they stink, regardless whether you decide to make them >consistent across platforms, or to disallow overbuilding in PC Classic >games. Application of the rules precisely as stated, in the practice >game I'm in right now, has given an enormous benefit to one side, done >great damage to another side (mine, which is why I'm complaining, but >that has no effect on the validity of my complaints), and has for all >practical purposes made it impossible and pointless to capture any of >his cities. I agree they aren't the greatest, but they were the least bad of all the possible options we considered for when a player is Lost. >Have these rules ever been play-tested?? Yes, but not extensively. It's not like we've had playtesters dropping out of games like flies. :) >The idea is to >prevent the other players from reaping a huge benefit when one player >drops out of a game. That's a worthy goal, but the effect of the rules >as they stand is to deny players the benefit they've earned for their >plans when the player they're about to crush gives up and walks away. It really depends on the player that walks away, though. We never know how good the player is who disappears. If an expert dropped out of the game, you can bet that the Static Defense would not be as good as that human's defense. But if a clueless novice drops out, it's true that the static defense can be more challenging to overcome. On the other hand, after the Practice Round there are no more novices, and after Round A there won't be any clueless players either. So the Static Defense will be (more) comparable to the abilities of the average player in the official rounds. Also, we expect that with the exception of various disaster situations, all players will finish all their games during the official rounds, and all the dropping-out will be done between rounds, so we don't expect to use the Static Defense often. >The cities I would have taken on my next turns were valuable and weak. >They are now strong and worthless. The green kingdom was an eggshell >with a lovely yolk inside, and IF green hadn't dropped out, I would >have shared an omelet with the blue player. Now, by application of the >Lost Player rules, the green kingdom is a granite rock, with nothing but >more granite inside it, worthless to anyone and impossible to break in >any case. It produces armies EVERY turn that defend with the strength >of an attacking griffin. Nobody is going to bother to waste the >griffins from two cities just to take a city producing only Hv Infantry. >You might as well just raze the damned things and be done with it. I think that's a little overboard. The Static Defense can hold off isolated attackers and stacks of identical units, but a city of 8-12 heavy infantry still gets mulched by any attacker with a decent stack bonus. You might have trouble overrunning a city with a single griffin, but if you use a Worm or a Hero in the stack, it's a different story. >Green will lose only one more city: one that would NOT have been taken >if not for application of the rules, forcing a wolfrider to retreat into >a city that needed no defense, instead of continuing forward to defend a >city it was obviously intended to defend. By forcing armies to head to >the "nearest" city instead of the "most sensible" city, the rules gave >blue a spider-producing city he could not have taken. But there's no telling what Green might actually have done in any case. He might have pulled out of the spider city completely, and sent all his units after you, or vice versa. There's no way a Moderator can adequately put himself into the Lost Player's shoes and decide what is "most sensible". You have to have a recipe. And you can't trust appearances either. I often have attacking stacks that are split up and look like they're heading as reinforcements to various cities, when in reality they all intend to converge on a single target. >By overbuilding >heavy cavalry with heavy infantry, the rules tore from my grasp 600 gold >I had earned through good strategy (which cannot be kept from me playing >fairly in PC Classic, anyway, but that's not the issue I'm discussing >here -- I think the overbuilding rule stinks in ANY version). Well, we can fix this by eliminating the overbuilding rule. >By giving >the lost player a +2 strength bonus, especially on armies that move so >slowly they never EVER get blessed, the rules make it utterly pointless >and nearly impossible to take any of these cities anymore, a condition >that certainly would not have existed if the player had remained in the >game. The rules accomplish the goal of preventing a windfall benefit to >the other players when one side becomes mindless -- but they go so far >beyond that it's ridiculous. I disagree. The +2 simulates the fact that the average player would most likely have had some sort of stack-bonus unit defending his/her vulnerable "target" cities and/or fortify the city to +2 defense and/or have reinforced the city with additional troops from other cities. A stack of enhanced heavy inf is pretty strong, but in general it's not much stronger than a mixed stack with bonuses would have been. And it's still valuable to take as many cities as possible. A city taken on Turn 12 at a cost of 3 units still pays for itself by building 8 units by Turn 20, or at least by by supplying enough cash to help support other armies from other cities. The other thing is that by spending all the player's gold on new production, the Static Defense can only produce units for a few turns before going into debt and not being able to produce. So there's a limited supply of those enhanced units. In DuelZ12 (a game I was in with 3 novices) we had a player drop out around Turn 9, with about 8 cities. I had to slow my expansion to assemble some city-kiling stacks, but when I brought in an elephant and a pegasus and some spiders, I mopped them all up in just a few turns. I would have had to do pretty much the same thing if the player had stayed in the game, only instead of planning my attacks and routing units against immobile enemies, I would have had to deal with the randomness of a human player. Individual battles might have been easier against non-enhanced units, but the war as a whole would have been just as hard. >As far as the ban on picking up items the lost player had, because >"nobody would let their hero get killed", oh how I laughed at that. >Yea, right, nobody ever lets their hero get killed. Who thought that >one up? I've killed two heroes in the first six turns, and passed up >a chance last turn. The rules presume veteran players who know how to figure out when their hero is vulnerable. I think that's reasonable for the majority of the tournament. Players who have no choice about losing their hero generally park him over the water where the items get lost. >In short, I think you should ditch the +2 rule, ditch the overbuilding >rule, and move armies to the most sensible city for defense, rather than >the closest one (even if they have to move out of or through a city to >accomplish that purpose). Converting cities to produce heavy infantry >is reasonable as long as they're NOT +2 strength (making them as strong >as griffins, every turn). Dropped items should be fair game to whoever >gets there first with a hero to pick them up. I'm still not sold on any of the changes except getting rid of the overbuilding rule. Although a Static Defense will defend itself better than a novice player, it is nowhere near as good as an experienced player, and I think it's a pretty good compromise. In general I don't want to weaken it. On average we want a player to use the same fraction of his/her strength beating a Static Defense as they would beating a typical human being, so that the Static Defense doesn't allow the player to divert lots of units to his/her other fronts. It's impossible to avoid damaging a game when a player is Lost, but I think the current recipe is about as good as we can do. -- Bob