Improvement to the auction ?

@oelepetoetje well in auctioned games you need not one but four players to act in an optimal manner, so, that's even more unlikely to happen.

besides, the 4th player who rotates has no idea what factions will be left when their turn comes, so, it is in their best interest to create a map that offers the best possible balance (so that, whatever is left for them to play, it'll still be playable). on the contrary, many people in auctioned games try to do the very opposite, throwing in a terrible faction and trying to create the worst possible conditions for other players (at least one) to play.

also, if starting position did matter in the outcomes of the game, some correlation should show with final games results. is this true? has somebody looked into this? do we have at least anectoditcal evidence that this is the case? i have never noticed anything of the sort and my impression is that my win/lose rate remains constant no matter what initial position i get. i might wrong but in this case i'd like somebody to show me wrong.

I don't think one position is always stronger, but I do think a position can be a lot stronger in a given game. As I wrote above, sometimes I think the starting player has a significant advantage, sometimes the last player, depending on the (number of strong) available boosters, factions, etc., which would make the pattern harder to spot.

It's so strange to me that there's so much talk of picking "trash" factions no one would ever want in this thread... The whole reason I like auctions is because I can pick a faction that's enjoyable to play but would never win otherwise, and actually have a chance with them. I want the opportunity to play Lantids without feeling at a disadvantage the whole time, want to have games where it's not just Itars Ivits and Ambas again, etc...

It would only work for experienced players, but it could be an interesting format if instead of having an auction, the last player assigned values to each of the four selected factions-- similar to rotating sectors to balance the options as well as possible. It would speed up the auction process (which is almost unusable in 4p games), and it makes everything a known quantity upfront rather than the poker-style bidding game some people mention... (It would put a lot of burden on the last player though)

But if the problem is that certain factions are better and certain factions are worse in absolute terms, and the game needs to be homeruled to make lantids or gleens playable, then why auctions? Auctions create a huge amount of problems because:

1. either all players know exactly what they're doing, and how good every faction is able to perform in a given setup, or the game is going to be fucked up from the start because certain factions will be over/under priced (and i think that it's everybody's experience here on BG that you almost never end up in a game with 4 skilled players)
2. auctions create another meta-layer, a game within the game, that has nothing to do with gaia project. Apart from the fact that some players willingly pick factions that are awful in a given scenario, the whole balancing of the game at that point relays on every player's attitute towards risk-assessing. Which is a very interesting mechanism that several games use, but not gaia project. Anyone who like bidding games is free to go playing them, but I really don't see the need to spoil a game that depends on totally different dynamics by adding other variables that are totally alien to it.

So as I was saying, if the games needs to be homeruled to be perfectly balanced, auctions are one of the worse ways to do this that I can think of. Slightly buffing the underpowered factions would make way more sense.

I dunno. Evaluating the worth of a faction for a given setup is already part of the game, auctioning is just a way of putting that valuation in real terms to a) balance the player order and b) balance the factions given a particular setup of the game. It's not much of a leap from "I think geoden will be better than bescods on this board" to "I think geoden will be 10 points better than bescods on this board". And it has effectively zero overhead-- you keep the entire game as designed, with one optional change at the start after which everything plays as normal.

I'm all for tweaking the factions to balance them, but that requires a concentrated effort to playtest and get accepted alterations in place, and it's potentially gamebreaking. There was a huge amount of playtesting for Gaia and there's still what turns out to be significant differences between factions. And look at snellman with TM-- they made 5 different versions of a faction and still didn't get it quite right, and that was with ~50x the number of games played to provide data to backup decisions for a less complex game... And once you decide how you want to balance the factions, you then either force players into using an unofficial version of the game if they don't have an option to use the original factions anymore; or you make players learn (and developers maintain) multiple versions of a faction with minor differences, which will cause headaches of all sorts... And, even if you figure all that out, it still doesn't actually solve the player order issue that auctioning does (imperfectly) since that's about more than just the factions themselves.

i also think the factions themselves shouldnt be touched, cuz: 1.) its incredible hard if not near impossible to balance those things, even when we think we could be capable 2.) it just creates a rule-mess, for example how should i play otb then?

i have a different solution in mind trying to fix the flawd auction system

How would it be when there is a cap for biding vp, like 10 or 20 or whatever, and when there is a tie on a certain faction, the player who choosed that faction gets the tiebreaker

with that system the player who picked a less favored faction for the map constantly has to think about playing that faction himself and we would still get the benefit of seeing other then the top tier factions each game, cuz the player who tries to give a lesser favored faction to others wont pic the absolute worst but something in the middle

Ok but I frankly can't see how

• give Lantids a normal power system
• make Gleens use qics, ffs
• remove the dang extra ore from Itars

could unbalance tha factions, honestly.

Regarding rules confusion: there already are two rulesets for GP, with or without auctions.

Personally, I think I'm done with auctions; I have enough of people throwing in Lantids just to have other players pick them out of boredom after three days of bidding. It's just a dumb way of spending my time. If you have fun in clicking "bid x+1 for Ambas" for three days then, great, go for it; I don't, and won't.

This means I won't cross a lot of other players who, instead, play exclusively with auctions; and that, in my view, is a shame.

@testrun it's not that i don't see what you're saying. I actually agree on several points. However:

• as el temblo and I are saying, the question is not "gaia with auctions vs. gaia with homerules". auctioning IS homeruling (and as this thread shows very well, even when it come to auctions, different versions of the auction exist, and not everyone agrees on how auctions should play out. again, because this is a homerule)
• i don't agree that there isn't much of a difference between "i think X is better than Y in this setup" and "i think X is 10 points better than Y". this is actually one of the things about auctions that always leaves me very puzzled. It is utterly impossible to determine how many points a given faction is going to score at the end of the game before the game has even started. So this whole idea of "i'm bidding 17 points for terrans because i think they will outscore everybody else by at least 18 points" is just ludicrous. And I keep seeing people bidding 25, 30, 35 points for a faction... how can that be even remotely balanced or accurate? At that point the game is entirely non-deterministic, there is no way you can know what faction is going to win (pace a few really really exceptional scenarios) , let alone that that faction is going to outscore everybody else by such a massive amount of points
• the "factions aren't balanced" problem has to be kept distinct from the "player starting order" problem. In the case of the latter, I'm not even sure there is a problem. I guess the argument of pro-auction players is that either 1st position is the best one, because you have more choices+first move, or 4th position is the best one, because you have more information+turn booster. This, however, is just a vague intuition that nobody has ever proven true. My direct experience with the game tells me otherwise, in the last 100 4p games or so I have played here, I think I ended up winning around 50% of the times, while i guess the distribution of my starting positions where roughly 25% each. If position did matter, I guess we should see some type of correlation that I'm not seeing. But this needs to be tackled in more detail so I'll try to have a look at some data in the next days.
• finally, yes, tweaking the factions takes playtesting. as asymmetric games go, gaia is amazinlgy well-balanced, and you can see how they really put some effort in playtesting. however, after years of gaming, we now know the balance is not perfect. so i think it is reasonable to say that it is now time for some changes to be introduced (and i agree with everything el temblo has mentioned above).

@El-Temblo said in Improvement to the auction ?:

Ok but I frankly can't see how

• give Lantids a normal power system

meaning their PI gives them 1 token? meaning they start with 4 tokens in bowl 2? meaning they start with all 6 tokens? Changing any one of those three things might be enough; change all three and they may end up too strong

• make Gleens use qics, ffs

So, completely change the nature of the faction, removing their one major weakness entirely? Gleens can already be quite strong, they're just easy to bomb if you start off on the wrong foot. Take away their one major weakness entirely and they'll probably be unbeatable in some setups (as well as boring to play)

• remove the dang extra ore from Itars

That one's probably right, but even that I'd want to see how it actually works in practice before we force all players to do it. All of this is an aside from the actual point of this topic though, so I'll leave it there (happy to discuss more via DM if you want)

Regarding rules confusion: there already are two rulesets for GP, with or without auctions.

