The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I'll be the one organizing this one it seems.


[Date]

Saturday, September 5th, 2009


[Time]

Here (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=9&day=5&year=2009&hour=14&min=0&sec=0&p1=64&sort=1) is how I found the various local times in case anyone's wondering.

    *  5 AM Sydney
    *  7 AM Auckland
    * 12 PM Los Angeles
    *  1 PM Denver
    *  2 PM Chicago
    *  3 PM New York
    *  8 PM London
    *  9 PM Paris
    *  10 PM Helsinki


[Place]

#UQM-Arena on irc://chat.freenode.net. If you don't know how any of this stuff works, this thing (http://www.gekko.frud.biz/uqmtutorial/) that Gekko wrote may be of use to you.


[Tournament Rules]

1) The tournament will be played using Shiver's balance mod. Find out how to install it from here (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/Balance_Mod/Installation).
2) There is a maximum fleet size of 200 points for all players.
3) Do not use more than one of any ship type.
4) The "stalemate breaker" rule is in effect. There has been confusion regarding this numerous times, so here is the rule in its verbose entirety:


Stalemates

Rule: In the spirit of competition, both players should employ whatever tactics they consider most effective. This may result in a stalemate at some point. If so, the faster of the two ships becomes a designated attacker. The attacker does not necessarily have to make a bee-line directly for the defender, but they are required to take the initiative.

Explanation: Stalemates are bound to happen. We found this rule to be a relatively painless solution. The decision to use speed as a stalemate-breaker did not significantly reduce the effectiveness of Star Control's fastest ships. As it turned out, the most mobile combatants were best suited to withstand such a penalty.


[Tournament Structure]

Players will be paired against each other at random. The tournament will consist of three rounds using Swiss tournament rules, meaning that you will play against other defeated players if you lose a match. There will be an additional final round between undefeated contestants if a clear winner has not emerged.

If the player turn-out is low, everyone will play against everyone else once.

There's a reason I stopped trying to make these, you know. I'll be around to play in any case.

I'll probably be there.

Not that I could have made it anyway, but you did have to make absolutely certain by putting it right when I'm picking up a relative from the airport, didn't you?

I'm at a friend's that day but I'd totally be able to make it like half an hour later. Probably.

I really wish you would just post the time in GMT or UTC. It would be much easier.

Seems I'll make it after all ;D

Writing this here in case someone checks this thread in time.

Tournament begins in 30-50 minutes. If you are here reading the thread and not on the channel, shame on you. Join already!

It seems I missed it. We were out shopping for school supplies and just got back 15 minutes ago. I wonder if the tournament is still going...

... and it's done. 1 win, 3 losses... I'll leave the details to Gekko or whoever posts the scores :)

btw. my fleet was:
Chenjesu, Utwig, Orz, Ur-Quan, Vux, Druuge, Thraddash, Mmrnmhrm, Chmmr, Shofixti

The turn out was 5 players. We had a small, nice round robin that lasted roughly 3 hours. In the end Gekko won, even though my last game vs Shiver could as well be a draw. It was bullshit lucking.

Gekko: 4/0

- Wins SquisherX by 110
- Wins SuddenDeath by 92
- Wins SirDayBat by 52
- Wins Shiver by 34

Shiver: 3/1

- Wins SquisherX
- Wins SuddenDeath by 62
- Wins SirDayBat by 46
- Loses to Gekko by 34

SirDayBat: 2/2

- Wins SquisherX by 42
- Loses to Gekko by 52
- Wins SuddenDeath by 16
- Loses to Shiver by 46

SuddenDeath: 1/3

- Wins SquisherX by 90
- Loses to Gekko by 92
- Loses to Shiver by 62
- Loses to SirDayBat by 16

SquisherX: 0/4

- Loses to Gekko by 110
- Loses to SuddenDeath by 90
- Loses to Shiver
- Loses to SirDayBat by 42

Fun times. Squisher must have been very rusty if he lost to Sir Day Bat and Sudden Death by that much. I've still got some tweaks to make on the mod apparently. That new Umgah was a nasty surprise!


