Tournament Proposal

[DrPraetorious]

Sign up by replying to the thread . If you want, you can send me a PM with your prioritized list of nation picks for age 1 - if you can attach it as a .txt file I can make sure not to look at it. Use at least the first three letters of the nation name, or the nation number (your choice). For example:

Code:

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nief

arc

saur

lanka

aby

erm

r'lyeh

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Make at least 7 selections. The maps will probably have 7 land starts and 2 sea starts - and 7 start locations will be used - but I might decide to have 7 starts, and if any of them are sea people will be forced to take sea positions. Thoughts?

Title the file yournick_1.txt

Unfortunately, there isn't really any way to enforce a "no alliances" rule - and it raises the question of what exactly qualifies as an "alliance".

I'd consider a rule that no-one is allowed to send gold, gems or magic items to anyone else. Actually, if there were an option to prevent players from trading, I'd set it. An honor system is great, but making it impossible to cheat is much preferable.

I will say - no *prior* alliances.

[Sir_Dr_D]

I am interested. But Iw ouldl ike tomake the folowing comments

1) I don't like that idea of setting random events down to rare. This will garantee everyone will pick misfortune 3. Could you not instead increase the number of starting provinces, so a bad luck event at the beginning is easier to recover from?

2)i take it the map size is large enough such that early bless rush strategies are balanced out? Things would be unfair otherwise.

3) Since this is a skill contest, a person should be able to play any nation. I would much prefer that random nations are used.

4) If you want a no alliance rule, you could always say that no messages are allowed to be sent at all.

[Teraswaerto]

There is no way to stop people from sending messages. Rules that can't be enforced should be avoided.

[DrPraetorious]

On reflection, I agree with Teraswaerto - if a "no messages" setting appears in the next patch, I will set it.

Okay - in the playoff round, random events will remain common, but each player will begin with 3 provinces. That seems like it would buffer bad events somewhat but still allow SC pretenders their place (which is the problem with multi-province starts.)

The number of start locations and the distance between them will tend to restrict maps to 200 provinces+, depending on how mountainous they are, etc. That's somewhere between a "medium" and "large" random map.

I'm not doing random nations. I don't want to start a flamewar over it, but I think that tests breadth of familiarity with the game nations, rather than skill as such. Put another way - I expect people to bring strategies they've tried and tested in other MP games and try them out on eachother, which you can't generally do if you're handed a nation you haven't played much.

However, I think a skilled player should have a winning strategy worked out with at least a few of the nations in each period, so that's what I'm requiring. It is entirely possible that no-one will choose Bandar Log - fine, that is acceptable. To an extent, this will also have the benefit of creating a "strongest nation" poll for each era.

[Gandalf Parker]

People will still end up using email, irc, PMs on this forum, etc.

One of the things I was considering was creating a game on my server and doing "blind emails". Such as creating accounts for Man, Ulm, Ermor, etc on my server and watching the email traffic for violations such as setting up a way to converse outside of those emails. But it seemed more trouble than its worth.

[DrPraetorious]

Yeah, but you could conceivably prevent people from sending gems, etc. I'm not sure how much this would do to prevent people from forming alliances - okay, I'm sure it wouldn't prevent people from forming alliances. But, if you cannot trade magic items with your allies the benefit is considerably reduced.

[Gandalf Parker]

I wonder if sending gems or equipment shows up in game logs. If it does then at least you would have a way of enforcing the rule.

[Ironhawk]

DrPraetorious said:
Okay - in the playoff round, random events will remain common, but each player will begin with 3 provinces. That seems like it would buffer bad events somewhat but still allow SC pretenders their place (which is the problem with multi-province starts.)

This setup favors using Misfortune as a point mine. If I know that there is only a 33% chance of my capital getting hit by a bad event in the first few turns, instead of a 100% chance, then I will be much more likely to use Misfortune. After all, once your empire expands beyond say 10 provs, misfortune isnt nearly as crippling as it should be, anymore.

I understand that the intent here is to protect regular, non-misfortune players from a crippling event. But the side effect is that it very much favors misfortune abuse.

[Dragonlord]

I agree that diplomacy is important, to me it was often the most fun part of online MP strategy games, but the ones I was in we tended to roleplay all our diplomatic exchanges over email. Is that ever done with dom3?

Also, I have been thinking about favorite nations but do not have that much preference because so far in singleplayer I have only ever used 4 different nations. Why is it supposed to be secret anyway, what your prefs are?

[llamabeast]

I think that diplomacy's one of the most fun parts of MP as well, but if you decided that a tournament should be based strictly on how well players fight and exclude the diplomacy part of the skill, that doesn't seem unreasonable to me either. It might be an interesting change to have no diplomacy options (personally I tend to rather rely on it).

I don't think you need to worry about cheating though. It seems to me that this community is exceptionally fair and mature. If a couple of new people come along with a cheating attitude, they probably won't be as good as the experienced players anyway, and frankly I don't think anyone would try to cheat in the first place. I think just trusting people creates a much nicer atmosphere.