The Great War

[mookiemcgee]

Thanks Shoop, I know this was addressed lightly earlier in the thread(what you see is what you get)... But if it isn't a rule, and only a few people are doing it only out of respect I think I might politely decline to follow it myself...

Mookie is a dick and will try to get a leg up by taking his first turn before you get a snap. You have been warned, please be sure to do the same to him!!!!

[Dukasaur]

12 hour fog rule in Great War tourneys?

Almost no one I've played with seems to wait 12 hours (or for my ok) when these games start, so I assumed that the 12 hour fog rule wasn't in place for these tourneys.

However I was just reprimanded by an new opponent for not waiting (the games were only up for about 10-15 min before I started taking my turns), he has asked I share the info on my turns , which i did out of respect.

Frankly it puts me off quite a bit that my respectfulness puts me at a competitve disadvantage in this set, while I'm getting run over in other sets with other players that don't wait. I'm personally not comfortable asking others to share their first turn info, its part of the game as far as I am concerned...

What is the main intent regarding this rule in 'great war' tourneys per you "the management". I would like to have some clarity moving forward. Again i understand its not an enforceable rule, but do you intend on people obeying this or not? Should I say tough luck to the next opponent that asks when i dont wait? My opinion is this rule has a place in clan war games, but in tourneys where many people arent in clans and may not even know there is such a informal rule it seems out of place to ask people to obey this.

Its clearly no a rule in this tourney and many don't wait. I always wait out of respect for my opponent and I know the people I play regularly do the same. But clearly there is a bunch that don't. So I would say its your call.

This.

I don't enforce fog rules. Some people follow them, some don't. If I'm playing against someone who I think might expect it, I wall them and ask.

[Dukasaur]

With Worldwide Warfare Week winding down, there are still three WWW tourneys (Falkland Islands, Qurna, and Dogger Bank) open for sign-ups. When the last three fill, I will publish stats for how many people signed up in total.

Meanwhile, it's time to get back to our regularly-scheduled programming...

Tomorrow the Suez tournament will open:
[spoiler=raid on the suez may 3rd to 10th]Raid on the Suez

Egypt was in an odd position. Once a mighty imperial power itself, it had declined over the millennia, and by the dawn of the 20th century it was a dependency. Furthermore, it wasn't even a straightforward dependency. Legally, it was part of the Ottoman Empire. Economically, it was dependent on Britain and France, and militarily it was both tributary to the Ottoman Turks and occupied and administered by the British. Culturally, there was a strong desire for independence. This very peculiar set of divided loyalties was barely stable until 1914, but with the outbreak of war it could not be sustained any longer. The Ottomans needed to restore their authority in the area, while the British couldn't give up the Suez canal, crucial to the maintenance of their overseas territories and to their domestic trade.

In December of 1914, the British engineered the overthrow of Egypt's Khedive (hereditary ruler) Abbas Hilmi, who was opposed to the British occupation. They replaced him with the more-tractable Hussein Kamel and formally declared a Protectorate over Egypt.

The Ottoman 4th Army, nominally led by the Turk Djemal Pasha, but largely controlled by its German Chief of Staff, Kress von Kressenstein, prepared an attack. They had at their disposal about 25,000 troops, only a third of what the British had in Egypt, and did not expect to be able to capture and hold Egypt. What Djemal Pasha hoped to accomplish was to cross the Suez, fan out behind the British lines, and inspire Arabs to rise up and revolt against the British. What von Kressenstein hoped to accomplish was a little less ambitious. He hoped to sink enough ships in the Suez canal to make the canal useless for the duration of the war, and thus to seriously impair the British and Frech commercial empires.

Both the Turkish and British forces were typically imperial in nature. Only one fifth of the Turkish force was composed of Turks. The rest was mainly Arabs from Syria, as well as other ethnic groups from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Only one fifth of the British force was composed of troops from Britain. More than half were from India, along with a sizeable ANZAC contingent and a small regiment of local Bedouins.

With the Sinai having few roads, only one railroad, and the sea passage blocked by the British Navy, Pasha and von Kressenstein decided to make the difficult overland crossing, using old caravan routes and Bedouin camel tracks. To bring an army of 25,000 men across this difficult terrain, carrying everything including their own water on horse-drawn and camel-drawn wagons, was a feat in itself, comparable to the marches of ancient armies in the same region.

On February 3rd Ottoman Army reached the Suez Canal, built pontoon bridges, and forced its way across. They had some very remarkable achievements to be proud of: having made the Sinai crossing, achieving tactical surprise at the Canal, bridging it despite the British artillery, and comporting themselves generally quite well. Nonetheless, they were doomed. The British had 3-1 numerical superiority, a prepared defensive position, technological superiority, ample supply, and basically everything needed for a decisive victory. The heated part of the battle lasted barely 10 hours. By the end of the day the British had won. The Ottomans were retreating rapidly, and British gunboats moved in to blow up their pontoon bridges.

For more information:
on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_the_Suez_Canal
on kaiserscross: http://www.kaiserscross.com/188001/279622.html
on firstworldwar dot com: http://www.firstworldwar.com/battles/suez.htm
on 1914-18 dot net: http://www.1914-1918.net/suez.htm

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Round 1: Egypt had once been a mighty Empire itself.

Poly (2), No Spoils, Parachute, Fog
1 game each on the four Egypt maps
24 start, 16 advance

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Round 2: Forces from the battle came from many places around the Ottoman and British Empires

8-player Terminator, default settings
1 game each on Eastern Hemisphere, WW I Ottoman, Indian Empire, New Zealand, Middle East, Ancient Israel
16 start, 6 advance

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Round 3: In the end, it was a decisive and one-sided British victory. Sort of like Trafalgar.

Scores reset
6-player Standard, Flat Rate, Fog and Trench
5 games on the Trafalgar map

[/spoiler]

Also, Monday May 4th will be the last day that the Conquer Gods will drop random Cannon tokens. After that, it will be back to earning them the hard way...

[sm8900]

hi. how does this work exactly? do the maps shown actually correspond to the battles that they represent? just want t make sure I follow this. thanks.

[waauw]

hi. how does this work exactly? do the maps shown actually correspond to the battles that they represent? just want t make sure I follow this. thanks.

just auto-tournaments, click on the tournaments tab on top of your screen and you'll see what you're looking for.

[Dukasaur]

hi. how does this work exactly? do the maps shown actually correspond to the battles that they represent? just want t make sure I follow this. thanks.

It would be lovely if CC had 5,000 maps and we had one of every battle! Unfortunately, no. We have to work with what we have.

We can of course use maps of the place, and often we have more than one choice. If the battle is in France, we have France, France 2.1, and France 1789 to choose from. If the battle is in Italy, we can use Italy or Unification Italy or possibly even something like Imperium Romanum. The tourney that is currently up, Suez, was fought in Egypt, so I've used all four of our Egypt maps in round one.

