Re: GenCon 98 FT Tournament Fleets

Hi, Doug! Good to meet you, finally!

On Thu, 13 Aug 1998 12:12:20 -0500,
Doug_Evans/CSN/UNEBR@UNebMail.UNeb.EDU
wrote:

>Hobie was very excited afterwards; wants even more to get games going
back
>at the local shop/club. He did whinge a triffle about the fleets in his
>first game, but everybody gets to make some comments, and he admitted
it
>was still fairly balanced. And, after all, he did get back in to the
second
>round. ;->=

I refereed Hobie's game. He was pretty happy for a guy that lost in the
second
round. Good thing to see, that even the people who lost enjoyed
themselves. 

>However, his thoughts brought something to mind. Your pointing to each
of
>the fleets having strengths and weaknesses is very well taken. However,
>there is some 'scissor/paper/rock' tendencies, I think, of fleet A has
some
>advantage over B, which has some over C....

That's probably an issue. We hadn't really thought about it. One way
around it
is to have far fewer fleet types. Not all of them were used. 

A second way is something I saw three years ago in a DBA (ancients)
tournament
at GenCon. DBA has the same rock-paper-scissors issue. What THEY did was
preset the matchups. That is, the armies were already on the table and
you
were plopped down in front of an army at random. The tournament was then
run
as a round-robin event, with points determining the winner. 

I think this second method might be best. We can make the match-ups
fairly
even, but different. We could do two rounds of round-robin to determine
the
semi-finalists.

It's another way to do it, anyway.

>Short of switching sides for a second battle on the same round, then
>averaging the points to declare a winner, anybody have ideas on what
could
>be done to keep the neat flavor the fleets give, but not be a stumbling
>block at any particular round? Seems difficult within a single elim
>structure.

I agree. Maybe round-robin is the way to go. 

Allan Goodall	       agoodall@sympatico.ca

"We come into the world and take our chances
 Fate is just the weight of circumstances
 That's the way that Lady Luck dances
 Roll the bones." - N. Peart