Bidding System for 1st Move in 1v1

[Roscokov]

I have to disagree on the importance of positioning vs going first - there's a lot of data showing the first player may win somewhere around 70% of the time given equal opponents. The positions are important of course and can decide the game, but going first almost always gives you an advantage in deploy and on cards that can snowball through the game. If position were that important (and it is independent of going first), it'd push win rates closer to 50/50.

Regardless... I'd love the option to choose your positions. Whatever the issues are, that would replace a lot of luck with strategy.

There's no rationality to assume that win rates would be closer to 50/50 if positions had an effect on the game...for that you would have to analyse the different results people got from going first/second with the exact same opening positions.

I do like the idea of being able to choose your starting positions - like the board game - but i can't see how this would really be workable in anything other than a real time game...it could take months to set up a game on the massive boards using 24hr. (and like once says the games on smaller maps will start to become repetitive)

I think pretty much all the suggestions sound interesting as extra game options to add flexibility but i don't think there is any one solution that could be applied across the board...some maps obviously (by the 1v1 stats) have a far greater first turn advantage than others...and any solution that evens up a map on classic mini is going to have a different effect on classic massive.

I've long advocated to change the rules so that the player with the first turn gets to place troops but NOT attack. In this way Player 1 doesn't get an advantage because the turn is defensive only

I'm not sure which player I'd rather be, which to me says it's somewhat even. It doesn't require any additional shenanigans that delay the start of the game.

I would rather be the 2nd player because the first person to attack ALWAYS gets an advantage. You also get to see where the other person has placed their troops which would be nice...

[Dalinar]

There's no rationality to assume that win rates would be closer to 50/50 if positions had an effect on the game...for that you would have to analyse the different results people got from going first/second with the exact same opening positions.

No. There is a rational, and we can make inferences just based on the win rates going first and second.

Here's a clear example. Imagine one player on classic evolved got all of Australia, the two adjacent regions, and then had their remaining regions evenly distributed across the map. I think we can agree that player would almost certainly win, whoever is playing and whoever goes first. (repeat with more commands on classic massive if you want something more extreme)

Now, that position is randomly distributed between players one and two, whoever is playing. The win rate would end up 50/50 or very close.

There, position would clearly dominate going first in determining who wins. However, since actual win rates are very far from 50/50 (70/30 iirc), we can infer that position (and dice, and everything else) are clearly not dominating going first.

[Roscokov]

Ok, but you are assuming that the favourable position is randomly distributed between the two players but there is no way to verify this (at the moment) just because things are random does not mean they occur equally - you would have to process millions of games until you came close to enough data.

There are 52 regions in Classic Evolved.

That means on a two player game there are quite literally millions of different starting positions available.

With that many different viable starting positions you can't really analyse the effect without knowing the stats on how many games are won from each position by each player (which we can't) to assume that the favourable positions are distributed evenly between player 1 and 2 seems pretty unlikely to me. (Think of it like tossing a coin, just because there are two possible results the chances of you getting a 50/50 result after 10 tosses is quite probable...the probability of you getting exactly a 50/50 result after 1000 coin tosses is a lot less so)

I agree with your analogy that the player with australia should usually win, however without knowing how often this actually occurs or any actual results when it does this statement is complete conjecture. (you also don't say how many times the other player landed all of South America lol)

Just by identifying one situation where your scenario applies does not mean you can ignore all the other factors. (dice, cards, player ahem skill)

How do you know that the system doesn't randomly give the first player a better starting position? I mean, obviously you assume it doesn't but with the amount of possible options available you would need to look at the actual data in order to actually confirm that. (and I could throw you some nonsense statistics/examples from the existing stats to argue that the higher win rate in the first turn is due to better board position - the point is there is no way to know)

For example, Duck & Cover, according to the league stats finished 59%/41% for the player going first.

What this doesn't tell you is how many of those victories were won by people who (for example) started the game with both planes or even one plane. it also doesn't tell you anything about the skill level of the players or the luck they had with their first roll.