Even with three France maps, there were something like 50 battles in France during the Great War, so the tourneys would quickly get repetitive. We try to switch it up and create a feeling of what was the most important feature of the battle. Here's some aspects of battle, and some of the ways we've represented them:

• We do have a couple general World War I maps -- Europe 1914 and Trench Warfare. Obviously, those get used quite often, but not, I hope, too often. With 1915 being the Gallipoli year, you will see WWI Gallipoli and WWI Ottoman used a lot this year.
• If it was a winter battle, and cold weather played a part, we've used the Antarctica map.
• If it was a summer battle, and hot weather played a part, we could simulate that with Africa II or maybe Oasis.
• I got lucky with the battle of Sandfontein -- that actually was a battle fought for control of an oasis, so I used the Oasis map pretty heavily there. The Battle of Tanga, which we did about a month ago, is colloquially known as "the Battle of the Bees" because it was frequently interrupted by troops running from attacks by aggressive African bees. Obviously, that immediately suggested the Hive map.
• If it was a fast paced battle where things changed rapidly, we can use Escalating Spoils to create fast games. Other settings that tend to produce fast games are Sunny, No Trench, Freestyle, and Unlimited forts.
• If it was a slow, ponderous battle where every inch took a week to gain, we can use Flat Rate and Trench to create slow games. Other settings that can be used to create a feeling of slowness include No Spoils, Adjacent Forts, and to some degree Fog.
• If the battle was heavily influenced by artillery bombardment, we can simulate that with Nuclear Spoils. We can also use maps where bombardment is important, like Waterloo, Arms Race, Stalingrad, or Duck and Cover.
• Betrayals and mutinies can be represented with Zombie spoils (your own troops turn against you.)
• Amphibious landings or surprise manouvres can be represented with Parachute reinforcements.
• If the terrain is a factor, we can look at the terrain maps we have on CC. If it's a big featureless flat field, we can use something like Feudal Epic that's a huge mass of grassland. Or, if we're in the mountains, we can use King of the Mountains as a map. In the first Masurian Lakes battle, James used the Great Lakes map to simulate fighting around the lakes. And so on.
• To avoid using the same maps over and over again, we try to think outside the box. Suez was a really one-sided British victory, so in the final round I used the Trafalgar map, which was another really one-sided British victory. In one tournament I'd already overused some of the obvious choices, so I noted that the German commander was from the Baltic coast, and I stuck in the Baltic Crusades map. In the Marne tournament I used the Steamworks map, with its balloons, to simulate the use of reconnaissance ballooons by the French. In Bita Paka I used Woodboro, because the battle was primarily fought for control of the radio station. That was actually the perfect map for the occasion, I'm really happy we had it.

Like waauw said, you can click on the autotournament details button, and that will tell you what maps and settings are used within it. If you want more information, the full description of all current tournaments is given in the fourth post of this thread, Current and Upcoming Tournaments (I apologise that "Upcoming" is a bit of a misnomer. We are working up against the clock quite a bit, so rarely is any Upcoming tourney posted much more than a day or two before it launches. That will improve as time goes on.) If you want to browse lists of previous tourneys in the series, you can look at the fifth post, http://www.conquerclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=207817#p4556461List of Previous Tourneys.

[mookiemcgee]

Are you sure you using the most up to date list of eligible games? It has changed over time... Usually if I start 5 - 1 v 1 games about 2 token drop (sometimes all form my opponent) at the start of the game. And virtually every win generates a token as well. If your in a larger game the odds of the drop go up significantly

[stealth99]

I have a suggestion but I first want to be clear that this post is not a challenge to our Automated Tie-breaking Procedures.
Having said that, you will need to familiarize yourself with CC's Tie-breaking Rules for Automated Tournaments Only:

TIE-BREAKER RULES

show

THE ISSUE - Players are being eliminated from too many Great War Tournaments, with identical win/loss records as player(s) who are advancing to the next round.

EXAMPLE I just advanced to the finals in this one:

http://www.conquerclub.com/player.php?mode=autotournament&tourney_id=12457

How do you think Coors1 feels about things? His record was identical to the record of all four finalists!! This cruel tie would have been broken by round speed OR by who joined first; believe it or not.

How often does something like this occur? Well I didn't cherry pick this example, it was the first one I came across in my overall search of my finished tournament games. This situation occurs in almost every tournament, with multiple examples occurring in most tournaments.

BIGGER ISSUE - When the problem occurs in the final round, players are eliminated with identical records as the player who outright wins the entire event.

BIGGER EXAMPLE - What happened here is just plain sad. Aren't we here to have fun by producing winners based on meaningful competition?

http://www.conquerclub.com/player.php?mode=autotournament&tourney_id=12113

This does not happen in non-automated tournaments. Are we not paying a huge price for this automation?

FUTURE EXAMPLE - True story

The most recent tourney that is listed, The Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes. There are just 12 players. We all play 12 games in a single first round and the top two advance to the Finals. So this is a two round tournament. Nothing wrong with that, I'm not opposed to short and sweet tournaments, providing they can produce a winner without using a random method.

What is the likelihood that this first round will end with 2 clear winners at the top? Remember, when we have more than two players tied at the top, two players will advance to the finals and the rest will be outright eliminated, based on a method that I believe I have proven is close enough to completely random, to call it just that.

One of the most likely outcomes in that first round, would be 4 players with 2 wins, 4 players with 1 win and 4 players with 0 wins. What a mess that would produce! Yet the automated system for settling ties will just sweep that mess under the rug and send two players to the finals and send two players packing. Heartless that computer is.

In RL, these types of tiebreakers are used because guys have to get home after a weekend competition, to go to work. There is limited time and limited resources so you quickly force a winner using these seemingly random methods. We don't have any of those RL issues here, do we?

The Auto Tournament System has it's limitations but we need to work within those limitations to create tournaments that won't yield so many of these seemingly unfair outcomes. It makes more sense to create tournaments that will have people walking away from them happy to recommend them to a friend; win or lose as opposed to feeling like it was a complete waste of time; again; win or lose.

IT GETS WORSE

The latter part of the Masurian tournament has the exact same problem but much, much worse. The 2 player final is a best of 4?? How can this be? Why an even number? Are we setting up for disaster before we begin? A 2-2 draw means the winner will be decided by the player who wins their two games in the quickest number of rounds; in other words a random outcome. That is the best case scenario. Given the low number of games it's quite reasonable that the players could have a tie in round speed too. In that case, guess how this medal and tourney trophy is issued?

We know before this one even starts, that the winner may be declared based simply on who joined first.

While I don't like our Automated Tie-breaker Procedures, I am not blaming anyone here. I'm just asking you to be more aware of these rules and how they affect the tourneys you are creating; so you can try and have these things actually competed for as opposed to just handed out.

I am one of the biggest supporters of this Great War Venture and I commend the people who are volunteering their time to bring me this enjoyment. Thanks so much guys and I hope this helps you make it even bigger and better.

[SiriusCowKing]

I agree on the tie issue and not only in the great wars but in all auto-tournaments.

[Captn B]

I also fully agree that the CC's Tie-breaking Rules for Automated Tournaments need to reflect skill by winners, rather than by an arbitrary time of who may have stumbled onto and joined a tournament first. That gives the TO the best advantage if he joins it just after he posts it. lol Not very fair.

Though it can be argued that the tourneys' winners must be determined by some criteria, and this is that criteria. Caveat Emptor. Therefor, all players are aware of that criteria before they begin play and thus it is their choice as to whether or not they wish to join.

But that is a hardened perspective, which tends to turn people away. Since this is a site which promotes enjoyment, anything (besides the normal play/dice/randomness of drops/...) that can be altered to enhance that experience, will only be a benefit. I would hate to be Coors1 in that example, knowing I was just as good (in this set) as the others, but I was eliminated on a technicality. And in the Masurian Lakes example too! That'd be even worse.

I'd suggest that if it is easy to repair, that it be righted immediately.

Of course perhaps it's a binary thing and since computers only speak in ones and zeros that it must be a multiple of an even number. lol NOT.

