[risque] Bidding on countries.

[Douglas Zander <dzander@solaria.sol.net>]

First, I wish to congradulate Richard and his family on the arrival of
their twins.  May you have happiness always and sleep whenever you can 
find it.  :-)

I am wondering if we could have an order to our bidding and then if we don't
win the first choice (because of a higher bid) then the points will
"trickle" down to our other choices automatically.  This way, we can give
*every* country a rank in which we want to win it; the top of the list
is most important to us, on down to lower rank.  Then what the server does
is alternate between players and "bid off" the country that is on the top
of that players list.  The points that the losing player(s) would have
used to bid on that country are evenly distributed to the rest of the
countries on his list.  (or maybe they are simply discarded  :-)
Now we have *two* indicators to decide who gets a country.  First, we have
the actual bid amount for the country, second, we have the rank that the
player gave it in his list according to importance.  Does this make sense?
For example if player A has 'peru' on the top of list and he bids at 10,
and player B has 'peru' in second position and he also bids at 10 then
Player A will get 'peru' and spend 10 points for it.  All losing players
will then have 'peru' removed from their list and whatever each had bid
for 'peru' will be redistributed as evenly as possible to the remaining
countries on his list.  In our example Player B will get his 10 points 
distributed one each to the top 10 countries on his list.  After 'peru'
(which was on top of Player A's list) is bid off then the server goes to
Player B's list and finds the top of his list says, 'eaf' for 8 points,
and the process repeats again with 'eaf', and then to the next player,
and so on...   (The bid amount takes precedence over position in list,
if Player C bid 9 points for 'eaf' then Player C will get 'eaf' even 
though it was on the bottom of his list.  (First bid amounts are used
to determine winner, then ties are broken with rank in list, then I 
guess further ties are broken with whoever has fewer countries at the 
time of the bid, then further ties are broken with a random draw?)

--
 Douglas Zander                |  
 dzander@solaria.sol.net       | 
 Shorewood, Wisconsin, USA     |