I hate making picks in games when I am busy. I need lots of foreplay to get excited about the strategic options in certain games.

A solution: 1v1 autodistribution ladder.

There have been hundreds of thousands of 1v1 ladder template games played. Why not have a committee of intelligent players look at those games and select games with interesting boards and starts.

Then, add those boards/starts to a pool of fair autodistribution templates.

How to play it:

1. The board used is chosen randomly from the pool of hundreds of boards. Pogo.com's Risk autodistributions were/are that way (but their boards were/are limited to about six or so).

2. The game starts First Turn. No picks or stupid tricks needed to determine anything. Player A and Player B are determined randomly. Both players have an equal possibility to win the game, based on their starts.

3. Warlord locations (4) and wasteland locations (10) are always visible as 4? and 10?, unless the player has broken through the fog -- ie, borders the territory, in which case you see 4 or 10, no question mark.

I would much prefer this than having to bother to care about making picks. Getting my brain to think and care about a new game sometimes takes days. In most cases, the play is what is interesting, not the picks. And with hundreds of thousands of 1v1 open games and ladder games having been played, there isn't too much more we can do to make better picks. Let's just use the boards that have already proven to give rise to interesting/fun games.

Edited 9/3/2015 03:29:12

i think it sounds interesting. it makes you play with what you get.

my only problem with it is that there would be no way to tell if you got bad starting positions so losing a equal footing game would take away the same points as a bad footing game.

also would there be something to make sure that you don't spawn in a bonus with a wasteland.

Play on Beren most famous template Earthsea. Less picks reduce rock paper scissors effect.


How about a better bank setting ? You have a low timer and high timer. Going higher than low.timer will.increment boot meter. Next thing is that the boot meter is common, it is actually the difference of commit time between players. If both players go over low timer, they will not receive penalty. Now, it could also be possible to incrememt default by 10 secs or so each turn. On large maps, it will scale well.




It would be very interesting to have a scalable timer based on number of controlled territories and turn number.

Nice idea.

I tried doing this as a custom scenario, but it reveals where the starting slots are for both teams :(

If it weren't for this and point 3(which is obviously integral to make this work), we could have done this as a CLOT.

My idea: all warlords are visible as 4? throughout the game until you penetrate the fog. This requires programming.

Wihout as much extra programming: Turn 1 starts right away. But history show us Turn 0.