I'm sure it's a simple programming fix that will provide many more-satisfied customers, rather than embittered ones.

Thanks to all the vols and management who provide an excellent experience for us!

[Slaylark]

OK, without piling on stats that i have verified, Stealth hit the nail on the head, i agree with his idea and GREAT effort to improve this site and tourneys.. well done bud.

[Dukasaur]

Wow, I seem to have become a magnet for everyone's pet peeves about the auto-tournament engine. I suppose I could just say, "I don't control the auto-tourney engine, I'm just an end-user" which would be literally true, but also a bit of a cop-out. After all, I am the biggest and most enthusiastic user of the engine, and I am also BW's number one fan on the site, so I suppose I need to be able to take the heat.

First things first:

I am one of the biggest supporters of this Great War Venture and I commend the people who are volunteering their time to bring me this enjoyment. Thanks so much guys and I hope this helps you make it even bigger and better.

Thanks, stealth! You have been one of our biggest supporters, and I appreciate that. Military history is one of my passions; conquer club tournaments are another, the Great War series brings them both together. Still, it's the compliments I get from you and people like you that keeps me going!

Thanks to all the vols and management who provide an excellent experience for us!

On behalf of the Great War team, I thank you..

THE ISSUE - Players are being eliminated from too many Great War Tournaments, with identical win/loss records as player(s) who are advancing to the next round.

BIGGER ISSUE - When the problem occurs in the final round, players are eliminated with identical records as the player who outright wins the entire event.

This does not happen in non-automated tournaments.

Well, it does happen sometimes in non-automated tournaments, depending on how their tie-breaking rules are written. Still, I'll grant you that it happens less often.
[spoiler=extended version of that answer]As I've said in other threads, there's no guarantee of "fairness" no matter what you do. CC is not a deterministic game. Games are settled by skill, dice, drop, cards, and turn order. Four of those five inputs are random, so no matter what you do you will have a very luck-driven result. I try to create tournaments with a sufficient number of games that the various luck inputs cancel out and the best man wins, but I know I'm only partially successful at that. Ultimately people want to have fun, and if the game load is too ridiculously high the tourney becomes more work than play, so we try to strike a balance between a sufficiently large number of games to be statistically robust, and a sufficiently small number of games that it's still fun to play. Different people have different opinions on where to peg those numbers, so we've had everything from 4-game tournaments to 60-game tournaments in this series.

Most TOs will add a tiebreaker round if their tournament results in a tie. The auto-tournament engine is a little less flexible. We have to program in a fixed number of rounds, and it can't be changed. I understand that some people would like tiebreaker rounds to be added dynamically, and while I would like to see that option added, I doubt very much if we'll get it soon, because it seems like a very big change to the basic simplicity of the engine. As both an organiser and a player, I don't think it's as big a problem as you think. Basically I just look at it as an aggregate number of games. Adding a tiebreaker just creates the illusion of greater fairness. If I've already played 25 highly-luck-dependent games, playing a 26th won't really prove much. It's a bit of an improvement in the statistical robustness of the result, but only a bit. So, yeah: dynamically generated tiebreaker rounds are on my wish list to pester BW with (You'd be surprised how many things he's already fixed about auto-tourneys. They've come a lot farther than most people realize.) We'll get there eventually, but I don't think it's among the more urgent changes to make.[/spoiler]

Are we not paying a huge price for this automation?

Short answer: No. We lose some flexibility, but we gain volume and a lot of efficiency. There's a cost, but relative to the benefit, it's not too high.

[spoiler=more complete version of that answer]We pay some price for automation. There are many, many things that auto-tourneys just can't do. There's a lot of creative rules in community tournaments that would just be overwhelming to try to program into a blunt instrument like the auto-tourney engine. That's one of the (several) reasons why we can't just go full-auto and why we will always have community tournaments.

There's a lot we get in return for that price. For one thing, volume. We've had something like 175 tourneys in the Great War series. (50 templates. 175 tournaments, counting iterations separately.) If those all had to be run manually, it just wouldn't happen. You've run tournaments, you know how much time can be involved. It would be a full-time job to run all those manually, not something you could do with an all-volunteer group like we have.

But we gain something even bigger: efficiency. Twenty minutes after the last game in a round has finished, the auto-tourney engine has put out the next round of games. Look through the Ongoing tournaments sub-forum and see how many complaints you find, about slow updates, overdue updates, when is the next game coming out, our game is missing a player and hasn't started, etc., etc. TOs get busy, they can't find the time to put out the next round, and momentum is lost. Sometimes it's been so long since an update that you forget you were in a tourney.

True story: two nights ago, I actually got caught up and put out a bunch of games in some of my manually-run tournaments. (Some have been waiting a just a few days, others were waiting three weeks.) The reason? My work tonight got cancelled, so I was able to stay home and update tourneys. If I had gone to work as originally scheduled, those tourneys would have waited until Saturday at the very least, maybe longer. Meanwhile, the players wait, and any sense of urgency passes out of them.

TOs get busy. Sometimes there's a delay of a few days before the next round comes out, other times it's weeks, or maybe months, or maybe the TO abandons it altogether. The auto-tourney engine doesn't sleep, it doesn't have to go to work, it doesn't make scoring mistakes because the wife is yelling in the background, it doesn't get sick, it doesn't get bored and abandon the tourney.

That's only half the equation. The other is players. All that waiting and worrying. Is everybody going to accept their invites, or not? Are you going to have to look for replacements because somebody went AWOL? Long delays while you send multiple invites, wait for players to accept, wall them or PM them and wait for a response. More delays while you look for replacement players. More people lose interest while their game doesn't start. And every TO's worst nightmare -- when somebody accepts some of their invites, but not all, and decides half-way through a round that the game load is too high, and he won't play. Now you're really screwed. You have to replace him in the games he won't join, but you can't replace him in the games he did join, because they already started. The auto-tourney engine doesn't have that problem. It puts people in their games. Boom. No waiting for invites, no wondering, just pop them in and the game starts. Immediately.

If someone doesn't renew their premium and can't be added, the engine automatically reduces an 8-player game to a 7-player game and carries on with the other 7. No pissing around, no PMs to the players ("Are you renewing your premium? The tournament is on hold while we wait for you to accept your invite.") No days wasted waiting while the player promises he'll renew his premium at the end of the week and then breaks that promise. He's dropped, the game is recast with fewer players, the show goes on.

It's amazing when you compare manual tournaments with autotournaments. It's not a small difference in efficiency. It's enormous. Maybe twofold, maybe threefold. Auto-tourneys of roughly the same size and shape finish sometimes two and sometimes even three times faster than manual equivalents. From a player's point of view, that's a huge gain in momentum and being able to sustain the sense of excitement.

By coincidence, I was just having a long talk with DoomYoshi about this just a couple nights ago. He was talking about the Conquer Club Olympics, and the night-and-day difference between the autos and the manual tournaments. The autos all finished on schedule, the event was still live and interest was high. And then there was the big multi-month delay while the manual tournaments wrapped up, and meanwhile everybody lost interest, and the event became old news, and by the time the final results were announced nobody cared. Pretty much the manual tourneys took a very popular event with very intense interest, and by dragging it out, destroyed its impact. They weren't bad tourneys. I'm proud of the one I contributed. Still, the inevitable delays in manual tournaments took place, the event ran three months behind schedule, and that was that. Doom says if he does the Olympics again he definitely won't have any manual tournaments at all.

