Conquer Club

Auto generate balanced map suggestion

Concise description:
How about an option for new games to force a generated fair map. By a fair map I mean that everyone's troop due amount is the same.
So if the system generated the starting map and one person starts with a bonus and the other does not, it just simply generates another map.

I know that initial deployment is random and this happens at times, but for tournament games it would be a bit more fair. Getting to a final game and starting with 3 troops due and my opponent has 9 for 2 bonuses does kinda suck.

Also this is a bigger concern for just 1v1 games. With multiple players and one starts with a bonus it doesn't matter as much.

How this will benefit the site and/or other comments:
1. Makes games more based on strategy rather than luck
2. I'll swear less at the site

thoughts?

The problem with this is that to do that, basically you would have to use a random function that also prioritizes certain territories to make a fair drop. In so doing, you would have to code every map differently for the drop, and I really don't think that this is feasible.

Darwins_Bane wrote:The problem with this is that to do that, basically you would have to use a random function that also prioritizes certain territories to make a fair drop. In so doing, you would have to code every map differently for the drop, and I really don't think that this is feasible.

Not necessarily; you could just do a random generation of the map as normal, and if any players have unequal expected troops due, then just "re-roll" the generator.

Metsfanmax wrote:

Darwins_Bane wrote:The problem with this is that to do that, basically you would have to use a random function that also prioritizes certain territories to make a fair drop. In so doing, you would have to code every map differently for the drop, and I really don't think that this is feasible.

Not necessarily; you could just do a random generation of the map as normal, and if any players have unequal expected troops due, then just "re-roll" the generator.

Well I, for some reason, think people will start arguing if a certain player got a majority of the bonus if this gets implemented. Like Player A got all but 1 on Aussie and SA on the Classic.

TheForgivenOne wrote:

Metsfanmax wrote:

Darwins_Bane wrote:The problem with this is that to do that, basically you would have to use a random function that also prioritizes certain territories to make a fair drop. In so doing, you would have to code every map differently for the drop, and I really don't think that this is feasible.

Not necessarily; you could just do a random generation of the map as normal, and if any players have unequal expected troops due, then just "re-roll" the generator.

Well I, for some reason, think people will start arguing if a certain player got a majority of the bonus if this gets implemented. Like Player A got all but 1 on Aussie and SA on the Classic.

I agree; I feel the same way about this suggestion as I do the similar suggestion about determining who goes first (I don't want the fundamental mechanics of the game to differ from the game that caused me to join this site in the first place).

We've already learned in that other topic that "same fundamental mechanics as Risk" trumps "fun gameplay". Also, as TFO stated, if you fix a problem, people might still complain about something else, so why bother fixing it? Might as well move this to Rejected.

You don't only implement improvements to stop people from complaining, you just want to make the game fairer.
Weeding out some of the unfair drops using a simple mechanism like this will improve fairness.

Also, when playing the boardgame I went to this site for originally with my friends, we would usually just redraw all the cards when somebody got a bonus, so I would like to see it happen here.

Only problem may be that in big maps with a lot of little bonuses (think waterloo, pearl harbor), the system may have to draw up to 50 times, and I don't know how long it takes the server to do that.

Humm. I didn't think about the big maps. The Hive would also be a problem.
Maybe on the large maps this "fair drop" option isn't available.

Also I am suggesting this as an option to the user starting up the game. It wouldn't be a system wide, you must conform change.
So tournament organizers can choice to use this or not.

Just as a FYI I had 3 1v1 tournament games this week where one player started with a bonus. The person with the bonus won all 3. ( I was only 1 of the 3 )