You can see from the league stats as well that whilst the win rate inn the Onyx league for players going first was 74% it was only 50% in the silver league...to me that statistic suggests that players competency levels also has a greater impact than who goes first.

Maybe what we want is an option to replay the previous game but on different sides - a rematch option that just regenerates the same map and swaps the player positions...or an option to create duplicate games.

Personally i think the biggest factor affecting every game is the dice...I would assume people don't usually play fixed force h2hs but i would be interested to know how the stats differ between those games and the chance games...then you would have a clearer idea of how the turn order plays out.

[TormentaBANNED]

Well I was talking about classic evolved escalate. I prefer to go first but no problem with going second, at least I will take 2 more troops when the cards are used. But if the first player has normal or good dice and can control SA or Oceania, game over.

In the tournament fibonacci, 1vs.1 duckandcover, I see 11-9 in favour of the first player. But what you can tell about those stats is that the best players (in rank) win, with only 1 or 2 exceptions. Of course I don't know if that is representative.

Anyway I'm not specially in favour of making changes (only having the option of deploying yourself at the beginning). If my opponent has that layout and is not really unlucky, I will suicide in round 2 or 3, and the same usually happens the other way round.

But of course it doesn't tell very much about strategy. Well as a matter of fact I don't think that 1vs.1 tell a lot about a player's quality, only if you are terrible

[ndrm31]

In the tournament fibonacci, 1vs.1 duckandcover, I see 11-9 in favour of the first player. But what you can tell about those stats is that the best players (in rank) win, with only 1 or 2 exceptions. Of course I don't know if that is representative.

Yep for that reasson that round was set in porpuse that way

[Roscokov]

Just to clarify, I am in favour of more game options as long as we keep the default that is at the moment lol

[Chilly]

I think that the easiest solution would be to have an option where you decide the initial deployment, as in the original game.

So the first player chooses a country to begin in, the second chooses another, until the map is complete.

The disadvantage would be that games would be slower because you add the initial turns...

An option I've seen at other sites is to randomly assign territories the same way we currently do. However, only put 1-troop on each territory. Then in the first turn, each person deploys the remaining 20 armies (2 troops * 10 terts?) however they choose. There are a few additional options that could be useful here. Make it blind deploy (Fog of war) so you don't know where anyone else's deploys went (or even what terts they own), or leave it visible. Also possibly place a max stack size (relative to the total deploy, the actual number is debatable).

The main benefit to this is that it only adds one extra turn to the game rather than dozens. Very doable IMO.

Back to the original idea. If implemented, this should also be available for any team game in which where are only two teams.

[Roscokov]

https://www.majorcommand.com/games/345682/


lets see what transpires in this one...

just my luck to get the poor hypothetical draw we have all talked about....going second as well(My money is still on me though lol)

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I like the chilly's suggestion - I have an app on my phone where the allocation works kinda like that (it gives you 8? troops a time) which are then allocated onto territories you already hold and players take turns to do so

It's a completely different battle at the start, in fact the whole games dynamics are much different.

[conquest6]

If you could place your troops manually and this process gave everyone an equal chance to start the game....there wouldn't be a need to worry so much about who goes first or last. You have time to build a strategy. Sometimes people run away with the game in a couple of turns because they got a killer drop. With manual placement you could look at the fact that the longer you wait to deploy troops the more you get and that might help early in the game. If this is implemented it would have to be timed so we don't have to wait on so long as those 5 minute turns when someone is Dilly Dallying.

[Squintgnome]

I agree with a comment made above, that, aside from the dice, there are two other random aspects to the game - the territory distribution and deciding who goes first. To build on the 'bidding' concept, you can show both players the territory distribution on the map and FIRST bid for which color each player will play, then, after that, SECOND bid for who goes first.
More specifically, for a 1 v 1 game, the initial territory distribution would always be red, blue, and white (neutral). The host would begin bidding for who plays BLUE (negative bidding permitted to account for cases where red is the preferred position). After that is decided, the player who lost the first bid would begin bidding for who goes first (again, negative bidding permitted for cases where someone may prefer to go second)