I'm certainly no enemy of manual tournaments. With almost 100 manual tournaments to my credit, thousands of hours invested in them, and three years of writing about tourneys for the newsletter, I think you know that I love the manual tournaments, too. The manual tournaments are perfect for creative rules, tourneys with complicated special scoring formulas, tournaments with creative components, special forms of player interaction, and so on. But for simple WYSIWYG format tourneys, auto is the way to go.

So, is the price too high? We have a significant loss of flexibility. We have a huge gain in efficiency. I think the price is not too high.[/spoiler]

http://www.conquerclub.com/player.php?mode=autotournament&tourney_id=12457

How do you think Coors1 feels about things? His record was identical to the record of all four finalists!! This cruel tie would have been broken by round speed OR by who joined first; believe it or not.

How do you think anybody feels when they play really well and come really close, but not quite close enough? How do you think a hockey team feels when they play to a perfect tie, and then it comes down to a shootout and one wacky shot that should have gone in but took a crazy spin along the way? How do you think a soccer team feels when they have an identical record as someone else but are just one less in their goal differential, probably because of some flukey against-the-wind miss that should have been a goal?

Of course it's a bummer, but unless you want to redefine the very nature of competition, it isn't going away. The very point of a tournament is that it gradually eliminates people and distills things down to just one winner. There's always going to be people who played really well and came really close but didn't quite make the cut.

If all tournaments were 1v1, it would be easy enough to to make them all odd-numbered elimination brackets and guarantee that ties are impossible. Which we mostly do in all-1v1 tourneys. But once you have multiplayer games, preventing ties is nearly impossible. Almost every structure will allow a possibility of multiple players ending up with identical records and needing a tie-breaking rule. The exception is the simplest multiplayer tourneys where only one player advances per game, like I did with Franz Ferdinand, but that is a very restrictive formula and would get pretty dull if all tournaments ran that way.

[The latter part of the Masurian tournament has the exact same problem but much, much worse. [b]The 2 player final is a best of 4?? How can this be? Why an even number? Are we setting up for disaster before we begin?

Well, that's one of the James Ker tourneys, and since you've been playing the Great War tournaments since the beginning, you probably noticed that James has this quirk of putting an even number of games in the finale. I found it disconcerting at first, but eventually I've come around and I see what he's trying to accomplish. Basically I think James wants the regular season to matter.

Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like in professional sports or whatever, if the regular season actually mattered instead of becoming irrelevant once the playoffs begin? I mean, it's ridiculous. A team in baseball will play 168 games, and that's just to get them into the playoffs, but once they get there, all those games go completely out the window! What a total fucking waste! Wouldn't it be cool if the final score factored in both your performance in the playoffs and in the regular season?

So that, I think, is why James does these even-numbered finales. Because by allowing the possibility of a tie in the finals, it means that the winner might be crowned not because of his performance in the relatively small number of games in the final, but because of his performance in the tournament overall. And that, I think, is a pretty cool idea.

But, if you absolutely hate it, don't play James' tournaments. You'll be happy to know that he's resigning and we probably won't see any more of his tourneys for a while. Personally I think it's a big loss. His quirky tournament structures added some much-needed variety to the rather predictable styles of the other Great War tournament authors.

We know before this one even starts, that the winner may be declared based simply on who joined first.

That's theoretically possible, of course, but extremely unlikely. It would require a remarkable triple coincidence:

1. The two players would first have to be tied in the Finals. That's a 37% chance. Fairly likely to happen.
2. They would then have to be tied in the tournament overall. The exact probability of that requires some integrals that I just can't face crunching right now, but as a ballpark estimate, looking at some of the larger tournaments, I'd say it happens less than 1/4 of the time. 0.25 x .37 brings us to a probability less than 8.5 %. (If any math whiz wants to crunch the numbers and post the exact probability that the top 2 players will win exactly the same number of 12 times 12-player games, I'd appreciate it.)
3. As a final coincidence, they would have to get past the second tie-break and have won all their games in the same number of rounds. Again, I can't do the math and give you a precise probability (and I'm happy to hear from anyone who can) but I would ballpark that again as being something in the range of 1/4 of the time or less. So now we're down to a cumulative probability of .25 x .25 x .37, or about 2.3 %

So, like you said, it could happen. I'm willing to bet that it won't. Literally. If any one of the Second Masurian tournaments is settled by the third tie-breaking criterion, instead of the first or second, I'll buy you 3 months premium. You don't even have to reciprocate on this bet. I'm fairly sure that the 2.3% chance won't happen, but if it does, I'll live with it.

I also fully agree that the CC's Tie-breaking Rules for Automated Tournaments need to reflect skill by winners, rather than by an arbitrary time of who may have stumbled onto and joined a tournament first.

I highlighted "by winners" in the quote above, because it is significant. We're talking mainly about non-winners. The only time we see the precedence (third tie-breaker) come into play a lot is in early rounds, when there are multiple players with zero or very few wins, and only some of them need to be eliminated. For instance, if the tournament structure calls for six players to be eliminated, and there are eight players with zero wins, we need some method to decide which of them will win the wild card and advance despite their lack of a win. For that, a relatively arbitrary measurement like that is very necessary. There really isn't any data to work with at that point. Once the tourney has advanced a bit, you can talk about win percentage being the most common tie-break. It's only those early rounds where precedence plays a big role, and why should it not? Remember, we're not talking about "winners" here. We're talking about people with zero wins who are getting a chance to advance despite being winless. It's not that the six eliminated players are losing anything, it's the two that are allowed to advance despite being winless who are winning a free pass.

In the Finals the third tie-break is almost never seen. As you see in my response to stealth99, the precise probability of the Finals being decided by precedence is very hard to calculate precisely, but even in a tournament like Second Masurian which has an extraordinarily high probability of a final-round tie, the chance of precedence being a factor is about 2%. For most tournaments, which have odd number of games in the final round, and often many more rounds, I would put it as vanishingly small.

In a 20-round tournament like Race to the Sea, I would peg the probability of it being decided by precedence as effectively zilch.

Overall, if you balance out the tourneys with a high chance of a final round tie and those with a low chance of a final round tie, again the math gets ridiculously difficult, but I'm willing to bet that overall it's on the order of one in a thousand, and anyone who wants to do the math is welcome to come and prove me wrong.

Just as a bit of perspective, I checked some sports sites. Here's the tie-breaking rules for the World Cup of soccer:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/soccer-insider/wp/2014/06/23/world-cup-tiebreakers-explained/

Here’s how FIFA will break group-stage ties, lifted straight from the organization’s book of regulations.

1. Greatest number of points obtained in all group matches.
2. Goal difference in all group matches.
3. Greatest number of goals scored in all group matches.
4. Greatest number of points obtained in the group matches between the teams concerned.
5. Goal difference resulting from the group matches between the teams concerned.
6. Greater number of goals scored in all group matches between the teams concerned.
7. Drawing of lots by the FIFA Organizing Committee.

So their criteria are much deeper than ours, but in the end, there still has to be some arbitrary method (drawing of lots) because no matter how you structure a tourney, their will come a time when you have teams with records that are identical in every way. (Again, as above, there are obvious exceptions: bracket tournaments that are exclusively 1v1, and multiplayer tournaments where only one player per game advances, and possibly some other structures. But overall, it's a pretty short list. Almost all structures allow the possibility of identical records.)

That gives the TO the best advantage if he joins it just after he posts it. lol Not very fair.

That's my cheating you're worried about, since I'm the only one who schedules all the Great War tourneys. Regardless of all the different authors of all the different Great War tournaments, I'm the one who does the final proofread and releases them for launch. So, if you're worried I might be cheating, feel free to monitor my performance in these tournaments.

