The best of both worlds: certainty vs neutrals (of 2 and 4) yet varying levels of luck vs enemy.

I didn't know straight round was what I needed to get it. I'll try it out and probably use it as my standard settings from now on.

No.

If 3v2 always hits then expanding is both cheaper and more efficient which totally changes the way the template works. It will also reward sitting and calculating endlessly over brilliance and intuition. 7v4 should be 100%, players should not be expected to hedge against a 2% chance of getting screwed over. I think 2v2 hitting sometimes is totally accpetable. I like the idea of more predictability at a much larger scale though. Too often one player has a much larger stack and the other an income advantage with little room for tactics; those situations should be resolved by luck less imho.

I don't think this will add much more calculating as there is still luck involved with larger numbers. Intuition remains just as important and all the usual tricks still apply.
If you think expansion becomes too fast, lower the base income, but I'm personally fine with a slightly faster expansion. This will also open the game for slightly larger maps. I would actually even prefer 4 starting spots tbh.

Why do you want these changes? I feel like there is a lot of anti ladder settings sentiment and I don't know why. Everyone seems to have a different problem. It isn't perfect but is a total overhaul necessary?

no luck in 3v2s will add a huge emphasis to calculating because your calculations will not become less and less accurate the more turns into the future you are predicting. I will be able to make my picks and for each combination plan exactly how every turn will go up until I bump into an opponent.

When I said expansion will be too fast I wasn't necessarily talking about the first few turns. At the moment expanding whilst in contact with an opponent is an advanced strategy, making 3v2s always sucessful and with 2 leftovers to boot will make it a necessity. Is that what you think strat 1v1s are lacking? both players spreading across the whole map and a greater emphasis on the importance of expansion space late game...

4 spots is interesting, what appeals to you about the idea and how do you think it will change the game?

The ladder settings changed over time (for better or worse) so I don't see why we can't discuss some new ideas here? This is not based on 'anti ladder' sentiments, where do you get that from?

Changes can bring new strategies, play styles etc to the game. You will never please everybody. But without change, it's the same crew doing the same things over and over. A lot of games are now very repetitive.

I have no problem if the majority believe that luck should play a role in risk kind of games, instead of being more like chess. In chess you can calculate every option, yet it never happens for obvious reasons. I do think it's the same in this scenario. There will be some more planning in the early game, but then you will rely on intuition, tricks, etc... to win the game.

My main points remains: I don't see why you should succeed a 3v2 where the other fails it. Games are too short and the importance of the early game is too big. While luck should balance itself out, it doesn't work that way when advantages accumulate. Having that turn 1 bonus is not the same as succeeding a 3v2 on turn 8.

I've played several games with 4 starting spots and I think it offers more strategy, such as counter-picking, gathering intel, securing safe spots and it avoids the early 'I'm screwed by picks' better. Also, the fighting is earlier, which is the most interesting part of the game for me.

But don't take it wrong, this is an open discussion. I think it's a good time now to hear opinions, there were seasonal ladders with no luck and several tournaments, so a lot of players should have some opinion by now.

Chaos' maps are good for 1v1s. I don't think his ideas are limited to or even focused on Medium Earth games.

As it is, I can only last 5-20 ladder games before I get bored with the ME ladder. Real-time is more exciting than multi-day. Team games are more strategic than 1v1s. Changing maps and settings every so often is more interesting. How many members are there? 500+? Yet the number of people on the 1v1 ladder is at about 120? I think ladder participation would increase with a Random Map ladder. Lots of people talk about boredom with the current map/settings. We all thought the seasonal ladder was created to address this. But it's only been ME, East Asia with strange neutral settings, ME, ME, Chaos' good map with good settings, and now ME again.

I'd like to see a Random Map 1v1 ladder. Two ways to make that fun: (1) Create 3-5 acceptable army/card settings and select 5-8 good 1v1 maps. Just as opponents are selected at random by the system, maps and settings for each game could be. Changing the maps and settings so that the same map and the same settings are not used twice in a row would add the variation that would make a ladder more enjoyable.

(2) Fixed Maps/Settings:

1. ME
2. The New ME (with straight round, 16%, no cards)
3. East Asia & Oceania (1v1 ladder settings)
4. A Chaos map -- whichever map/settings he thinks is most enjoyable
5. Europe (I got a fun one with 7 cards given right away and adjusted bonus values)
6/7. Sze's (6) Ancient Greece and (7) Turkey
8. I think Anciet China is a fun/strategic 1v1 & have 3 different templates that are somewhat popular
9. Imperium Romanum (5 cities worth 0, no cards, 3-4 starts)

if u want 0% luck pls go and plat with some kind of mathmatical equations, if u want to play this kind of game pls add some luck to it

Chaos: You don't play on the ladder, or in any of the 1v1 ME tournaments I've seen and you've been vocal before about alternatives to the ladder settings before, am I wrong in assuming you don't like them? I wasn't sure what you don't like about them so I asked =).

It seems that you don't like people being handed unearned advantages by the luck modifier? Changing to straight round has some ugly unintended consequences. The fix that occurred to me was to put a modifier in place to give players who had been less lucky than their opponent lots more luck in the following turns.

Imho a game of war is not war without luck.. often in war plans don't work out or if they do then not in the way predicted... it is that unpredictability that makes a war game fun

Something I'd like to see: Ratings are adjusted based on who gets first pick. Why not add accumulative luck to the ratings equation? I win and have more accumulative luck, your rating isn't affected as much. You win and I have more accumulative luck, your rating goes up a bit more, mine goes down a bit more.

