Tournament Proposal
 

0. Signing up!
If you want to play, leave a message to that effect in the thread, or send me a PM, or both. When the maps are ready, the first thing to do will be to pick your 9 favorite nations from the EA, in descending order. Be sure to pick TWO ocean nations and SEVEN land nations, since there is a chance the map will have two ocean start sites on it (I think the maps will have either two or none.)

1. Qualifying rounds, nation selection
Three rounds of qualifications, with victory point accumulation - one VP in each capital, two VP in each "treasure province" (see maps, below).
Each of the three rounds will be played in a different age - each player will rank their nation preferences in descending order (and in secret!) for each age. The players are then awarded their highest-ranked remaining, allowed choice, one at a time, in random order in the first round - in subsequent rounds/ages, those who were forced to take lower-ranked picks automatically pick before those who got their first choice in the first round.

Water nations will only be allowed if the random map (see maps, below) happens to have enough water start sites.

Anyone who stales more than *once* gets set to computer, automatically, and earns no VP that round. The time limits will be fairly long and somewhat flexible, however (anyone who has been in one of my games knows I always try to make sure no-one stales.)

2. Advancement to playoff game(s)
Anyone who *wins* a qualifying game goes to the playoff game(s).

If there are slots left over (either on purpose, or because the same player won a game in more than one round), they will be awarded as wildcards among the losers^H^H^H^H^H^Hnon-winners, according to total VP accumulated among all three games.
-- note: does this encourage turtling too much?

The age in which a playoff game is played is determined thusly - sum the VP earned by each participant in the qualifying game played in each age. Highest total VP is the age for that playoff game. If there is more than one playoff game, I'll assign players on 3 criteria:
1. Players who have never faced eachother will all meet in the playoff, if that is possible.
2. Remaining slots will be assigned by seed - with highest seed playing lowest seed, etc.

In the playoff rounds, nation selection priority is given by seed - highest total VP earned gets first choice in every playoff game - again, nation selection "ballots" are secret.
If there is more than one playoff game, the winners (and probably 2nd placers) will play a championship game.

3. Game settings
Qualifying games - renaming on, all other settings default.
Playoff games - renaming on, three provinces to start, all other settings default.
-- EDITED --

4. Maps
Obviously the game has a significant element of chance to it - which I regard as essential in any decent game (the ability to anticipate, prepare for and/or exploit the unexpected is a profound skill) - but early setbacks, especially a lousy start, have a cumulative effect on the course of the entire game.
The maps will be randomly-generated, wrap-around maps supplied by Paradox Bringer's random map generator, when he's willing to release it to the public.
Each map will have as close to 7 start locations as is possible given participation level (this means slightly under half the players will advance to the playoffs.)
Each start location will have at least 5 neighbors, not counting sea, swamp or waste provinces. For sea start locations, deep sea neighbors will not count, and no more than 2 neighbors will be land provinces.
There will be at least three provinces separating any pair of start sites.
All start-location neighbors will be large, site-rich provinces.
Each map will also have "treasure" provinces, likewise separated by 3 provinces from all start locations and from all other treasure provinces. One province lakes and islands have priority as selection as treasure provinces - other provinces are selected if they have few total neighbors.
Number of treasure provinces will vary, but approximately equal in number to the start sites.
The treasure provinces will have fixed names, drawn from my list of 64 pre-configured treasure provinces, which will be available for everyone to look at, so once you know the name of a treasure province you'll also know exactly what guards it.

5. House rules / mods
NONE! Play triple bless vanheim to your little black heart's content.
Since this is supposed to be a tournament of skill in the game-as-shipped, I won't be using any balancing mods.
I will use the latest official patch and I will install any official patches immediately upon release.

---
Did I miss anything? Any suggestions?

Does anyone think this is less than scrupulously fair?

If you'd be interested in *playing* in such a tournament, let me know.

Re: Tournament Proposal
 

Heh, I'm guessing people who aren't interested won't be voting much, so the poll will probably be mostly people saying hells yeah.

Where do I sign up?

Re: Tournament Proposal
 

Might need some diplo rules, possibly along the lines of No Alliances.

Re: Tournament Proposal
 

Sounds like fun. I'll play.

Re: Tournament Proposal
 

Me too.

Re: Tournament Proposal
 

I just hope the desire to be number one does not produce cheaters.

Re: Tournament Proposal
 

Sign up by replying to the thread http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif. 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:

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
nief
arc
saur
lanka
aby
erm
r'lyeh
</pre><hr />

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.

Re: Tournament Proposal
 

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.

Re: Tournament Proposal
 

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

Re: Tournament Proposal
 

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.