All new Great War tournaments are released @1500 CC time on the scheduled day, so that people who are worried about this can set their alarms and plan to be online at 1500. This is common knowledge. So much for my big advantage. (Actually around 1520. The auto-tourney engine takes about 20 minutes per sweep, and it launches new tournaments at the end of the sweep, so a 1500 launch time is usually actually around 1520.)

Once the initial iteration of a tourney has filled, the next iteration will launch about 20 minutes later, during the engine's next sweep. Anybody can see this by watching the counter go down whenever they go to their Central Command. The tourney will say how many spots remain to be filled (4 spots left... 2 spots left, 0 spots left). Once it says 0 spots left, you know (if the schedule hasn't been exhausted) that the next iteration will launch in 20 minutes or less, so if you're really worried about it, get ready.

Bottom line, though, is that it's a tempest in a teapot. The way to win the tournaments is to win the games. If you don't win the games then the tie-break might keep you alive for an extra round, but it won't give you the tourney, no matter how much paranoia revolves around this issue. As long as you're winning the games, the only tie-breaks you really need to worry about are the first and second.

If you're still worried, then only join the tourneys that have a large number of games in the final, where a tie becomes less likely. That's all I can say. I think I've done pretty well at providing a tremendous variety of tournaments in this series, so if one structure doesn't suit you, just wait a few days and there will be a very different one.

[Dukasaur]

Here's my latest tourney in the series. This is one of the ones I'm really proud of.
[spoiler=initial Dardanelles bombardment may 7th to 14th]Initial Dardanelles Bombardment
The narrow passageway connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean has always been of enormous strategic importance. It was fought over by the Hittites, the Trojans, Scythians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusader kings, the Venetians, the Turks, the Bulgars, the Ukrainians, the Russians, the British, and the French.

At the outset of World War I, the Ottoman Turks were neutral and being courted by all sides. The Germans, however, were far more active in the courtship than any other major power, and the Turks soon accepted major German gifts of money, supplies, military advisors, military technology, troops, and ships. The story of how a German battlecruiser sailed across the Mediterranean despite allied attempts to intercept her, and joined the Turkish fleet, has previously been told in our tournament the Escape of the Goeben which we ran at the end of October. The further story in how the captain of the Goeben took over running the Turkish fleet and tricked the Ottomans into going to war against Russia has been told in our tournament the Black Sea Raid which we ran at the end of January.

On November 3rd, 1914, without waiting for an official declaration of war by Britain or France, the Anglo-French squadron shadowing the Goeben opened fire on the Turkish fort at Sedd el Bahr. A lucky hit ignited the ammunition magasine, ripping the fort apart, destroying ten heavy guns and killing 150 men. The large explosion was clearly visible from the Allied ships. A very lucky fluke, the Sedd el Bahr detonation may have contributed to an overoptimistic view of what naval bombardment of the Turkish forts could accomplish.

Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, was very enthusiastic about a naval assault on the Dardanelles. His admirals did not share his enthusiasm. Most of the admirals felt an assault on the Dardanelles could not succeed without landing a sizeable force. The British and French were heavily engaged one the Western Front, and extra troops were hard to find. Churchill insisted, and Sea Lord John Fisher and Sir Sackville Carden, commander of British forces in the Mediterranean, strenously disagreed, but they followed orders and prepared a plan of attack.

The attack began on February 19th. Very few sources mention it, but that is the anniversary of the 1807 British victory at the Dardanelles, when Admiral Duckworth demolished a Turkish fleet guarding the straits. Coincidence? Perhaps, but it seems likely to me that Churchill, who was a keen student of history and always discussed historical parallels with current operations, chose that date because it was a celebratory anniversary.

70 vessels participated in the attack, including one new Dreadnought (the Queen Elizabeth), three new battlecruisers, and sixteen old pre-dreadnought battleships. The fortresses at Kum Kale and Cape Hellas were attacked, but no grand explosions were observed. There was actually significant damage to the forts on the shore, but Turkish mobile batteries on the heights were able to pick up the slack and continue fighting back against the Allied fleet when the guns in the forts went silent. On November 3rd, the Allies overestimated how much damage they were doing; on February 19th, they underestimated.

The bombardment was to resume on February 20th, but bad weather forced a postponement. The second bombardment took place, after several weather delays, on February 25th. On that day, even more damage was done to the forts, and marines shore parties were landed to blow up the forts that the Turks abandoned. As before, however, the guns on the heights continued to be effective when the shore guns did not. Several allied ships were damaged, and with no hope of silencing the guns on the heights the operation was called off.

Historical map of the bombardment, showing the sweep of the Turkish guns:
[bigimg]http://www.naval-history.net/WW1Book-RN2-143.JPG[/bigimg]

wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_operations_in_the_Dardanelles_Campaign
firstworldwar.com article: http://www.firstworldwar.com/battles/dardanelles_feb15.htm
a group of interesting articles: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?6819-Feb-19-1915-Dardanelles-Bombardment-Campaign-begins

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Tournament round 1: The Straits of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles have been fought over since ancient times.
6-player Sunny escalating games, one each on Gilgamesh, Alexander's Empire, Pelo War, Ancient Greece, and Imperium Romanum.
24 start, 20 advance

Round 2: Germany outfoxed Britain and Russia, and brought the Ottomans into the war on the Central Powers' side.
5-player Flat Rate Foggy Trench games, one each on Unification Germany, Transsib1914, WWI Ottoman, British Isles, and Europe 1914.
20 start, 12 advance

Round 3: A preliminary bombardment on Nov 3rd scored a lucky hit and created a false sense of optimism.
Five 1v1 Nuclear games on WWI Gallipoli, random sun and fog
12 start, 7 advance

Round 4: February 19th was the anniversary of the destruction of the Turkish fleet by the British in 1807.
Five 7-player Terminator games on Napoleonic War map, one each of no spoils, escalating, flat, nuclear, and zombie
7 start, 4 advance

Score resets
Round 5: The first bombardment damaged some forts, but the Turkish guns on the heights could not be destroyed.
Four Poly-2 games on WWI Gallipoli, foggy, randomly escalating and flat, one each of Chained, Parachute, Unlimited, and No Forts
4 start, 2 advance

Score resets
Round 6: A second bombardment on February 25th did more damage, but still failed to silence the guns.
Six Poly-3 and Poly-4 games on WWI Gallipoli, No Spoils and Fog
-- DK[/spoiler]

[waauw]

I absolutely love the great-war series. It's a lot of fun but these guys do have a point about tie-breakers. Now, I'll admit that I haven't read your entire text just now dukasaur. The size of it scares me off. So my appologies if I repeat something already mentioned.
But there are methods to lower chances of tie-breaking rules having to operate:

• Use more direct 50% elimination rounds like most ordinary tournaments do
• in round robin tournaments, play as many games as possible. The higher the number of games, the lower the chances of ties.

For instance in the tournament "Raid on the Suez", there are 4 games in round 1 and 8 players getting eliminated out of 24. I feel like 4 is not enough and will almost certainly lead to a tie-breaker. Though I do realize that it's a fine line between avoiding tie-breakers and making the gamecount too overwhelming.

btw, is it possible to have terminator auto-tournaments where kills are counted and not wins? I'm in a tournament right now called "Givenchy" where I lost 4 out of 5 games already, but the games are terminator and I did succeed in taking with me quite a number of kills. I've been thinking of putting this in the suggestions-topic, but I wasn't sure whether this was a mistake or whether it's truely not implementable.

