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PLayer starting positions.

Posted: Sat May 05, 2018 11:16 am
by korexus
Looking at https://www.kaomaris.com/games/2035/kor ... h)/turn_0/ and https://www.kaomaris.com/games/2036/Ecr ... h)/turn_0/ it's clear to see that Skirmishes on this map will often involve fighting very early on.

That's fine, and kind of the point of Skirmishes, but in the first of those games it allowed me to cut up Ecrivian pretty neatly on turn one. This game has the OOP the other way round, so I'm restricted instead. The luck all evens out, and we're both experienced enough players not to get disheartened by an unlucky start. (Although Ec's was probably more unlucky than mine, so that's easy for me to say...)

But this is a point that has come up before. Han used to get very concerned about even starting positions for new players even in games of ten. That's hard to manage without human intervention, but for a skirmish we could probably have a decent stab at it. If, for example, home provinces had to be at least three provinces apart. players would always have some safe neutrals they could grab on turn one. - It would also eliminate province 10 as a starting province on this map, and that's by far the strongest position to have.

We could never make starting positions exactly fair, without mandating what they are (and so removing a lot of the fun of random starts) but it might be worth some tweaks to stop the worst setups.

Any thoughts?

Chris.

Re: PLayer starting positions.

Posted: Mon May 21, 2018 8:52 pm
by korexus
Playing around with this, I've implemented a version of a maximal spacing algorithm. I haven't put it live yet, because I'm not sure I like it. - In a skirmish it will pretty much guarantee one player is on the edge of the map, in order to get the most space between players. It will mean more time for players to build up though, which is probably a good thing.

I need to check it out for multi-player variants too, as it's possible that some maps will struggle to make a starting position at all now.

Re: PLayer starting positions.

Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2018 8:34 pm
by korexus
A few tweaks later, I think this is ready to go. Ec, are you up for a re-match, where we don't start on top of each other?

Re: PLayer starting positions.

Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2018 7:11 pm
by Ecrivian
Ok I'm game.