Tournaments - help needed

[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.