[Dukasaur]

I absolutely love the great-war series. It's a lot of fun but these guys do have a point about tie-breakers. Now, I'll admit that I haven't read your entire text just now dukasaur. The size of it scares me off. So my appologies if I repeat something already mentioned.
But there are methods to lower chances of tie-breaking rules having to operate:

• Use more direct 50% elimination rounds like most ordinary tournaments do
• in round robin tournaments, play as many games as possible. The higher the number of games, the lower the chances of ties.

For instance in the tournament "Raid on the Suez", there are 4 games in round 1 and 8 players getting eliminated out of 24. I feel like 4 is not enough and will almost certainly lead to a tie-breaker. Though I do realize that it's a fine line between avoiding tie-breakers and making the gamecount too overwhelming.

You've identified the problem perfectly. A higher number of games leads to more statistical robustness in the result, but many people do not want to play a huge number of games. We try to provide a good variety of large and small tournaments, so that everyone can find something they like.

I am rather confused though. First you urge that we use rounds with a 50% elimination rate more often, but then you complaing about Raid on the Suez, which is significantly more generous than 50% and allows 67% to advance.

(I was actually asleep and thinking about this woke me up and brought me back to the keyboard, lol. Raid on the Suez, for a small tournament, is about as robust as a small tournament can be.)

The first round has four 2-player games. The likely breakdown of wins is something like this:

• Four players will win zero games
• Five players will win one game
• Six players will win two games
• Five players will win three games
• Four players will win four games

So, you have 15 players that win two or more games, and "deserve" to advance, plus there will probably be one player who advances with only one win (the "wild card" or "lucky strike" player). If we followed the traditional 50% advancement, then some of the "deserving" players who won 50% of the games would have to be cut. You'd actually be making it less desirable to the players.

I think advancing 2/3 (effectively all of those who win half their games plus probably one or two who don't) is actually pretty good. Fair for those who win half, and a nice present for someone who didn't.

There's also the issue of making sure you advance enough for the next round. The second round of Suez features eight-player games. If we only advanced half of the original 24, that would be not enough for two sets of 8-player games. On the other hand, if you expanded it to 32-players to eliminate 50% and still have 16, you would be reducing the number of iterations of the tournament that fill. (Typically, we have 96 per tournament. If you make each iteration 24 players, you can make four iterations of a tournament, but iif you make them all 32s, you will only have 3. Not that I'm unwilling to do that -- there have been 32s and 40s and even a 64 in this series -- but 24s definitely need to be more common than 32s.) This whole thing, however, is the lesser of the two factors to consider. The first factor -- trying to advance everyone who deserves to -- is the larger consideration.

btw, is it possible to have terminator auto-tournaments where kills are counted and not wins? I'm in a tournament right now called "Givenchy" where I lost 4 out of 5 games already, but the games are terminator and I did succeed in taking with me quite a number of kills. I've been thinking of putting this in the suggestions-topic, but I wasn't sure whether this was a mistake or whether it's truely not implementable.

Being able to score by kills instead of by wins is one of the things on the wish list that I've given BW. There's no guarantees, but I'll get it eventually. Not telling how long. The ways of BW are mysterious.

[waauw]

what I meant with 50% was the traditional simple tournament type, where you play 1-3 games against 1 other player and the one who loses most is out. So without a point counting table.
But yeah, lets' keep fingers crossed for the terminator autotournaments

[mookiemcgee]

I just wanted to give a shout out to the great war organizers also, I really like the format and all the effort your putting into this has not been overlooked by "us" the masses.

I've been reading the Great Tie debate of 2015, and while I have been both "screwed by" and "saved by" the current tie-break rules personally I don't think the wheel needs to be re-invented. I submit there is no perfect way to break a tie short of 'sudden death'.

Here would be my solution:
Anytime there is a "bubble" amongst prize postions, a new game could launch featuring only the bubble players on a small map for a hopefully "quick" game. It could be the exact same map/rules anytime there is a tie in any auto-tourney that affects advancement or prizes. I include the caviot that I have no idea if this would even be possible given the current game system... I'm sure someone has thought of this already, and thats probably why it isnt in use now so just disreagard if this has already been beaten to death.

The one thing that really does bother me about the tiebreaker rule is that there is no way to view who joined a tourney first after it's started (at least that i can tell)... I won't know until all games are complete if I will be moving on or not. Would it be possible to include this info on the tourney page? Right now you have 5 catagories of info on the tourney page: "players, record,active,score,status" Could you add one that reads Joined/Win rounds, and have it display info the same way- example - 4/15 - meaning (joined 4th/won in 15 rounds)... At least that way you know where you stand so you can adapt your play along the way to try and secure a position (maybe by trying finish in fewer rounds).

Just trying to brainstorm with y'all, if these are nonsense suggestions just disreagard!

[Dukasaur]

I just wanted to give a shout out to the great war organizers also, I really like the format and all the effort your putting into this has not been overlooked by "us" the masses.

Thank you!

I've been reading the Great Tie debate of 2015, and while I have been both "screwed by" and "saved by" the current tie-break rules personally I don't think the wheel needs to be re-invented. I submit there is no perfect way to break a tie short of 'sudden death'.

Here would be my solution:
Anytime there is a "bubble" amongst prize positions, a new game could launch featuring only the bubble players on a small map for a hopefully "quick" game. It could be the exact same map/rules anytime there is a tie in any auto-tourney that affects advancement or prizes. I include the caviot that I have no idea if this would even be possible given the current game system... I'm sure someone has thought of this already, and thats probably why it isnt in use now so just disreagard if this has already been beaten to death.

This is an option we hope to have. It's not supported by the current auto-tournament engine, but like everything else on this site, that's a work in progress, and I think we will eventually have this option.

Even if/when it does exist, however, I'm not really in favour of always using it. One of the biggest advantage of the autos is the efficiency; the next round is created within 20 minutes after the previous round ends. Inserting a delay for a tiebreaker game partially loses that advantage. I know in my manual tournaments I found that if there was a delay for tie-breaking games, the players not involved in the tiebreaker would lose that sense of urgency and immediacy while it wrapped up. Even in my manual tournaments, I long ago started writing the structures in such a way that ties could be broken with available data, instead of waiting for tie-breaking games.

Even on a small map, you can't guarantee that it will end quickly. It might, but it might not. Still, I hope the option for tiebreaking games will be added eventually.

The one thing that really does bother me about the tiebreaker rule is that there is no way to view who joined a tourney first after it's started (at least that i can tell)... I won't know until all games are complete if I will be moving on or not. Would it be possible to include this info on the tourney page? Right now you have 5 catagories of info on the tourney page: "players, record,active,score,status" Could you add one that reads Joined/Win rounds, and have it display info the same way- example - 4/15 - meaning (joined 4th/won in 15 rounds)... At least that way you know where you stand so you can adapt your play along the way to try and secure a position (maybe by trying finish in fewer rounds).

That sounds like a change with no technical hurdels. I'll definitely send that one upstairs...

Glad to have your feedback, and glad you're finding the Great War series an interesting challenge!