I've played in the ladder and loads of tournaments earlier, and still do on other account with over 2k games. ME is a fine map but lately I've mainly played on different maps, several tournaments on Battle Islands V and some other maps like volcano island. Fizzer's new Heavy Earth seems very interesting as well.

True, I dislike too much luck in competitive games/sports. That's why I like the 0% + SR, which still leaves luck in the game, but at least not when it comes to 3v2 attacks.

What are those ugly unintended consequences you mentioned? So far I had really good games (won or lost) with these settings and at least they were not decided by failed attacks or high risk play.

Nothing wrong with keeping it the way it is, but I'm interested in different opinions. This is not a crusade to change the game.

@ R+A: thanks for the constructive feedback, really helpful...

Hannibal: that is such a brilliant idea.

Chaos: the unintended consequences were what I was talking about in my other posts: emphasis on expanding middle and late game, calculating being all important, overall the game being less complex.

This is based off my experience with season 5.

The luck factor is a part of the game you need to deal with, and your calculus can be as rigorous and thorough as you want to. It means you have to be more flexible on mere reasoning, it doesn't mean the game gets uneven considering both players can do the maths exactly the same way.
Pick your favourite way to think your games, please don't say the game is less interesting with a luck factor you'd like to ignore just because it's easier to do so ^^

Easier? We all know the possible outcomes with luck, no need to calculate it any more, and I'm sure nobody ever does for the common situations. You attack with 3 on 2, calculate all you want, but the only way to see the exact outcome it to see the next turn. We deal with other luck factors already.

"Personally I don't see any reasons to play with (16%) luck. All it does is force you to gamble a lot on 3v2 attacks early on."
Do any of the top players actually do that?
Have to agree with the majority here. 16% luck is maybe a little too high (it IS annoying when a 7v4 fails) but 0% luck + straight round puts a huge emphasis on micro in the opening stages, which in turn makes picking well even more critical. And given that picks already decide the majority of games in Strategic 1v1 I don't think that's a good idea for that particular template anyway. Personally I tend to prefer 0% luck + weighted round.

sometimes you have to rely on 3vs2 attacks. Pretty disgusting if you lose some of them

@Hannibal: The ratings are modified based on who gets the first pick. If you get first pick and you win, your rating boost will be lower than if your had gotten it. Cumulative luck is a bit trickier, sometimes cumulative luck graph can show +5 armies for one person, on the other hand it had no consequences to the game and the winner got crucial 1st order... Very hard to aggregate overall "luck" in the game.

@R+A=R, A not 0: Even with weighted random a lot of the time you can find an optimal strategy, a lot of the time it's a dominant strategy, sometimes a Nash equilibrium in mixed strategies, so if you really want to push that argument, you should not play the game at all, since you can always calculate expected value and variation.

Of course every template is different and which is the preferable luck setting is debatable, depending what goal we have in mind. My preferred standard is 0% luck weighted random. Of course 16%<0% luck, since it is pretty much the same, except turns attack that are 95% accurate (like 7vs4) and turns them into 100%. Since income is a scarce resource in warlight, we rely on attacks that are >95% accurate (unless there is a very specific reason not to do it) so it really comes in handy when you want your 7vs4 not to miss, calculation is simply easier. 16% luck was implemented for 4vs2 attacks to be 100% accurate, since that is the most common type of attack on almost every template, since 2 as a neutral is a standard, but the very same argument can be made for 14% lick and 12% luck for 5vs3 and 7vs4 to be accurate respectively. 0% luck makes the calculatoin just much easier. Now for the straight round vs weighted round, both have some advantages, but I dislike the first for the very same reason I don't like cyclic orders: it overcentralises the game. Contrary to popular beliefs, managing 4vs2 and 3vs2 attack is a very important part of skill in warlight and you should recognize when you can and when you cannot use them. The problem with straight round I have it overcentralises the game around expansion. Expansion is almost always preferred since it is A LOT more cost-effective then in weighted round due to 3vs2 being always successful and neutrals killing only 1 on defense leaving maximum amount of leftovers possible. On many templates it allows you to search for optimal picking strategies, for example 2vs2 0% luck straight round manual warlords with 4 starts on europe is broken because of the rounding system, I am confident that setting has 1 dominant strategy with very small tweaks. Take back straight round, ut opens up many possibilities. Similarily cyclic orders make attack and defense so much easier since you know when you can rely on 1st order and when you cannot, that allows for much less refined strategies in both attack and defense. Straight round I think works very well on small maps where leftovers and further expansion will not be a problem e.g. my turkey 1vs1 template. I am probably in a minority, but I'll always prefer 0% luck weighted round.

a bit hard to read through that big paragraph, but I agree that 0% luck and WR seems a good compromise. I only tried this a few times, but it seems good.
It does make the 3v2 the same as with SR though.

Maybe it's a matter of playing around with the different numbers for luck? Try everything from 0% to 16% and compare the odds and outcomes. If there is a setting that guarantees 3v2, but could leave you with 1 or 2 remaining armies, that might be a solid choice.

Anyone tried with 3 on the neutrals and more income or starting armies?

Even with 0% luck, 3v2 is only guaranteed with straight round. I believe that was the reason straight round was implemented, to specifically allow a setting for 3v2 to always work.

I forget the season number, but there was a season that used 3 army neutrals. It was the season with the Oceania map. Lots of test cases there, if you want to go back and watch the games.

I see, must have made a mistake in testing the 0% and SR. How about x% luck and SR?