Tournaments - help needed

[Kristoffer O]

Hello all!

BF_Napoleon is trying to set up a dom2 tournament at the-battelfield (there is another thread on the topic).

I want you to tell him and me what settings you would prefer in a tounament. Many of you have probably played more MP than I have.

When the time is right we can do a poll on the matter.

Best of course is consensus.

Victory by Dominion
Victory Point (by # of Capitals)
Victory by Provinces

Any of those can be easily broken down into a Rating system and doesn't leave the Tournament in a lurch because of long drawn out games that take months to complete.

My guess would be an average game Lasts ~40 Turns based on the conditions and a long 'hard' game would end ~60.

But that is also determined by the map and by # of players on the map in question.

[Gandalf Parker]

For a ladder something will have to be agreed on.

How about:
a map that is in the demo (aran or eye)
limit of 40 turns
spit out a score.html and add up all the numbers for every nation
high score wins

That way even demo'ers can take a stab at it.
Now come on. Thats a pretty wild plan. SURELY that will spark some better suggestions.

[ April 27, 2004, 23:18: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[Tris]

The problem is coming up with a good format for a tournament that doesn't unreasonably favour one or other nation, and still lets people play Dominions 2.

It would be stupid to have each tournament game Last 200 turns, it would be annoying if Ulm became the only nation to ever win, and it would be sad if we lost the cooler spells that you get a bit later in the game because of a limit.

A 40 turn limit sounds reasonable, though this is still over a month at 1 turn/day.

I'd suggest accelerated settings to make it possible to bring powerful magic in meaningfully within the short turn limit.

Fast Research is obvious, perhaps also starting with more than 1 province, to accelerate the start of the game.

Perhaps people more experienced than I can suggest other settings which would help balance the races, given fast research, a few starting provinces, and a 40 turn limit.

[tinkthank]

I think the suggestion of Aran is very good, the smaller the better.
Victory by small number of VPs, where many are available would be good, something like
Map: Aran
Victory: 6 VP required
# VP: 12 + 1 per Capital
Independents: 4 or 5 (just to speed things up)

This would give many people a good chance, including those that prefer sneakiness.

I wouldnt put a 40 turn cap limit, however, I find that would give magically-oriented nations a real handicap and leave a lot of interesting aspects of the game out.
Instead, one could imagine that tournament players must submit at least 10 turns per week. Games will be sure to be over in 6-8 weeks.

EDIT: perhaps this is a more helpful suggestion: Make the tournaments quasi-regional by time zone(e.g. Europe, North/South America, Asia/Australia). (People could conceivably compete in more than 1 zone.) This way, one might stipulate that a tournament competitor must submit 14 turns per week, or even more detailed (2 turns per day, 3 on weekends, or whatever you feel is reasonable). This is of course suboptimal in many ways, but would get rid of the need for a 40-turn cap. Also, one could conceivably have the European champ(s) / American champ(s) / Asian champ(s) play each other in One Big Final Round. Could be a bad idea if you were considering offering a monetary award (since you would need to award each of the champs in each zone), but I suppose that is up to you.
I think it would not be unfair to say that a full Version of the game is required to compete, and thus demo-owners are not allowed (in case games *do* exceed 40), but that is just me. Or: Demo Version owners can compete, but if they are not killed off by turn 40, they drop out?? Sort of an evil incentive....

[ April 28, 2004, 11:33: Message edited by: tinkthank ]

[Leif_-]

A rather unusual suggestion, perhaps, but maybe one "match" in the tournament might consist of several parallell games with different settings, and the players score is determined by some sume of their score across all the games?

I.e. one might have that one turnament match consists of one game with high resources and low independent strength, another game with standard resources, easy research and high independent strength and one standard vanilla game. Each player plays the same nation in all three games, and plays turns for all three games every day.

So, to win, the player will have to be consistently good in several different "Dominions Categories"

[Tris]

You just gave me an idea:

Create a standard game with (for example) 5 nations in. You are allocated a nation, your opponents chosen randomly. The game runs for a set number of turns.

Now your score (however you want to determine it) is compared with the scores of the other people who were playing the same nation as you in the set game.

This has several advantages:

You are not advantaged or disadvantaged by the turn limit, research speed, starting provinces etc etc - because even if your race is disadvantaged, you are playing against people who are in exactly the same situation.

Over several rounds it tests the overall skill at playing Dominions. It is impossible to win the tournament by practicing with only one race, and playing them to death, or with one powerful combination of spells. The winner will be great at playing Dominions, not just playing Jotunheim, or Marignion or whatever.

It means you can have a large tournament without it taking forever. At most 17 players can play in a Dominions 2 game, but if you run the same 10 player scenario 100 times then each player is playing against 100 others.

You don't have to knock people out - which means having a bad game doesn't mean people have lost completely. Instead give people ranking points based on where they came out of the people who played their race. (1st = 1, 2nd = 2, 3rd = 3 and so on). The player with the lowest number of points after X rounds wins.