[Dukasaur]

Now, as promised, here are the Worldwide Warfare Week participation stats:


Ardahan and Sarkamish
Launched April 20th
There were 5 iterations of the tournament, and with 20 players each, the total number of participants was 100


Kolubara/Rudnik Ridges
Launched April 21st
There were 3 iterations of the tournament, and with 30 players each, the total number of participants was 90


Falkland Islands
Launched April 22nd
There were 3 iterations of the tournament, and with 32 players each, the total number of participants was 96


Battle of Bolimów
Launched April 23rd
There were 6 iterations of the tournament, and with 16 players each, the total number of participants was 96


ANZAC Day
Launched April 24th
There were 3 iterations of the tournament, and with 26 players each, the total number of participants was 78


Qurna
Launched April 25th
There were 5 iterations of the tournament, and with 16 players each, the total number of participants was 80


Dogger Bank
Launched April 26th
There were 3 iterations of the tournament, and with 36 players each, the total number of participants was 108

Glad to have so many people aboard!

[Dukasaur]

Four iterations of the First Siege of Przemysl ran. They were a gruelling challenge with 17 concurrent games on the Siege map. The Second Siege of Przemysl, which will launch tomorrow, will be grueling in its own way, but very, very different. An elimination bracket, mostly Poly, on the Stalingrad map. Behold:[spoiler=second siege of przemysl may 12th to 19th]After the failure of the first siege, the Russians resumed on Nov 9th. This time the situation was much more in their favour. The Austrian army had still not recoverd from the disaster of Galicia, and now the German army was also reeling back after the defeat at Lodz. Very little help was available for Przemyśl. A relief force was sent, but failed to reach the city. The Russian artillery never stopped, and in addition to combat casualties there were many losses to disease, starvation, and frostbite. On March 22nd the garrison capitulated.

Account of the siege on wikipedia

Reading about Przemyśl is very much like reading about the debacle at Stalingrad, which is why the Stalingrad map has been chosen to represent this battle. Nuclear spoils represent the constant losses to Russian artillery. No forts represent the failure of the relief force to reach the garrison. Observation was somewhat unreliable, but not entirely, so I have chosen a mixture of sun and fog.

The tournament is a straightforward elimination bracket straight out of Dullsville, so nobody will be offended by use of tiebreaking rules. Most of the rounds are Poly, to reduce the impact of the fairly strong first-turn advantage.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Simple elimination bracket. 32 players start, 31 die.

All rounds feature Nuclear spoils and No Reinforcements.

Round one, 1 x Poly(4) game, sunny
Round two, 3 x Poly(2) games, all foggy
Round three, 5 x 1v1 Standard games, random sun and fog
Round four, 7 x Poly(3) games, alternating sun and fog
Round five, 9 x Poly(4) games, random sun and fog

-- DK[/spoiler]

With the Second Siege of Przemysl, we will be trying a new policy. We will be filtering out players with a turns-taken percentage less than 96. This is a suggestion first made by [player]Shoop76[/player] back in January:
Subject: The Great War

Can't we make a restriction that a player must have a certain percentage of turns taken? Probably 97%. There are organizers that ask for this in the community tournaments. This would considerably reduce this problem.

BigWham devised a way to do this, I have tested it on the Beta site, and it works. Let's hope it reduces some of the problems with deadbeats giving some people a free pass through the tourney. There's no guarantees, of course, but it may help.

[shoop76]

Four iterations of the First Siege of Przemysl ran. They were a gruelling challenge with 17 concurrent games on the Siege map. The Second Siege of Przemysl, which will launch tomorrow, will be grueling in its own way, but very, very different. An elimination bracket, mostly Poly, on the Stalingrad map. Behold:[spoiler=second siege of przemysl may 12th to 19th]After the failure of the first siege, the Russians resumed on Nov 9th. This time the situation was much more in their favour. The Austrian army had still not recoverd from the disaster of Galicia, and now the German army was also reeling back after the defeat at Lodz. Very little help was available for Przemyśl. A relief force was sent, but failed to reach the city. The Russian artillery never stopped, and in addition to combat casualties there were many losses to disease, starvation, and frostbite. On March 22nd the garrison capitulated.

Account of the siege on wikipedia

Reading about Przemyśl is very much like reading about the debacle at Stalingrad, which is why the Stalingrad map has been chosen to represent this battle. Nuclear spoils represent the constant losses to Russian artillery. No forts represent the failure of the relief force to reach the garrison. Observation was somewhat unreliable, but not entirely, so I have chosen a mixture of sun and fog.

The tournament is a straightforward elimination bracket straight out of Dullsville, so nobody will be offended by use of tiebreaking rules. Most of the rounds are Poly, to reduce the impact of the fairly strong first-turn advantage.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Simple elimination bracket. 32 players start, 31 die.

All rounds feature Nuclear spoils and No Reinforcements.

Round one, 1 x Poly(4) game, sunny
Round two, 3 x Poly(2) games, all foggy
Round three, 5 x 1v1 Standard games, random sun and fog
Round four, 7 x Poly(3) games, alternating sun and fog
Round five, 9 x Poly(4) games, random sun and fog

-- DK[/spoiler]

With the Second Siege of Przemysl, we will be trying a new policy. We will be filtering out players with a turns-taken percentage less than 96. This is a suggestion first made by [player]Shoop76[/player] back in January:
Subject: The Great War

Can't we make a restriction that a player must have a certain percentage of turns taken? Probably 97%. There are organizers that ask for this in the community tournaments. This would considerably reduce this problem.

BigWham devised a way to do this, I have tested it on the Beta site, and it works. Let's hope it reduces some of the problems with deadbeats giving some people a free pass through the tourney. There's no guarantees, of course, but it may help.

Thanks for the hard work duk and listening to what we ask for. I know its not realistic to make all changes that are brought forward, but at least we see that you take us seriously.

[Dukasaur]

The latest from DoomYoshi:
[spoiler=angola may 16th to may 23rd]Angola Campaign

One of the characteristics of a World War is that many nations, which are not declared war combatants, can still battle each other, as a periphery of the war. One of those cases is evident with the German Campaign in Angola. Between October 1914 and July 1915, the Germans and Portuguese clashed in Portuguese Angola, even though Germany and Portugal were not at war until March 1916!

To represent this global war phenomenon, the first round will be truly global battles. Just try and stay neutral in the first rounds... it will prove impossible.
24 Start
Round 1: 4 games Terminator, [World 2.1, Classic, Dark Continent, Eastern Hemisphere] , 8 Players, Escalating, Chained, Sunny
Round 2: 4 games Terminator, [World 2.1, Classic, Dark Continent, Eastern Hemisphere], 8 Players, Escalating, Chained, Foggy
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There were a few skirmishes, all held on the border between modern Angola and Namibia. The people who live in this border area are the Ovambo. Many critics of the borders of modern Africa can point to the Ovambo as a flaw in the current system, since even though they are mostly in Namibia, the areas in which these battles took place are also Ovambo areas. From a ethnic perspective, it made sense for them to be part of one colony. This started me thinking about the merits of ethnic-based borders. For this rounds only maps with a strong ethnic component were considered.
24 Advance
Round 3: 6 games Terminator, [All Your Base are Belong To Us, Battle For Iraq, Dawn of Ages, First Nations Americas, Rorke's Drift, Supermax: Prison Riot], 6 players, Escalating, Chained (Sunny, Foggy)
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Germany conquered a border town, lost it and then completely surrendered (in South-West Africa) all before the war began. They did continue to supply the local Ovambos with arms to resist occupation. This is a typical type of operation in almost every civil war in every period of humanity.
24 advance
Round 4: 6 games Terminator, [Alexander's Empire, American Civil War, Unification Germany, Unification Italy, Holy Roman Empire, Texan Wars], 6 players (Flat Rate, No Spoils), Chained, (Sunny, Foggy)
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Looking at this region of Africa illustrates one of the key arguments in ecological biology: pastoralism versus ranching. The pastoralists claim that this is the only truly sustainable form of animal agriculture, while the ranchers claim it does damage to the environment since nobody cares about it (they just move on to destroy the next area). Ranchers claim that is the only way to feed the growing world population, pastoralists claim there is no sustainable way to feed the growing world population. You probably have an opinion on this issue already, but the science isn't as clear as either side would like. Both the Portuguese (and Germans if they would have stayed longer) tried to force ranching on the locals.
To settle the top 4, some of the most famous disagreements in Western history will be simulated.
Note: No Score Reset (this isn't a bracket, just a way to clear up ties at the top)
4 advance
Round 5: 3 games, [Duck and Cover, US Senate, Solar System] (random spoils, reinforcements, and special gameplay rules)

2 advance
Round 6: 3 games, [Extreme Global Warming, Third Crusade(played poly3), Prohibition Chicago] (random spoils, reinforcements, and special gameplay rules)



Try Ranchin' me, buddy!


