Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Nation Assignment/Placement
 

I need a map with fixed positions, so I can test it. Not sure why theDemon has not submitted the nation choices. We finalized them today.

Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Nation Assignment/Placement
 

I have nation assignments and placements for both teams.

Thank the gods, we now enter the final phase of organization:

Pretender design/upload.

Ling, I believe one of your cohorts was working on a test map for you guys.

Some of you have been extremely quiet, where's the trash talking and all that good stuff?

Can I assume everyone is OK with/wants a hands off capitols for 5 turns NAP? Dr. P?

Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Pretender Design/Upload
 

NAPs are for sissies, but if that's what everyone wants I won't object except to point out how weak and stupid our opponents are.

If they wish to prolong their agony for five months with some mewling NAP, that's fine by me.

Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Pretender Design/Upload
 

It's not a NAP :) It's just a no attacks on capitals before Turn 6 rule. If you Vets agree. You can fight anywhere else before then....

Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Pretender Design/Upload
 

Now that's the spirit! :D I can't think of any good riposte right now though - any good comebacks, fellow Noobs?

Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Pretender Design/Upload
 

There's a game at llamaserver.

Does that mean we can start uploading pretenders there?

Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Pretender Design/Upload
 

Maybe we can fight amongst ourselves for awhile Dr P, just to pass the time until our opponents can field an army.

Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Pretender Design/Upload
 

Not really interested in playing a huge MP game yet, but I did want to comment on how you assign nations.

The most fair way to do it would be to have each player submit a ranked list from 1:n where n is the number of nations available. You then minimize the sum of squared rankings for nations awarded across all players. This is actually a remarkably simple thing to do - one way to accomplish this is if you think of it as a player : nation matrix where the elements are the jth players rank of nation k, you're looking for an ordering of the columns (nations) to minimize the sum of the diagonal (row k gets assigned column k). There are n! possible orderings, so you don't want to actually brute force it for 24 players, but there are clever things you can do. (For example, an heuristic search would get you an approximate best answer, a principle coordinate analysis would tell you who's rankings are similar to each other and let you break the problem into sub-problems in most cases, and I'm sure someone better at math than I am can figure out something truly clever to do to arrive at the actual solution).

Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Pretender Design/Upload
 

...

As my professor in System Analysis and Operations Research used to say: "Usually the best solution to a problem is the one that gets done in time."

Interesting concept, but I feel we spent enough time with this as it is already. :)

Re: Noobs vs. Vets III: Revolution, MA, CBM, Pretender Design/Upload
 

the flaw in a solved system is that players can change their lists in order to exploit the formula and increase their chances of getting that one nation they really really want... if you were to use a solved system the lists would have to be kept totally confidential... additionally with only two players (two teams) in the game there is no reason at all for something like this... the forming of the list itself became a game in which players attempted to take into account what they thought the other player's list would be....

the system we used ended up being almost entirely optimal we left the team that picked first the vets get pick1 and4 but gave the other team pick2and3 and then alternated throughout