...except that the actual rules of the game are identical. Nothing about how you play the game, or how a faction works, changes. There's just one additional setup step; after that the actual game play is identical.

Personally, I think I'm done with auctions; I have enough of people throwing in Lantids just to have other players pick them out of boredom after three days of bidding. It's just a dumb way of spending my time. If you have fun in clicking "bid x+1 for Ambas" for three days then, great, go for it; I don't, and won't.

This means I won't cross a lot of other players who, instead, play exclusively with auctions; and that, in my view, is a shame.

That is a shame. When I throw in lantids, or gleen, or whoever, it's not to force other people to pick them-- I hope I end up with them, I just also want to make sure I have a reasonable chance of winning. The timing of auctions in 4p games is definitely a problem. I'm starting to accept the risk that I "overbid" a couple of points to move things along-- if I was willing to pay up to 15 for ambas, and jump the bid to 10 when 7 would have been enough, oh well, that's still within the range I thought they were worth.

What do you think of the idea of the last player setting values, instead of/in addition to rotating sectors? It would cut out the multiple days of "bid+1"ing you mention... A sealed bid format may make it more playable, e.g. each player selects a maximum bid for each faction at the start, and then the auction happens automatically based on those bids. There's a ton of ways for that to play out-- the simplest that comes to mind is that the highest bid overall wins the given faction; other bids from that player and faction are removed; the highest remaining bid wins the next faction; and so forth. (You could also go with the Vickrey model, where the winner pays the second-highest bid, to help avoid the winner's curse and overcome people's fear of overbidding) Or, if the developers are up for it*, there are more intricate game theory-based formats that could be applied. ex: implementation described for the digital app here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2486355/article/35619027#35619027

* I'm going to be using a couple of week of PTO in December with nowhere to go, so may be able to help out in that regard...

@Molfo - I do see what you're both saying, yeah. In my mind an optional, pre-game homerule is far less of a departure from the design than a faction change etc. that actually changes how the game is played, but it seems not everyone sees it the same way.

Deciding on the right auction format is critical. The one implemented here is a reasonably "safe" implementation, other than that it frustrates people (which does kind of defeat the purpose of playing a game...). You're right that bidding in a truly accurate way is practically impossible; but so is predicting the end state of the game without bidding, especially in a 4p game... but you're already doing that to some degree when you pick a faction in the first place, and when you pick a starting planet, and especially when the last player rotates sectors. That feels like a much bigger leap in terms of necessary prediction than an individual player estimating the worth of a faction after the board is locked in.

Agreed 100% that the faction balancing needs to be a separate issue.

Player starting order -- there are general benefits to being 1st and 4th, yes, but I think auctions are mostly important for specific instances. e.g. there are starting set-ups that are dramatically better for specific factions, and first choice may be a large advantage there (even if the last player rotates sectors as best they can). Handwaving the numbers, you could have a reasonably fair game without auctions in 4/5 games, but 1/5 first choice could effectively decide the game...

@JenniL said in Improvement to the auction ?:

How would it be when there is a cap for biding vp, like 10 or 20 or whatever, and when there is a tie on a certain faction, the player who choosed that faction gets the tiebreaker

anybody thinks this could be a viable idea?

@JenniL said in Improvement to the auction ?:

@JenniL said in Improvement to the auction ?:

How would it be when there is a cap for biding vp, like 10 or 20 or whatever, and when there is a tie on a certain faction, the player who choosed that faction gets the tiebreaker

anybody thinks this could be a viable idea?

There are legitimate times when a faction could be worth far more than that, but I guess it would discourage people from picking a faction they think is worth >20 points less than another faction... I personally wouldn't like a hard limit like that, but it could be a middle ground to make everyone only somewhat unhappy :)

Player starting order -- there are general benefits to being 1st and 4th, yes, but I think auctions are mostly important for specific instances. e.g. there are starting set-ups that are dramatically better for specific factions, and first choice may be a large advantage there (even if the last player rotates sectors as best they can). Handwaving the numbers, you could have a reasonably fair game without auctions in 4/5 games, but 1/5 first choice could effectively decide the game...

