On Tue, 2026-05-05 at 09:14 -0300, juan via agora-discussion wrote: > ais523 via agora-business [2026-05-04 21:13]: > > […] > > > > I Declare a Junta (causing both Janet and myself to win the game). > > > > […] > > I would love to see a write up of the thought process behind creating > the scam. Just an idea.
As I mentioned before, I found what is possibly a proposal forcethrough scam during RTRW, and was looking for something to force through that wasn't too obviously "this proposal exists only for use as the target of a proposal forcethrough scam" (as being too obvious about that tends to lead to pre-emptive counterscams and I didn't want to have to deal with those). We didn't have to actually use the forcethrough because the proposal ended up passing naturally. Some history about forcethrough scams: they used to be a lot more common / easier many years ago, basically because back then there were usually rules that allowed players to directly or near-directly manipulate voting strength (either for the player or on a particular proposal), allowing for both scams against those rules, and economic forcethroughs where you just purchased a lot of voting power and deployed it unexpectedly. Around the time when I was most actively playing, there was a rule called Support Democracy which allowed any player to turn off basically all the possible voting-related shenanigans on a particular proposal with 2 support, which put a really interesting constraint on forcethrough scams: if you wanted your forcethrough to succeed, you had to hide the fact that you were performing it by forcing through a proposal that looked innocent (or possibly just innocently buggy) rather than allowing players to cotton on to the fact that there might be a forcethrough scam happening. Support Democracy was eventually repealed, which annoyed me (and I would occasionally appeal to have it put back) – I found the art of writing forcethrough targets that other players wouldn't realise were part of a forcethrough scam to be a fun part of Agoran scamming. Nowadays, with-support dependent actions can again be used to turn off some mechanics that interfere with voting power, and as such, when planning a forcethrough scam, it's prudent to try to disguise the proposal you're forcing through as being unrelated to a forcethrough. I wasn't expecting my proposal to naturally pass, but was hoping (apparently correctly) that the other players wouldn't be thinking about forcethrough scams when looking at it (several players recognised it as likely being a scam, but the more obvious scam is "write a biased/exploitable proposal and hope that the other players vote it through naturally", and the obvious reaction to that is to vote AGAINST rather than to look for a counterscam). I wasn't, however, expecting it to actually pass naturally (especially given that it was AI 2!) – just trying to slip it past attempts to counterscam a forcethrough. I'm reluctant to give too many other details because the forcethrough scam is still there and Janet and/or I may want to make use of it in the future. I guess one alternative would be to have some way to turn a disclosure of the scam into some sort of reward other than simply just using it for a proposal forcethrough. Perhaps some "disclose this scam that would allow a pair of players to take over the game, and if the other players agree that it would have worked, grant a win" mechanic. (This would in many cases be preferable to actually performing the scam, especially for scams that have a lot of requirements that are hard to line up correctly.) -- ais523
