I'm just thinking here, and this might not be workable, I don't know much of the various voting systems or reasons for anything. But I'm thinking of a way the plan voting system might be improved.
Sorry if some of this is stupid or impossible. I'm just brainstorming here.
I think the plan vote could be broken up into 3 distinct phases. It might take longer to do but it should be a more satisfying interactive system. I hope.
The first phase would be national actions and responses to things like attacks and nemesis actions.
Each category, martial diplomacy learning and so on, would have the number of actions as the number of votes people can make. So each person could vote for one action and hero in Occult and two different actions and assigned heros in learning. If someone only cares about specific actions they could vote just for them and ignore the rest. A example would be if they only cared about human genetics or investigating employees that round.
The highest martial one would win, the highest two diplomacy, two stewardship and so on.
In the event the two highest voted actions are the same action but with different heros or recruitments the highest one wins and the second action slot goes to the next highest different action in the category.
After the voting there ends we have national actions and heros locked.
After this point anyone that has earned exp could assign it to national actions as normal.
The second phase is personal actions and quests.
All remaining heros not removed by the first phase are then voted on what personal actions people want them to take. The highest voted per hero wins. If people only care about a few heros personal actions they could just vote on those and ignore the rest.
If people want to do a quest they could assign up to 5 of the remaining heros and vote for it. There would also be a "don't go on a quest" vote option. If the total quest votes outnumber the don't go on a quest votes then the quest proceeds and the highest voted quest team is selected and removed from the personal action list.
This ends the second phase and all heros should be locked at this point.
Third phase is items and miscellaneous.
Now we know what all the heros are doing. Voting is listing a item and hero you want to attach to it. Highest vote wins. This phase should be pretty quick since we don't have that many useful items to assign but the number will only increase.
Once that's done we have the complete plan done with each individual voting on the specific stuff they want instead of sorting through a dozen complete plans trying to find one they can live with or trying to convince people to change one or two things in their plan.
So... thoughts?
Does this seem like a good idea? A terrible idea? Completely impossible for reasons i haven't thought of? Stupidity complicated and hard?
Right now I think it could work. It would just extend one vote into three.
And I have no idea how hard it would be to manage. Hopefully not to bad.
I'd wait until we actually test approval voting before making radical and labor-intensive overhauls of the voting system which still fail to eliminate all of the potential flaws with the turn votes.
Because the issue with running unplanned votes for large, interconnected turn votes is that people make choices with certain assumptions in mind about what other choices are being made. That's why planned voting exists.
For example, lets say we have 8 Income, a couple of popular options cost 5, and most people want to hire the Commodore. Without planned voting, it's easy to pick both of the costly options without settling on any of the income-producing actions, throwing us into the red before even accounting for the Dickens, even if nobody would have voted to spend all of our money on national actions under a planned voting system.
Alternatively, some people may want to take an action like Move Doofhawk now, while some people might want to take Comedize Supply Lines
specifically before taking Doofhawk to reduce the Doofhawk DC. It would be easy enough for both options to win, at which point the people who won the Comedize vote aren't actually happy because the Comedize bonus can't be applied to Doofhawk that turn, making the action something of a waste.
Or people could be faced with [Short-Term Problem], have two different options to address the problem, and all agree that we should spend one action on the problem because spending both would be a waste. And then accidentally vote for both options anyway, because there wasn't a consensus on which option was better.
Or people could accidentally vote in two different options they wanted the Yang Talisman for, and end up taking an action without being able to assign it the artifact that made them want to take the action in the first place.
Or people could split a vote on an option most people want between two different heroes - say, something Genetics with Jumba vs with Janus - enough that neither option wins.
And so on. I could sit here and come up with flaws in an unplanned vote system for this quest all day; the point is that it isn't a silver bullet, that it would make our difficulties with long-term coordination even worse than they already are, and that it would be far more labor-intensive to try out than approval voting to boot.
(After all, it's actively harder to run non-approval voting than approval voting on SV. With non-approval voting, you need to check to make sure each user is only voting for one thing each.)
