If I am playing against a stronger player, do I have an incentive to be or not to be omnicidal? Is “everyone loses” preferable to “I win with probability 10% and lose with probability 90%”?
I think your idea is that “everyone dies” is an outcome that is possible but everyone wants to avoid, but is it true?
I guess that the dynamics of the game would depend on how relatively expensive is it to build a doom device—something that reliably kills everyone, including you. (Can I borrow zillion dollars from Satan, build zillion robots and kill everyone, and the next turn Satan takes me because I am unable to pay back? Or is my capacity to make such deal limited by my current resources, so if I get poor, even my capacity to make deals with Satan is limited enough to make me harmless.)
There is no intrinsic incentive to use the doom device, but there is also no intrinsic incentive to not use it when your loss is guaranteed. So it would be used for blackmail: “don’t create a situation where my loss is guaranteed, or I will use the doom device”. Given that only one player can win, if two of them build such device, they are stuck. (They could possibly negotiate to destroy both their devices.)
This again depends on how predictable the situation is. Whether it is something like “you have 10x more resources than me, you are virtually guaranteed to win” (so I know when to use the doom device) or like “you can win by a surprise, such as using a resource I don’t know that you have, or by a random outcome, such as having a spell that wins the game depending on a coin flip” (so I am never sure whether this is the moment to use the doom device until it is too late).
tl;dr—I think the dynamics would depend a lot on implementation details
Right, we wouldn’t want it to be possible to easily build doom devices. Good point.
I think the right balance would be something like “If player 1 is snowballing and invading player 2, player 2 can sell their soul to get a decent chance of defending against player 1 and a small chance of outright turning the tide and beating them, but even if they maximally sell their soul they still might lose, and if they push Player 1 too much then player 1 probably has a chance to retaliate by selling THEIR soul...”
If I am playing against a stronger player, do I have an incentive to be or not to be omnicidal? Is “everyone loses” preferable to “I win with probability 10% and lose with probability 90%”?
I think your idea is that “everyone dies” is an outcome that is possible but everyone wants to avoid, but is it true?
Everyone loses is supposed to be exactly as bad as someone else winning.
I guess that the dynamics of the game would depend on how relatively expensive is it to build a doom device—something that reliably kills everyone, including you. (Can I borrow zillion dollars from Satan, build zillion robots and kill everyone, and the next turn Satan takes me because I am unable to pay back? Or is my capacity to make such deal limited by my current resources, so if I get poor, even my capacity to make deals with Satan is limited enough to make me harmless.)
There is no intrinsic incentive to use the doom device, but there is also no intrinsic incentive to not use it when your loss is guaranteed. So it would be used for blackmail: “don’t create a situation where my loss is guaranteed, or I will use the doom device”. Given that only one player can win, if two of them build such device, they are stuck. (They could possibly negotiate to destroy both their devices.)
This again depends on how predictable the situation is. Whether it is something like “you have 10x more resources than me, you are virtually guaranteed to win” (so I know when to use the doom device) or like “you can win by a surprise, such as using a resource I don’t know that you have, or by a random outcome, such as having a spell that wins the game depending on a coin flip” (so I am never sure whether this is the moment to use the doom device until it is too late).
tl;dr—I think the dynamics would depend a lot on implementation details
Right, we wouldn’t want it to be possible to easily build doom devices. Good point.
I think the right balance would be something like “If player 1 is snowballing and invading player 2, player 2 can sell their soul to get a decent chance of defending against player 1 and a small chance of outright turning the tide and beating them, but even if they maximally sell their soul they still might lose, and if they push Player 1 too much then player 1 probably has a chance to retaliate by selling THEIR soul...”