One thing that can perhaps be considered is that the more games you play the less the exceptional scenario - in which there's a faction that is clearly going to outscore everyone else - matters. I mean, if I find myself in a similar context and i'm not the first to pick, I can still compete for 2nd position and then try to win all other games (this is a consideration that works well in the context of a tournament, for instance, or with respect to rankings here on BG). Though to be honest I think these cases are very rare... even if there is a faction that has a big advantage in a certain setup, the end results will still depend on what factions the other players pick and on what strategies they will adopt in-game.

I think it would be nice if you could have the app pick the 4 factions that will be auctioned off randomly. That way you get to play all the permutations of factions, which is really cool (and that greater kind variety is kinda the whole of the point of having the auctions) and you could never get deliberate trash picks.

@AntoineBR In your example there is chance you or any other player will end up with Itars with 10-20 points bid on them, when some player decide to pick last faction - Terrans with 0 bid on them and immediately starts the game. And the player who end up with Itars doesn't have any opportunity to change their bid anymore. In your mode whenever some player decides to pick last faction, game starts right away.

@Molfo That way of playing was existing in Terra Mystica for quite long time, so there was no reason to not implemented it in Project Gaia. It just a mode, you are not forced to use it. If you don't like auction games, don't join rooms with auction mode enabled or create your own room. Simple as that. I don't see any reason to reduce available options how to play the game.

So far I've played maybe 10 games with auction mode, most of my PG games were in standard player order picks. What I can say is that it is definitely designed towards experienced players. Because, as you mentioned, its almost impossible to correctly estamite exact points difference between factions in particular game. Especially for players which are not experienced, they will probably bid towards factions the are familiar with or they simply don't see small oportunities hidden somewhere on the map or tech positions. So definitely bidding is part of the player skill and probably that's why experienced players prefer this mode over standard one. As @lucasrrr have said - auctions also makes less popular factions playable. You have opportunity to pick them and actually compete for 1st/2nd place. In standard mode it's rarely the case - for instance Lantids requires very specific setup to work well.

What I agree with you is that auction system shouldn't be used as a data input towards faction balancing. Unless you will just take scores from those games without bids values and calculate average score for each faction from all of the games. Anyway, faction balance is separate topic.

@Molfo That way of playing was existing in Terra Mystica for quite long time, so there was no reason to not implemented it in Project Gaia. It just a mode, you are not forced to use it. If you don't like auction games, don't join rooms with auction mode enabled or create your own room. Simple as that. I don't see any reason to reduce available options how to play the game.

Could you please not "simple as that" me? That's what I already do, thank you very much. Btw your suggestion that "experienced players prefer auctions" is questionable, I have played hundreds of games of GP over the course of the years and deeply dislike auctions (for reasons that I took the trouble to carefully explain above) .

My point in discussing the validity of auctions is relative to competitive contexts (tournaments or, in general, rankings). As far as these are concerned, I think the question poses itself of how the game should be managed and organized. Are auctions to be made a part of it? Yes? No? How? Why?

It seems to me there is plenty of room for a debate on the subject, since this thread alone is enough to show how even people who are pro-auctions do not agree on how auctions should actually be implemented. Unfortunately every time anyone brings that up somebody intrudes in the conversation with the charismatic line "oh wouldn't you just shut up, we used to did that for terra mystica" - as if that was a valid argument. I'm honestly a bit fed up with ex TM players who think they can come and nerdsplain GP to me. So, more constructive approaches are welcome.

I don't think so there is a better way to implement auction system. At least from the competitive point of view. In this system you have full game information, you know all the factions and their turn order. So entire bidding process is fair without favorizing any of the players. The main concern people have about this mode is that sometimes there is a faction in the pool no one wants to play with, which basically prolonging entire bidding process and forces one player to eventually pick it. But it is not competitive concern, its a fun concern. If that would happen during tournament, my guess is no would complain. Maybe even someone would be very happy about that pick and could think to himself sth like 'I think I can do quite well with that faction with this setup, lets see how much bidding I can force on other faction first. Lets hope I'm the only one thinking this way'. And after if he picked it and won with, it would be a fully deserve win.

