On Thu, 2017-08-17 at 09:50 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > Elevating R1698 sounds like a good idea though. One question is which > of 1698, 1030, and 1551 should be highest - do their global protections > interact in odd ways that mean we should be careful about their order?
I've believed for a while that 1698 should be higher than 1030. 1030's current 3.2 is probably correct, meaning that 1698 should be 3.3 (or 4 if we have concerns over the Town Fountain somehow being used to end the game). 1551 should be below 1698 and 1030 but higher than everything else (again, with the Town Fountain being a special case). Putting 1551 above 1698 might make it possible to ratify ourselves into an ossified gamestate, which a) is not completely implausible and b) would clearly be much worse than the alternative. Putting 1551 above 1030 would make it possible to ratify inconsistent precedence relationships into the ruleset, and AFAICT have no other impact compared to the reverse relationship. In both these cases, it's clearly better to have a playable game (even if it takes some research to work out how) than it is to have certainty about the gamestate (even if it's unplayable). Note that the above-3 power of 1551 is correct; when it was only power 3, it frequently broke accidentally from "you can't do this" requirements in other rules. So my suggestion is 3.1 for 1551, 3.2 for 1030, and 3.3 or 4 for 1698. As for rule 101, it clearly functions correctly at any power in the 3-4 range. I know that there were failed attempts to increase it to power 4 in the past, but it failed (mostly because it was a lot more complex and the interaction with other rules was unclear). It might be time to try again, mostly a) for symbolic reasons and b) because there's probably a clever scam involving it somehow, which might be interesting to see (note: I'm not currently aware of such a scam). -- ais523