See what happens when I take my ray out to pasture?[/spoiler]

[Dukasaur]

The newest member of the Community Team, [player]takman2k[/player] helped with the design of tomorrow's entry, Neuve-Chapelle.

[spoiler=neuve-chapelle may 18th to 25th]
Indian Troops Charging German Positions Source: wikipedia. Original source: Official British Military photograph. First published in "The Great War" Ed. H.W. Wilson, 1916

After a depressing winter of trench warfare, the Allies were anxious to develop an offensive on the Western Front and begin the process of ejecting the Germans from France. Originally the plan called for a joint offensive by both the British and the French, centred on the point where their lines met in Artois. However, due to lack of reserves, the French half of the offensive was cancelled and this became a purely British operation.

At first everything went well. The British used aerial photography to create detailed maps of the German lines and circulate them among their troops. A stupendous artillery barrage destroyed the German front line. The British and Indian forces surged forward, and fought much harder than either their German enemy or their French allies had expected them to. The town of Neuve-Chapelle was captured on the first day, and the German lines were broken.

Things started to go sour after that. Despite the detailed maps, the labyrinth of trenches was incredibly confusing; a couple battalions in key places made wrong turns and ran into German strongpoints that hadn't been bombarded. The unreliable and artillery-damaged phone network failed at key moments. Attempts to communicate using older methods like runners didn't do much better, again impacted by the bewildering terrain. The artillery barrage on Day 1 had used 30% of the British Army's entire ammunition reserve (one historian calculated that in the first 35 minutes the artillery used as much ammunition as the British had expended in the entire Boer War.) This lavish expenditure of ammo had devastated the German lines and made the gains of the first day possible, but it could not be maintained, and by Day 3 when German reserves arrived, many British division had nothing left to shoot at them.

By Day 3 the optimistic assessment based on Day 1 results was drying up. Neuve-Chapelle and a small strip around it remained in British hands, but most of the line was restored to German control.

Post-war assessments vary. Many historians say that the small gains achieved are about as much as anyone could expect under the circumstances, and count it as a British victory, but others call it just a bloody and expensive failure.

articles:
Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Neuve_Chapelle
1914-1918.net -- http://www.1914-1918.net/bat9.htm
FirstWorldWar.com -- http://www.firstworldwar.com/battles/neuvechapelle.htm

24 players begin. Three preliminary rounds will test your worthiness to be one of the top 8 and enter the main part of the battle.

Preliminary rounds

Rounds 1 to 3

• 7 X France 2.1 8-player Standard flat rate fog
  
• 4 X France 4-player Standard Manual Foggy Adjacent
  
• 3 X 3-player Assassin nuclear foggy on [Trench Warfare, Europe1914, Benelux]

Bracket phase (scores reset every round):

Rounds 4 to 6

• "What Went Right"
  Balloons on Steamworks represent aerial photography, South Africa 1885 represents the British Army's expenditure of ammo, Conquer 4 represents the mathematical meticulousness of the plan, Indian Empire and British Isles represent the British and Indian troops.
  Poly Dubs No Spoils Fog Adjacent on [1 each of Steamworks, South Africa 1885, Conquer 4, Indian Empire, British Isles]
  
• "What Went Wrong"
  Rail map represents the arrival of German reinforcements, Labyrinth represents the confusion of the British troops in the maze of trenches, Trench Warfare represents the restoration of the status quo.
  Poly Quads default settings on [1 each of Trench Warfare, Labyrinth, Rail Europe]
  
• "Finale"
  (11 of the 12 maps used thus far [excluding Benelux, and playing Trench Warfare just once not twice.])
  Eleven 1v1 random spoils, random fog, random trench on 11 maps.

-- T2K, DK
(Preliminary design by [player]takman2k[/player], final tweaking by [player]Dukasaur[/player])[/spoiler]

[Dukasaur]

On tap for Wednesday:


[spoiler=attempt to force the narrows may 20th to 27th]Attempt to Force the Narrows

[bigimg]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/HMS_Irresistible_abandoned_18_March_1915.jpg/1024px-HMS_Irresistible_abandoned_18_March_1915.jpg[/bigimg]
"HMS Irresistible abandoned 18 March 1915" by Royal Navy - Library of Congress. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... h_1915.jpg

Most naval officers knew that it was futile to try to take control of the Dardanelles through sea power alone, and that control of the land would be required. However, with heavy commitments on the Western Front, neither Britain nor France had many troops to spare, and both the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who made British naval policy, and Minister of Marine Jean Augagneur, who made French naval policy, were determined that their respective Navy should win the Dardanelles without asking their Army for help.

Whether the "Navy only" approach was stimulated by genuine desire to avoid putting strain on the Western Front, or just hubris, is a matter for coffee-shop debate. All we can say with certainty is that their plan was a total disaster. Three British and two French warships were lost in the Turkish minefields, along with auxilliary craft, and little damage was done. The debacle caused great political fallout at home; before the year was out both Augagneur and Churchill, along with several admirals, had been removed from their posts (other factors were at play as well, but the disaster in the Narrows was the largest element). Soon the Army would be landing on the Gallipoli peninsula and facing its own horrendous debacle, but this episode is pure Navy.

Article: http://www.firstworldwar.com/battles/dardanelles_mar15.htm

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In this tournament, rather than use the Gallipoli map (which focuses on the land-based attempt to control the Dardanelles) I have opted to use Conquer Club's three great naval battle maps: Battle of Actium, Trafalgar, and Spanish Armada. All games are 5-player Standard. Each of the five preliminary rounds is named after one of the five Allied warships lost and has settings suggested by the name of that warship. In the final, the top five players will play 9 games in three waves, named after Churchill, Augagneur, and Turkish War Minister Cevat Çobanlı.

25 players start

Round 1: Irresistible (sunny nuclear)

Round 2: Inflexible (flat rate no forts)

Round 3: Ocean (sunny and unlimited)

Round 4: Bouvet (foggy parachute)

Round 5: Gaulois (flat rate trench)

Top 5 advance, scores reset

Round 6: Winston Churchill (default settings)

Round 7: Jean Augagneur (flat rate parachute trench)

Round 8: Cevat Cobanli (no spoils fog)


.[/spoiler]

[mookiemcgee]

Hi Duk,

I just tried to join neuve-Chappele, and was refused because "player joined another in the series"....I noticed no one else has joined either so perhaps there is a flaw in the system?