So the question really is - what do players prefer? To have more competitive game or just have more fun with the game? It seems that we already have both. I don't mind if sth new will came up, like @AntoineBR idea for auction system. It is not as fair as current system, but it basically will force player to pick only good factions. So definitely we can have a new mode, but we also should keep the current one and let players pick what they prefer. However if tournaments will get introduced - we should use current auction system there.

So, seen how participated this thread has been, I want to offer my point of view on the subject, mostly to reply on some things I read so far. First of all I've seen someone mentioning TM and how well auction works for that game, well I used to think that too, that auction was great and let you vary a stale meta a lot more but... there are two big "buts": the first one being that TM has a few fixed maps, with few viable starting positions and fewer paths to score, therefore it's much easier to predict how much better a certain faction will score compared to another, the same thing doesn't apply to GP, most games I played with auction here ended up either with biddings that didn't matter at all or biddings that were far off (like the extreme case where the faction bid the most loses and would still have lost without the vp subtracted from the auction). All of that is simply much more likely to happen in GP because the game is much more sandboxy than TM and the line one player decides to follow in the midgame is just not predictable, and that can cause very big swings of points for another faction (so you could say: this faction is worth this many points more than this other faction unless that third faction does that thing in the midgame, than it would be the exact opposite... so how much do you bid? and for who?). In most games I've seen aucton be useful it ended up just being a mean to nerf those factions which are known as stronger overall, and that to me means recalibrating the factions would make for a much more elegant and definitive solution . The secon "but"is that even in TM when there's a matchup where one or more of the factions have two or more viable options for starting placements, the evaluation for another factions might change drastically depending on what the starting positions end up being. Therefore the auction becomes just some sort of gambling game (that I'm liking less and less even in TM), and while this issue doesn't arise as much in TM (and auction at this point has settled as the definitive way to go for competitive play) it's pretty much always the case in GP, even in a table of all exepert players the auction is still gambling, it's just not possible to make a correct assumption of what the vp offsets will be.

In conclusion for the way I understand it auction in GP is merely a way of putting the more high tier factions to level with the weaker ones. In table of experts the rotation can already do a lot for that and frankly i never percieved a game with rotation option (when the person rotating knows what it's doing) to be unbalanced and never yelds a predictable result after faction selection, otherwise why bother playing the whole game? If there's an issue with factons relative strenghts that is something to be solved with further tweaking of the faction, and for all those who think faction balance is untouchable, that is simply a silly assumption, I mean look at all the online games: they get balancing patches all the time, because players evolve, discover new things change the meta, etc... A boardgame simply doesn't get that much playtesting before release, I don't know how you imagine the playtest to be but I can assure you that it's not that thorough and eventually designers have to meet deadlines. The game played during playtest aren't even a small fraction of the game that have been played on here. That said changing the factions would require the approval from the designers followed by a thorough tesing which is very unlikely. They're designing an expansion which makes me think they're not interested in reviewing the factions at the moment. There are many ways you can tweak the auction system but the game will never be objectively better than with the good ol' rotation, just longer. It may meet your tastes better, I won't argue with that, but most of the time you'll just be playing a small gambling game before the actual game, and that's perfectly fine, I'm just not intersted in it anymore. Just mind that no auction system will improve your chances of winning a game.

@Babbuc49 <3

@Spooky If tournaments were to be introduced here on BG, the I'd like to have two parallel sessions running, one with auctions for those who believe they work and one with "last player rotate sectors" for those who don't.

@testrun said in Improvement to the auction ?:

What do you think of the idea of the last player setting values, instead of/in addition to rotating sectors? It would cut out the multiple days of "bid+1"ing you mention...

Well, it could work; but, again, it's in the hands of a single player, so... why don't we just play GP as it was intended, maybe adding just the sector rotation? :D

Quick replies: for Lantids, I think ALL of them, and no, it wouldn't make them op. Regarding Gleens, sorry, but "Gleens can already be quite strong" is just light years from my experience. Anyway, since nothing of this will take place, we're talking about nothing ;).

