Are heavy bless strategies the best ones ?

[Ygorl]

Right. Only one person gets to win any given game, hopefully everyone gets to have fun. To achieve maximum fun, each person has his or her own balance between striving for optimal play and the best chance at victory on the one hand, and tinkering, fooling around, exploring, diplomacy, role-playing, doing whatever else there is to do that's *not* a min-maxed drive to victory on the other hand. This balance may well change from game to game, day to day, nation to nation, whatever, for a given person. Most people recognize this and accept it; sometimes it dictates what games a person joins, sometimes somebody gets frustrated at having joined a game in which a lot of people are playing with vastly different goals. Mostly, people are civil and have fun.

[KissBlade]

Actually in a multiplayer game, it is VERY frustrating when someone's not playing to win. You can end up having completely pushing over neighbors who have no intent to win and triple the size of your empire because of that and completely mess up a game.

[Ygorl]

Yeah, that's most of what I was referring to about people getting frustrated. From my (admittedly limited) experience, that kind of thing happens more often when experience or skill levels are vastly different than it does when motivation levels are really different, though (by motivation, I mean motivation to win, not motivation to play, a lack of which is possibly the worst possible trait in a player).
But yes, I completely agree, it can really screw up a game when essentially people aren't even *playing* the same game.

[KissBlade]

Yeah. I recall, I've been on both ends of this scenario too. There were at least two games I won where I got no real satisfaction from winning simply because half my neighbors just decided to stale out of the game.

[Edi]

If and when I play MP, I play to win, but that doesn't mean that winning is the be-all end-all for me. In the two games I took part in during the Dom2 days, I had tons of fun even though I finished fourth or so in the first and got totally clobbered in the second (which incidentally also resulted in several improvements on sections of the Faerun map as I saw firsthand some problems there that I had not originally noticed or paid attention to).

Of course, staling out of a game is unacceptable. Better to go AI than stale away.

Edi

[Teraswaerto]

I always play to win, but I don't let that stop me from trying weaker nations or non-optimal pretender designs.

[Sombre]

If you enjoy competing you usually enjoy challenge too. Sometimes that means you enjoy putting some 'artificial' limitations on yourself - after all these limitations are really no different from the rules of any game.

I personally enjoy forcing myself to use a certain ratio of weaker troops, for instance.