By Sergio Cherchyk

Introduction:

This tournament is an attempt to evaluate a different scoring system that was designed to allow a variability of balance for tournaments, scenarios or campaigns. We will be counting the victory points in a new way that, of course, I didn't test before.

Only registered players can sign in to play in this tournament.

Tournament structure:

The tournament will be played, if possible, by groups of three players. The best-scored one will access the playoffs.

The number of groups is not determined beforehand in order to allow the higher possible number of players to sign on. Since the results will be the subject of later statistical analysis, the more players the better.

Once everybody has signed up, the final structure will be defined and published. To determine the groups I will divide the total number of players into three lots according to their armie’s ranks, and then I will assign a player of each  lot to each tournament group randomly.

Rules:

We’ll adopt the home and away map system, so that the players have to choose their homeland maps. For those players not yet familiar with this system, it implies that everybody has to fight each other twice: once on his local map and once on the enemy’s local turf

In addition to that, each player have to select two armies: one having a value of 80 points or less, and the other one with at least 81 points. Each player will choose just one Home Map (a home map for each army should be surely better, but I’m afraid that I’ve already did this tourney TOO complicated).

So that, in a group of three, a single player should play 16 games.

Basically, we’ll assign a value to each army, which are reflected in a table. This value was estimated to achieve a certain balance, but these are experimental values, and this tournament was made to test them (and, hopefully, to get a lot of fun).

The players have to provide their army compositions in order to determine, from the beginning, the value of their armies. Any player can choose only one army composition (i.e. mounted/dismounted units, or any other variation will be not allowed). The General element can be changed freely whenever the player so decides.

The players have to inform to me their e-mail addresses, optionally indicating if they don’t want this address to be accessible from the tournament home page.

There are no limits to choice the armies, and many players could use the same armies.

Scoring System:

The scoring system, which will be now described, could sound a little complicated but notice that you only have to provide the battle result, leaving all the calculations to the me.

In a first step, the raw result points will be calculated as follows:

 victorious player 30 points

 kill a unit 10 point (destroying an enemy’s scythed chariot doesn’t count, as usual, towards the victory conditions, but it will counted as 10 points to the player that destroys it). Notice that you don’t lose any points for losing any units but the General.

 killing/losing the Gen +10/-10 point (so that, kill a general will add 20 points to the score, 10 for the unit itself, and the other 10 for the General inside. Losing a Gen, therefore, substracts 10 points.)

 taking over/losing the Camp, no additional points (only the 30 points as per the regular rules), but who loses his camp has -10 penalty.

 the minimum amount of points in a given battle for a player is zero.

 there’s no limit to the maximum.

Example:

 In a game African Vandal (full Kn) face the Incas with a result of 4 –2 (Vandals win)

In the first step we assign 70 points to the Vandals and 20 to the Incas.

The value for these armies is:

Inca = 57

Vandal = 108

The final result is:

Vandal = 70 x 57/108 = 36,9 (Rounded up to 37)

Inca = 20 x 108/57 = 37,8 (Rounded up to 38)

This extreme example shows how an all Aux-Ps army can prevail over a heavy armored one, at least in the score. It is obvious that a result of 2- 4 is very difficult to get for such a weak army against a Kn army. Of course, in a mainly BG map, the Incas could even win, but it is still very difficult, an in open terrain there are almost "dead meat" (remember than we are performing home and away maps).

In the example we can say that both players achieved a tactical victory. In a 4 – 3 result the score should reflect a Pyrrhic victory for the Vandals and a Strategic Victory for the Incas, which gain  more points than their enemies, even if they were defeated by DBA rules.

Player’s Duties:

Each player should provide every battle result of those combats fought on his homeland, regardless he won it or lost it. The battle results could be posted in the forum or sent to me by e-mail, but I strongly recommend that you use the results form provided with this WEB page. This form should, hopefully, avoid any misunderstood derived from the different result formats that every player is used to use. (At least I won’t feel that my work creating this form was in vain :) )

Additionally, every player should keep a replay copy of any game played on his home turf or don’t delete any of these games until the round where they belong has been declared over.

Tie Breaks:

I don't expect to find too many ties in the tourney, but just in case, the winner will be the one with the lowest value army, if this is still a tie the one with the highest value army wins (remember that we will be using two armies for each player, so this tiebreaker would encourage a bit to take extreme options), if this is still undecided the winner will be the palyer with the highest number of victories.

Unit Value Table:

 

El	Kn	HCh	WWg	Art	LCh	Cv	LH	Cm
9	9	9	8	7	7	7	6	7
SCh	Sp	Pk	Bd	Wb	Aux	Bw	Ps	CF
8	7	6	8	5	5	5	4	...

A note about balance:

As it stated above, this tournament was created to test a system that should allow the organizer to change the balance of a given battle at will. I think that it is impossible to ensure perfect balance in a DBA tournament, unless you use the same armies for every player. Therefore, to find the “perfect balance” is not my main objective in this tournament. I’m not looking for even a better balance than that we have now, in open tournaments, either. My first interest was to create an open tournament where the heavy-mounted/heavy-foot armies were not the favorite choice. Anyway, we can bias the balance just adjusting the Unit Value List to fit everybody's preferences.

I don’t really know now what kind of army will be the most favored, but I know that I’m giving a chance to win the tourney to Later Libyan and other "real man’s" armies

I believe that the system, and variations of this, could be useful for many other purposes in DBAol. It, however, is perhaps not the best idea for DBA, where you can vary the number of units and change the number of units to kill to achieve a victory, in order to change the balance.

To conclude, I hope you can help me to try something new and, most important, enjoy the process!