@Babbuc49 said in Improvement to the auction ?:

There are many ways you can tweak the auction system but the game will never be objectively better than with the good ol' rotation, just longer. It may meet your tastes better, I won't argue with that, but most of the time you'll just be playing a small gambling game before the actual game, and that's perfectly fine, I'm just not intersted in it anymore. Just mind that no auction system will improve your chances of winning a game.

THIS, a bazillion times THIS.

Out of my experience and mistakes, I now realize I could plan carefully for an auction in order to maximize my chances of winning, even with, let's say, Lantids if the mains are "planet types" and "Gaia".

I just don't want to do that (and it's fine if other people want to do auctions, ofc). I'm definitely with Babbuc here.

i'm going to avoid getting into the "objectively better" rabbit hole re: "good ol' rotation". the pros/cons of rotation aren't really relevant here.

this post is about "Improvement to the auction", so it seems like the only relevant feedback is along the lines of "what could make auctions better for more players?" people may dislike auctions, or be dead set against them, and that's fine, they never have to use them. (going the full mile of rebalancing factions can easily be a parallel effort, and if last sector rotation works great then, hurray! auctions should be less appealing and effectively go away on their own...) but this thread should probably stick to constructive feedback.

the intractable issues people mention with auctioning seem to be that it's too non-deterministic / difficult to predict, and that gaia isn't supposed to be about risk-assessment. i'd argue that every selection during setup requires a similar magnitude of prediction to bidding-- and rotating sectors a magnitude higher-- and that risk assessment is a fundamental part of every decision in the game-- am i giving power charge too soon, can i wait to take that planet, how much do i have to rush this track to get that adv tile, etc-- but: if you view those as unique or excessive issues with auctioning, they are intractable, so you should avoid playing games with any form of auction implemented.

the main potential goals of auctioning people focus on are: G1) evening out the impact of player order re: faction selection-- OP's point G2) evening out / making more factions playable in a given setup

the main potential flaws with auctioning people focus on are: F1) "sabotaging" games with a bad faction*-- this was OP's key point (and most people's concern), and no one has really addressed their suggestion directly F2) the possibility for other metagaming -- seeing what factions people are aiming for (or aiming to avoid), trying to push their prices up, etc. F3) the delay to the game -- going back and forth on bids for days, especially with 4 players

@oelepetoetje's suggestion was "whenever someone bids zero for a tribe that he did not pick himself, he is allowed to change that tribe to one of the tribes that was not in the initial selection." @AntoineBR had a related suggestion, that factions are picked and bid on one-by-one.

• Superficially, this will address F1 in full; and partially address F2 and F3 as not being shoehorned into the "bad" faction should reduce metagaming and lower the peak value of bids, thus speeding the bidding process up.
• This will address G1, but G2 is largely unaddressed -- the relative value of a faction-with-replacement can still make the selected faction unplayable. You'll still end up with the four strongest factions in every game if people are playing (roughly) optimally
• The other concern I have (and others voiced) is that the value of a faction can change dramatically depending on what other factions are in the game, because of planet color, likelihood of gaiaforming, etc. Once people are "locked in" on another faction, they may get severely bit by a faction swap, which can be taken into account but then many of the issues with auctioning are increased-- the ability for metagaming, the difficulty of prediction, etc. You're now making more decisions with less information.

Overall, I definitely would not prefer this; but if most players only care about G1 and not G2, then something along these lines could work better overall.

My preference would still be switching to a closed bid format-- every player makes one and only one bid for all factions at the start, and then factions are assigned automatically based on the relative value of the bids.

• This completely resolves F2 and F3; there's no delay and there's no metagaming as there's no counter-bidding. It also completely fulfills G1 and G2: the impact of player order is now completely mitigated, and any faction can be involved
• F1, the issue of sabotaging with bad factions, is partially resolved-- those factions can still be introduced, but because bids are closed and factions assigned automatically, the person picking them has no way of guaranteeing they don't end up with the faction they tried to sabotage others with. So if you're picking it, you have to be comfortable playing it.
• The main drawback I can see for some players is that the final choice is taken out of your hands. In every other setup, you get the final decision about what faction you are, even if it's at an absurd cost. So if you just reaaally don't want to play Xenos or whoever, in the current auction you can always just keep bidding even if it's 50+ points. With closed bids, you can't absolutely guarantee that you don't get a faction (even if you can make it very likely by bidding high). How important this is will obviously vary player-to-player; I'm personally fine with it.

