Congratulations to Rubik87 for winning Season III! Rubik87 has now won two of the three seasons – very impressive!
Season IV settings
Season IV will be a luck-less version of the Strategic 1v1 template. Its settings can be accessed by this template: multi-player / single-player.
This template’s settings are the same as Strategic 1v1 with the following exceptions:
- Rounding mode is set to Straight Round (see previous blog post if you don’t know what this is)
- Luck modifier is set to 0%
- Move Order is set to cyclic
With these settings, there’s no luck involved in combat at all. It’s a good idea to learn your kill tables so you know what to predict when sending your armies out. Here’s some of the more important ones:
- 3v2 always wins, leaves a 2 on the catptured territory
- 4v2 always wins, leaves a 3 on the catptured territory
- 6v4 always wins, leaves a 3 on the catptured territory
- 2v2 always loses (kills 1 and loses 1)
- 1v2 always loses (kills 1 and loses 1)
- 1v1 always loses (kills 0 and loses 1)
Ranking Changes
A couple tweaks have been made to the ranking system from Season III.
The biggest change has to do with the way players are matched up. In Season III, players were given games against players with similar ratings to them. This ends up making players move very slowly up or down the ladder once they get established.
To counter this, the matchmaking algorithm will now look at your win/loss record in that season in addition to your rating. Your rating will be adjusted by 80 points for each win/loss over/under an even record ((wins – losses) * 80). This adjusted rating isn’t displayed anywhere, rather it’s used when determining who you’ll be matched against. This will help players who get a late start to the season but win a lot of their early games, helping them get matched against tougher opponents until they start losing.
When thinking about this change, it’s important to remember that the rating itself is already affected by your win/loss record. Therefore, it’s not fair to say that your win/loss record wasn’t taken into account for matchmaking in Season III. It’s fair to say that it’s weighted more heavily for matchmaking in Season IV.
The other change that’s being made has to do with the way that low-games penalty is applied. It’s always been the case that finishing a season with fewer than 20 games gives you a penalty of 40 points per game. This rule exists to ensure players can’t cheat by joining a season very late and getting a couple high-ranking wins to walk away with the #1 rank (or a very high rank.)
In Season III, this was implemented by simply adding 40 points for each finished game, win or loss, up to 20. This has the unintended side-effect of making players who finish games faster get a temporarily higher rating than players who finish them slower. Since your rating is used for matchmaking, this in essence was a penalty to slower players. This is being corrected for Season IV – the points will be added as each game is created, not when they’re finished.
I was hoping for more interesting settings
The seasonal ladder is a great opportunity to mix things up. Season 3 was great on a different map which we all had to learn. Season 4 Settings I’m afraid has led me to sign out. Sorry, I don’t like complaining, but it feels like a missed opportunity. And quite a big one.
Why not just wait until the tournament is over to do the points for games instead of doing it during each game. Otherwise it seems like it’s going to negatively affect the accuracy of the rating as it weights it differently in a way that is irrelevant to skill and wins/losses. Saving it until the very end avoids this while still doing it for the final score. Or perhaps if there’s a way to show it on the scoreboard, but not have it calculated in for determining opponents (which is the relevant thing affected during the ongoing tournament by this).
Not everyone wants to play Medium Earth forever. There are already two ladders using that map. That’s what made Season III fun.
thats exactly what i think
i will be playing, just for the fun of it but i would have preferred to have seen a more obscure map being used.
I hope season V will be more interesting
Ironically, I love these settings and might actually come out of semi-retirement just to play this Season out! It’s too bad that I’ve been too busy to play much on here and wasn’t able to participate in Season 3 (which used the map that I created!) but I can definitely see how a change in maps could spice up the Ladder and incidentally this is the exact goal I had in mind when I created the East Asia & Oceania map. My ultimate goal was to help determine and/or create around 4 of these type of maps (2 more + Medium Earth and EA & O) that had the similar strategic components to Medium Earth with a different scenery to add some flavor to the traditional Ladder matches. It’s nice to see some positive feedback about the change in Season 3 and it might be worthwhile to discuss with Fizzer some other potential candidates to use moving forward.
Out of curiosity, if there was a map out there right now that a vast majority of Warlighters would consider an ideal Strategic 1v1 format suited for use in a Seasonal Ladder, what would that map be?
Our clan like european borders.
Long live the Clan of Warlighters
Duel map
quadruple actually does have a strategic side, with the right settings.
You could pile up in one place, then attack or just defend.
Obviously not for the season but the current map is a big disappointment.