Toaster Posted:

I would very much like to have instead to the ability to create a. "Empty" seat.  What you'd essentially have is a computer-controlled player who placed their units randomly each turn and made no attacks.  Territory / continent bonuses and factories would be gained by the empty-seated player just like any other player.  Designers would be able to assign seat number(s) to the Empty Seat(s) and could have multiple ones per board setup. 

You could do a bunch of cool stuff, like include neutral-killing for elimination bonuses or gain cards given to the Empty Seat at game initialization. 

This could allow for a more interesting way for players to vary the number of random neutrals by increasing or decreasing the number of Empty Seats allowed to be in the game.  As in, a designer could allow for 1-3 empty seats at the host's discretion.  If the host wants light neutrals, then invite just 1 empty seat.  If you want heavy neutrals, then invite 3 empty seats to your game. 

In simultaneous territory selection games, the Empty Seat would mean that you could have a random distribution of neutrals unknown to the players.

This could even be a nice way of allowing designers to use these Empty Seat(s) to initially test a new board themselves w/o having to wait (or annoy) their fellow players with finding missing borders or misplaced factories.  Of course, the "Only 1 Active Seat" games would only be available for DEV games.

So the 'default" would be 1 empty seat, but with no bonuses, etc?  That way most games would get light neutrals.

The feature would necessarily need to be disableable by the designer.

Personally, I would like neutrals dealt to be a % determined by designers, but I like the larger idea and think it's worth exploring.

One of the things I like about it is that it's possibly an evolutionary step to bots actually playing the game, which has been discussed in these forums a bit before..