*as mentioned before, what people see as trying to force other players to play a bad board, I think is more often players picking factions they're interested in trying themselves; but I'm predisposed to view it that way as that's why I do it

@testrun said in Improvement to the auction ?:

My preference would still be switching to a closed bid format-- every player makes one and only one bid for all factions at the start, and then factions are assigned automatically based on the relative value of the bids.

How do you resolve 'relative value of the bids'? If, for instance, one player will bid the most points for all factions than how you will determine which faction he should play? Even if you will try to create some kind of factor representing this relative value, you still may end up with tie situations. Some players may think - I can play with any of those factions, so I will bid 0 for all of them. What if there are 2 players thinking this way and in effect more than 1 player will end up with exactly same bidding values? It's not that unlikely. So you need sth extra for resolving tie situations.

Besides it's cool idea and it's addressing some issues mentioned before.

@Spooky good questions. There's a ton of ways to handle relative value and ties, depending on what you want to emphasize. To my knowledge, the main approaches either go for simple face value (e.g. top-down, you pay the lowest winning bid for each faction), or maximizing efficiency (true value/optimizing bids)

Example auction and bids:

Factions: Ambas/Terrans/Firaks
Player A: 10/8/0
Player B: 0/8/5
Player C: 15/10/0

The simple face value approach would basically follow a "highest overall" system, i.e.: 1. highest bid overall wins, and pays 1 more than the next highest bid for that faction; 2. remove the now excess bids for the winning player/faction; 3. repeat 1&2 for the rest. In the case of a tie, the best tiebreaker is likely to compare to the next highest valued faction, and resolve based on that.

So in the example: Player C wins Ambas for 11 (their value was 15, but they get it for +1 over the next highest bid). Remaining bids:

Factions: Terrans/Firaks
Player A: 8/0
Player B: 8/5

Player A and B both bid 8 for Terrans, so look to their next bids. Player A values Terrans over their next option more than Player B, e.g.: (8-0) > (8-5), so Player A would get Terrans for their max bid of 8, and Player A gets the last option Firaks for 0.

There's obviously some downsides to this, which is to say how a player values the factions in comparison to each other is actually more important than how they value them compared to other players, and that's only used as a tiebreaker above. So maximizing efficiency / optimizing bids based on game theory is probably a better way to go.

It would effectively boil down to: people pay the minimum they have to so that it isn't worth paying any more for another faction. Using the same example:

Factions: Ambas/Terrans/Firaks
Player A: 10/8/0
Player B: 0/8/5
Player C: 15/10/0

The optimal solution is likely: Player C gets Ambas for 5; Player A gets Terrans for 3; Player B gets Firaks for 0. (Values might change by a point depending on how you handle ties / "bidding order", so we'd need to decide a standard approach there.)

Effectively, it's as if people bet as follows:

A bid 0 on Ambas -- their highest valued faction
B bid 0 on Terrans -- their highest valued faction
C bid 1 on Ambas -- relative value 4 over next best faction (15-1=14 for Ambas vs 10-1=9 for Terrans vs 0 for Firaks)
A bid 2 on Ambas -- relative value 1 (10-2=8 for Ambas vs 8-1=7 for Terrans vs 0 for Firaks)
B stays on Terrans
C bids 3 on Ambas -- relative value 3 (15-3 vs 10-1 vs 0)
A bids 1 on Terrans -- relative value 1 (10-4 vs 8-1 vs 0)
B bids 2 on Terrans -- relative value 1 (0-4 vs 8-2 vs 5)
C stays on Ambas
A bids 4 on Ambas -- relative value 0* (10-4 vs 8-2 vs 0)
B stays on Terrans
C bids 5 on Ambas -- relative value 3 (15-5 vs 10-3 vs 0)
A bids 3 on Terrans -- relative value 1 (10-6 vs 8-3 vs 0)
B bids 0 on Firaks -- relative value 1 (0 vs 8-4 vs 5)
(Done)

* My instinct is a tie in relative value between factions for a player should be broken by their face value, e.g. if they originally valued Ambas more than Terrans, they'd take Ambas over Terrans assuming the same net value after bids. It could also be broken by which board they picked at the start, if relevant (face value could be the backup tiebreaker).

