New Competition Formats

[daveallen]

Trying to bring a discussion that started in email onto the forum. This will give it a better structure and allow more people to contribute.

Let's start with the original idea:

From Stephen Stead

I have often thought about a similar tournament format. You design and bring an army but do not play it. After the first round the top player plays with the worst performing army and the lowest player with the best performing army. You never play at the same table as your own army and never play with the same twice. At the end of the tournament your final position is decided by adding your score to your armies score. To do well you have to design an army that does well in relatively inexperienced hands while coping with a number of different armies yourself.
This format would only work with a reasonable size field I have not checked the maths properly but I think you need a minimum of 18 players. Therefore it is not suitable for the National League or other team events but would be fine for any of the regular large events

And one of many responses:

From Kevin Johnson

I think this has potential but once you start adding in exclusions, which sound good for fairness, the practical problems start to mount up. By game 4 each player will have used and faced 6 armies, so each pair of opponents will potentially be excluded from using 12 of the armies in the tournament. If you start to add club/family restrictions, the draw becomes a nightmare to manage. Even the simplest rule, that nobody plays the same opponent twice can make getting a valid draw tricky in the later stages of a tournament, especially at lower player counts.

But, since we're looking at alternate formats, what does the team think of my idea for a Pairs competition:

1) Each team consists of 2 players who bring 2 historically matched armies.
2) Pairs are drawn against each other.
3) The games are singles, one player from each team will use that team's armies, the other will use their opponent's.
4) The player using the opponent's army chooses which of the two to use.

Two advantages that I see in this format are that there's no need to set a theme and there's no motivation to design competition optimised armies.

For my part, I think some of the problems with Stephen's idea make it quite tricky, but I'd like to give it a try.

Kevin's idea is also interesting and maybe a more viable format.

Dave

[madaxeman]

I did once play in a pairs event in France in which both players had to each use each army at least twice.

The gist of it was, erm...
- 2 Player teams, with 2 armies.
- Each player has to play twice with each army.
- The armies were from different themes - in DBM terms it was one from Book 1&2, one from Books 3&4.
- You usually play against the same "theme" opponents, however each team has one "Joker" they can play to swap the matchups round!.
- This joker can only be played once in the competition, and can be cancelled by an opponents joker.

There was slightly more to it - each player could bring 2 armies instead of 1, but you (somehow) got less points for this, and as I was on a plane I didn't do it anyway.

The report is at http://www.madaxeman.com/reports/cannes_2005_1.php

Might achieve some of the above intentions, but be easier to do.

[daveallen]

Or we could adopt a more standard pairs format:

1 Each team brings two identical armies.
2 Each player fights with their own army twice and against it twice.
3 The draw is by team using their combined score, not by individual score.

Simples

[RonanTheLibrarian]

Further to the Stephen Stead email, back in the 80s, the club I belonged to ran a Napoleonic competition with a twist: everyone brought along an army, they all went into a draw and you picked an army blind, with the one proviso that it couldn't be the one you'd brought. Year 1, most people just brought what they had (including a fair few "Imperial Guard" armies). Year 2, you have never seen so many Spanish and Neapolitan armies in a competition in your entire life!

The problem with doing this using FoG:R is that there aren't enough different armies in most of the sub-eras for there to be no chance you won't draw a force at least vaguely similar to your own army. Perhaps an alternative might be to create army lists with minimal Elite/Superior/Average units, and a maximum number of Poor ones, and see how people get on with those (if nothing else, you might fit in more games in a day!).