I told Gekko I'd be willing to run #uqm-arena meet-up events. These will be a lot like tournaments except more laid back. Real tournaments are not viable anymore these days. More open-ended melee events might be. My goal is to accommodate the players with the following issues: Early arrival, late arrival, unwillingness to play against expert players, an interest in playing but limited free time, insistence upon using Thraddash in vanilla UQM, distaste for standard tournament rules, distaste for unusual game variants, refusal to try melee mods. The kind of problems that plague most of the tournaments. I think they can be worked around. Hosting a meet-up is better than letting Gekko steal my tournament format when I refuse to run one myself and then having to support his tournament anyway. Want more details? You'll see in a week or so.

What fleets did you all bring?

While driving to the airport, knowing that this was going on, I thought about special tourneys...

Like, a tournament in which the two fleets are fixed - let's say, as an example, old hierarchy and old alliance - a match is two rounds, one each way, with the overall winner based on points.

There'd be no need to make the fixed fleets fairly balanced to each other at all. You could have a fleet with every slot a marauder vs the old alliance, and the tournament would still be fair.

There are a lot of expert programmers in this scene, but why hasn't anyone created some kind of ingame lobby system that matches up players for quick battles? :)

All I remember is Gekko's Umgah killing things I hadn't bothered to test it against and later being savagely violated by a string of bad spawn locations. 200 point fleets lead to nice big games with lots of ship variety, but the fleets themselves are indistinct; that many points gives players enough room to cover all their bases. I didn't save my fleet so don't remember its composition exactly.

What I do remember is lots and lots of Ur-Quan. I had one. Most or all of the other players did too. It was always powerful. I need to uptweak Chenjesu so it does its job better.



Don't let the balance mod confuse you. I can't program my way out of a virtual paper bag. I only know the ship code because I banged my head against it for days and asked real programmers a lot of questions.

Novus has supposedly done some work on an in-game lobby. No idea if that's going anywhere.



Those are good ideas. I have a few untested tournament ideas myself, the zaniest being a Secret Mission tournament where every player is given goals such as "load a Syreen Penetrator up to 42 to crew in one of your games" and "select your ships randomly and still win a game". That would be fun. If the community weren't dead, I would try it.

Wow, I really like that idea.

I think all tournaments should be randomized ships anyway. When I play for fun I always select random ships, just to test my skills (which I practically don't have) ;).

That would be a bad idea. Some players would have bad fleets and lose because of it. Unless, of course, you also used Death 999's idea for both players to use each team.

Random ship picking has the problem that if you start with a Chmmr, then your opponent might end up losing many ships before getting his Druuge/Utwig. Maybe random picking would work if there were some special rules. I have no idea how that should be done, though.

I thought he meant random fleets, but random ship selections would be bad too. You would probably have to ban half of the ships, particularly ones from SC2.

A 'sudden change of rules AHOY' kind of gameplay change would be forcing all players to play with their opponents' fleet, which could actually be quite entertaining. Of course, it'll have to remain a secret until the tournament actually starts and people have already submitted their fleets to whoever is hosting said tournament.

Oh yeah, that would be cool. It wouldn't matter much at 200 points (especially in vanilla), but at 100 or 150 points it'd be a different game.



That's easy to solve and I've played with those rules a few times. Blacklist Chmmr and Kohr-Ah and you're golden. Add Ur-Quan to that blacklist if playing the balance mod. Random picks are fun but flawed in that cheap ships are devalued somewhat when they can't be played as counters.

I actually meant random ship selection from the same fleets playing against eachother. Over an entire tournament, the most skilled player will win anyway, not the most lucky player.
The idea behind this is that starship captains would have to have tactics for every ship they encounter, not just know the rock paper scissors thing the best. When you encounter a hostile Chmmr avatar in hyperspace, Druuge/Utwig reinforcements might be days or weeks away and can't be called in in the next battle ;).

Actually, when me and my friend would play UQM, we would always play where both players select their fleet (normal), but you always picked random ship.  Ship prices are adjusted using a free market system we set up. 

It brought about many more interesting battles, as well as small ships battling the big ships, where the goal is to damage the ship rather than kill it (I like the ZFP vs the Chmrr, getting that tongue in).