Ties between players could either be broken by player order, as above, or by defaulting to the faction they picked at the start-- e.g. if the optimal value for Terrans over other options is 3 for two players, it would go to whoever selected Terrans as an option. (In rare cases you may end up with a true tie that can't be broken by meaningful distinctions, and then it would have to be random. e.g. if it ends up with two faction that have the exact same bids from two players who didn't pick either faction at the start, you just assign them at random since the players didn't differentiate between the two.)

It's a more complicated algorithm to implement, but doable and should get as close to optimal results as possible.

@testrun said in Improvement to the auction ?:

F1) "sabotaging" games with a bad faction*-- this was OP's key point (and most people's concern), and no one has really addressed their suggestion directly

I did suggest this:

I think it would be nice if you could have the app pick the 4 factions that will be auctioned off randomly. That way you get to play all the permutations of factions, which is really cool (and that greater kind variety is kinda the whole of the point of having the auctions) and you could never get deliberate trash picks.

Which I still think is a solution to the "trash-picking" problem that should be pretty easy to implement (and also saves some time, as players do not have to contemplate what faction to introduce into the auction). It's how I usually play offline and would choose to play here if it was possible. It is a lot of fun to see, for example, how a game where gaia-forming is heavily rewarded develops when the factions are Lantids, Taklons, Nevlar, and all those strange combinations can come up when you have random selection of the factions + auction.

@lucasrrr sorry, when I said "no one has really addressed their suggestion directly", I meant their suggestion for an improvement- the option for the zero bid to swap boards

I played similarly in person too and still usually randomize when playing with friends on here (we hit random twice and pick between the two results). I definitely like seeing new combinations of factions and trying to play a faction in unusual conditions.

Re: randomizing all four boards here- this is technically possible already through coordinating in the chat, but it might be nice to formalize it. As far as whether it fixes trash picks-- the question is whether people dislike the "spirit" of it, what they see as deliberate metagaming; or whether they just don't like a bad faction being there because of how it influences the bidding / not wanting to get stuck with it. Randomizing would of course fix the first, but not the second, as there's a 4/14 chance the worst possible faction still gets selected and the same bidding war to avoid it happens anyway.

In my mind, it's possible to resolve the bidding war part of things with a closed bid system, but still preserve the ability to have unusual factions in the game. (And these two options could always be combined-- randomizing factions would work as an independent option you could select during setup)

@testrun ah, of course, should have picked that up from your discussion of @oelepetoetje's suggestion below that

I think a good closed bidding system would be a nice way to solve what you've termed F3) -- the delay caused by slow incremental bidding -- which I don't terribly mind, but definitely could do without (also agree that this is completely independent from and could be combined with randomizing faction selection). Do worry such a system might not be intuitive for a lot of players though.

I'd like to think Gaia players can handle some complexity :) but yeah it's definitely less intuitive and the purchase prices might make people go "huh?"

It would probably work best if the game logged the individual bids similar to how I demo'd above in order to be transparent about why people got the factions they did for the price they did. If the text at the start is something like "Select the maximum price you would pay for each faction", and then the game log at the bottom showed bid-by-bid how it played out, I think that would be pretty clear. (And obviously, there could be a page explaining how it works, like there already is for the existing auction)

(The downside of needing to log step-by-step would be you couldn't take shortcuts in the algorithm, but I don't think it would be too much of a burden on the sever. There's the chance people could deliberately / coincidentally place matching very high bids which could add a few hundred "moves" to work through but as long as you batch them for writing to the db that shouldn't slow things down)

I think the official app for Gaia Project will go with a closed bid system, there is an ongoing thread about it but the developer on BGG.