Ambush!: MiniTourney ***It's all over!!***

[Death]

updated 5/18

It's over! Thanks for watching!

Quick links to the two articles written for this tournament are here and here.

Replays are posted at the bottom.







CONGRATULATIONS TO THE BLACK SWORD!!!

After a no-nonsense, no-holds-barred, no-where-to-hide [sic] showdown, The Black Sword emerged from the river as the sole survivor of this year's Ambush! tournament.

Congratulations!



May your name be whispered in fear among those traveling through the woods.




Once again, thanks t everybody for participating, I think we can say without a doubt that this was the most successful player2-themed tournament ever.





Post Tournament Notes:


Theme

This is the second "themed" tournament I've run, and I think once again it worked, albeit with a few more difficulties than the last one. Nonetheless, I was pleased to see a number of decent to hard fought matches come out of it all.


It seemed to me that the ability to pick factions outweighed the first turn advantage (there were several cases of lower seeds beating higher seeds with p2, but none where the lower seeded p1 achieved victory), although strong players were able to overcome this challenge.


The main problem with the tournament theme was seeding. Ideally, of course, every player would play every other player twice (taking turns as p2), and then the best records would move on. However, this would also take forever, and with the added downside that the sooner players accumulating losses were out of contention, the sooner matches would simply stop getting played. Thus the system of semi-arbitrarily picking, for each match-up, who would have the p2 faction-picking advantage. And here I'll let you in on a little secret: I kind of screwed the top seeds over a little bit in favor of more interesting matches (sorry plk2 ).

On the other hand, there's only so much accuracy you're going to get with an 8 team league, and a good rule of thumb for these kinds of tournaments is to pick fun over fairness if you're ever forced to choose.


Other than seeding, I think the tournament went well, and players did a great job of getting into the theme.

The only thing I'm still scratching my head about, as one player put it so well:





Scheduling

This tournament I took a more "hands off" approach to scheduling. Which is a nice way of saying that I did nothing, and the players took care of it themselves. I think this shows more than anything that this community needs more tournaments. I mean, come on. This tournament just finished entirely thanks to player motivation!

All I did was write up some rules and say "go."


As for the finals, well I've seen team tournaments with 40+ teams gather 14+ players at regularly scheduled games every weekend... only to have to delay the finals back a week.

Who knows why computer game finals seem to be cursed, but I'm not too concerned. As long as they finish, that's what matters.



Anyway, that's all I got. Thanks again!

[Henrythe12th]

• To sign up, post a reply to this thread with the following:

Your ScreenName
Your TimeZone (American, Europe, or Japan/Asia)

Hello Death,

Good idea, I want to take part in the tourney.

My name will be still: Henrythe12th
My time-zone is: Europe

Regards,

Henry

[ParadiseCity]

Sounds like a fun thing to try out, I'm in.

ParadiseCity
American (Central)

[UK1]

Just to inform you, there's this new hyper-insane apparently flawless knalgans v undead strategy. Because of stuff like that wouldn't it make sense for player two to pick the factions and then player one picks which player GETS each faction? Almost like "You split, I pick"? I dunno.

[Death]

i have indeed been watching this strategy, although I have yet to see it demonstrated for pre-known with undead as player1. my guess (and hope) is that we will see even more lopsided combos in this tourney - the objective is to beat the mismatch with player1 advantage.

that is a good suggestion, though, and i will use it if it means more people will sign up! (i might use it anyway)

of course, it is also possible to simply ban that pick i'd say it depends on what happens... if this happens!



We need more signups!!!

[Rigor]

hello,

very nicely decorated thread. last time i had lots of fun, and you can count me in again this time!

timezone europe

im already calling all my friends to join up ))

[Tesafilmchen]

Im in too.
Tesafilmchen/Europe

[plk2_]

sign me up
plk2, europe

[5dPZ]

Just to inform you, there's this new hyper-insane apparently flawless knalgans v undead strategy. Because of stuff like that wouldn't it make sense for player two to pick the factions and then player one picks which player GETS each faction? Almost like "You split, I pick"? I dunno.

Either wait until faction balance or ban this, otherwise player2 will always win by picking this match up.

Uk's suggestion also works.

[The Black Sword]

I'd like to try a tournament;
The_Black_Sword, Europe.

Looks like I'll have to get out of my current habit of picking Rebels .

[Cackfiend]

Count me in.

Also very curious to see this undead vs dwarves strat.... guessing it has to do with the Scout units since it got nerfed in the dev version

[Gregorius]

I'm always up for a match and for new things
Gregorius
Europe

[Henrythe12th]

Hello Gregorius,

I am sorry but i made a mistake in our last match ...
I am p1 and you are p2 ... so you can chose the fractions ...
I already canceled the ladder report. Please tell me when you
are ready to redo this match.

Regards,

Henry

[Gregorius]

as my excuse, i only has this combination once when my enemy used the fact drakes have many pierce units and produced sceles, so burners were good that game... another lesson learned
*EDIT*
for any of my opponent: I won't get online tomorrow (monday) for I go to work half day and then go eat some pizza with my classmates, when I get back I will probabbly be too tired to play

[plk2_]

First game with Gregorius (plk is p2 on Howling Ghost Badlands) ended in a win for me.
He attacked on first day time, pretty unlucky, which was a bite too early. gg

the replay will follow later, dont find it tbh, but is saved somewhere