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Olympics Redux

As the Winter Olympic games are coming to a close I thought it would be fun and interesting to take a look back to my 2004 Olympic Games tournament created for GC. I applied the scoring system in use for Strategy Gamers to see how the competitors would have fared.

The 2004 Games ranked competitors based on the percentage of opponents defeated per game, then by the number of 1st place victories. For example, in an 8-player game there are 7 opponents. Defeating them all results in a score of 1.0. Defeating 2 (6th place) results in a score of 0.286. The scores of each game are averaged.

The new system awards victory points only to 1st place finishers on a basis of 1 point per opponent defeated (for tournaments only). Average score would be a secondary factor in ranking. I applied the victory points system to the 2-21 player games from the original contest and then again had only 2-8 player games been played. Clearly, winning the game makes a sizeable difference in the results.

Enjoy!

The original results are here (slow loading page)
http://www.sgamers.net/Teasers/The%20Olympic%20Games%20-%20The%20Global%20Combat%20Decathlon.htm

The new results under the victory point system are here.
http://www.sgamers.net/Teasers/VPs.htm

Intersting.. i see those that win the big games are more rewarded.

I am no objective :wink: , but i belive games with 2-8 players a a mch beeteermeasure, the bigger games are much more luck involved.

I would say that in 5 or less players placement have nearly any impamt since you can almsot gain a continent each..

6-8 player games ..are also a good measure in skill, but you can be screwed with placemnt. ( the bigger the more luck)

bigger games, luck is a very big factor, offcourse you need skill to win the games once you had enoguh luck to have the opportunity of a good chance,

That being said ..i am still annoyed shooter won both 14 and 21 games...that is indeed lucky :twisted:

LOL... forgot dpate was last

Re: sicktrain's comment about lucky starting position.

Because luck of the draw has historically been a source of concern I added game settings to deal with it. The default option prevents a player from receiving > 60% of the areas in any one region. The second option (Full Regions) allows players to be dealt entire regions.

No, just select the Full Regions option and then any starting distribution is possible. I figured that there are really only two types of distribution, 1) relatively even and 2) potentially very uneven. Despite the mechanism on GC to deny full continents, I've encountered many games wherein the opponent(s) had all but one of a continent plus its buffer territories. That skews the game immediately. So it might as well be an all or nothing approach.

i'm not sure how playable this will be, but what about a Risk-like placement, where players can choose territories in an alternating fashion? kind of game before the game.

it would hypothetically add quite a bit of turns prior to the game starting, but it is a consideration. it would probably also piss some people off that spend 6-10 turns claiming their starting territories, then get killed in the first 5 turns of the actual game. i could see this working out quite well in a "speed game" though, where each person gets, say, 15 seconds to choose their territory, then the game starts with 1-2 minute turn lengths...

oh, and if a player is too lazy for that, that they can still join the game but there'd be some sort of box to check that would make their territory decisions automatic... also automatic if someone just takes too friggin' long choosing a territory.

I did give considerable thought about the dynamics of using the option and in at least this phase of the site, I've left it out.

The primary reason is the nature of having a global group of players wherein there may be half a day or more of a delay between some players getting on line. That adds a lot of time just to begin the game. Wherein some players are not known commodities, there is the real issue of newbies simply dropping out before the game starts. That results in lots of wasted time for the other players just to have a dummy player sitting idle on the board. Also, from my experience of playing the board games, nearly everyone I played with used the "deal-out-the-cards" method of distributing territories b/c there is always at least one player whose inexperience gives them a disadvanage in selecting territories. Plus people always seem to take a long time to decide.

Add all of these considerations together and the option becomes increasingly less desirable. Although it could work in short turn length games, I find that most of those are, again, with newbies that would rather not have to choose their territories.

It will remain a possible addition for later. Until then I hope that the 93 billion combinations of game settings I offer will sufficiently tide you all over. :)

So let's see, if I'm on your site playing every day from age 20 til 80 (negating the fact that I'm already 27 :p), I'd need to play 4,246,575 games a day to cover all the possible game setting combinations...

eh, I say we shoot for a solid 5 mil :p

Yeah Bsmoke, but how many games per day is that if you play those games on a train heading east from Chicago at 93kph while I'm on a train heading west from New York at 64kph?