PBEM Tournament announcements and discussion

[Tau Ceti]

Viriato, Misotu: I agree with both of you . The idea is to have cooperative victory enabled in the random map/map of Planet games, but not on the tournament map (where there will only be the four human players).

If there are no objections, all games started from now on will have restricted communications.

[Tau Ceti]

I am back on larsheg@sensewave.com now. Will check the hotmail address for a few more days, but please send to sensewave from now on. Thanks.

[Adam_Smith]

Tau Ceti already knows that I object to co-op victory enablation (new word). Anyway, I want to make it known to everyone. Reason: It's not fair to the third person, assuming that they are not in the co-op. Let's be realistic. I have won in a co-op a few times. Everytime there really was one clear winner, but the fact is that the players didn't want to play out the war. Whenever it was close and all the AIs were eliminated the pact was always ended so that the players could "get it on." To make things interesting I think the players should unit against the hegemon. No co-op.
[This message has been edited by Adam_Smith (edited April 27, 2000).]

[Tau Ceti]

A first draft of the new Tournament map can now be downloaded here. I would appreciate any and all comments and suggestions for improvement etc.

[Tau Ceti]

No comments at all? Does nobody care anymore?

[Viriato]

I just downloaded the map. I'll let you know what I think as soon as I watch it. Too tired now .

[korn469]

Tau Ceti i got the map

hmmm if you are going to make any changes maybe you could add a little bit more land to the player's starting landmass and take away some of the unity pods but other than that it looks good

[Viriato]

I took a look at the map. Other than too many pods (IMHO) I have no objections.
The small island will force the players to find somewhere (or someone ) else to colonize.

[Tau Ceti]

It seems there is consensus on too many pods (even though I already removed at least 50 of them - I guess the map generator makes quite a lot!). Does that apply all over the place or are there any specific areas where there are too many (north pole, south pole, high seas, player islands)?

[Garth Vader]

If anything player islands are too big. With the large distance between islands momentum players need to be able to expand and fight on the poles which means the home island should be too small to stay on.

[Tau Ceti]

You mean they are still too big? They are somewhat smaller than in Zsozso's old map.

Now we have one saying they are too small, one saying they are the right size, and one saying they are too big. Sounds like right size so far...

[Meister Flo]

the stockpile energy bug gave me a lot of grief lately.
Does anyone know what we are talking about ?
How is this issue adressed in the tournament right now ?

[joer]

It would be easy to just disallow putting stockpile energy into the building queue. However, that solves only half of the problem. Would it make any sense to disallow stockpile energy altogether? Or set some minimum number of turns a base has to produce stockpile energy, if it produces it at all? Does anybody who is not exploiting this bug still use stockpile energy?
-joer

[Tau Ceti]

There is no official ruling as yet. Personally, I have never used the build queues and do not feel like starting, so for self-serving reasons I would prefer to leave it as standard procedure, getting Stockpile Energy after building improvements and not after building units. But I do not care so much one way or the other, so I would like more opinions.

joer, I am not sure if I understand your post. Are you advocating banning the use of Stockpile Energy so as to force players to always have something in the build queue when building a facility?

For those who are not sure what we are talking about, check out this thread.

[Meister Flo]

i agree 100 % with you, Tau.
Lets call it operation "Ostrich". For me its seems the most convenient way to handle this bug. Using no queues after building either improvements or units is the default behavior for most players. So operation Ostrich is the least intrusive method.

The one extreme measure to handle it - build queues in every single base - effectively cancels the bug for humans and slightly benefits the AI. Big minus: micromanagement nightmare. A strong "nay" for this one

The other extreme is to exploit it to the last Joule, by manually inserting "stockpile energy" after units. Diadvantage: in my mind this is gross cheating on the pathetic AIs. + Super annoying. Who likes some random bugs to dictate the only efficient way to play the game ? Nay to this procedure.
Nevertheless, this is the procedure ACOL has adopted for most of the games discussed there. In other words, it is the procedure favored by the "old school" CMNs and the most accomplished players (imho).