Brilliantly, this avoids the prisoner's dilemma of a bash-the-leader situation. In many other high-interactivity games, players are disincentivized to bash the leader, but they all want others to engage in conflict, because conflict weakens both parties. In Hansa Teutonica, players should actively seek to block the leader - and anyone else! - because blocking is its own benefit. That cutthroat zero-sum nature of a lot of abstracts is not present.
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yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness