What good does it do to have these divisions in the first place? I can only presume that those in favor of this idea are also in favor of grading on a curve -- it's that ridiculous. Grades will be handed out based not on absolute performance, but on position in the scoring relative to other participants.
To arbitrarily "decide" that 1/4th of all players in Bracket A will be "demoted" to Bracket B after the competition might please the controlling personality, but what does it have to do with the results? It's a random guess, and likely to be wrong. Perhaps none of the players warrant "demotion", and perhaps most of them will. Deciding that before the games are played...?
A competition also implies comparing results from different players playing the same game. If folks are playing at different difficulty levels, they are not playing the same game. It's not quite as bad as playing chess in Bracket A, football in Bracket B, and Barbie's Dream House in Bracket C, but still, it's not the same game. If you want to even out odds of winning based on skill or lack thereof, some kind of handicap system akin to that in golf might work, but even then... the data samples available will probably be too small to get that cute.
I think Aeson's scoring system is a noble attempt to improve on the flawed and exploitable one in the game, and at first glance it seems to be making progress. Just the idea that the system can be "milked" at all for more score after the game is effectively over is problematic. Yeah yeah, that's a "talent in its own right" but I thought this was aimed at eliminating that? Or can it not be eliminated?
I like the idea of competition. This one looks like it has some good things going for it, but I don't think it's quite refined enough to catch my interest. I'll try to explain why.
The gameplay itself is rife with luck in ancient combat, and the smaller the map, the more so the luck. Warrior Gambit is just the tip of that iceberg, and I haven't seen reports from gamblers showing a failure rate that matches with the odds on the risks many of them are taking, so... that starts to wander off into other issues besides game play that are distinctly not fun to take on. But even presuming a perfect level of integrity among all players for the sake of argument (no cheating), for THAT MUCH luck to be involved, the results blur beyond a meaningful margin of error on a sample this small. Even four games and even with an improved scoring system that weighs results more carefully, if games are turning based on combat in the first 3000 years, with warriors and archers especially, or a small number of horses/swords, the same four players could do the same exact things with the same units, one turn apart, pulling different seeds out of the RNG, and come up with wholly different results. Of what value then would those results be? You could have a contest just as meaningful by having the players sit down, throw dice, and declare the luckiest ones the winners.
Even if the game objectives won't allow for gambit moves to "win", they still have a huge impact. The civ that takes over the capital of a close neighbor with a military gambit in 2000BC is leaps ahead of the civ who waits to have the forces for a more sure victory. The smaller the map and the closer your nearest neighbors, the more luck-based the results are going to be, regardless of any controls in place to try to work around that.
"Four Small Maps So We Can Get More Games In" sounds cool, but you're trading quality for quantity. I know Grey Fox likes to use gambits and exploits -- I've seen him mention it numerous times, and I've not read all that many threads -- so this arrangement caters fairly well to his playstyle. Maybe a little too well? Not implying anything sinister, but from over here the conditions and details of the contest look biased to me. The "earliest finish" is very heavily weighted and that, too, sounds good. But then the pressure is on the player to forego playing it safe and take more and more risks for high rewards, because that is how to dramatically speed your results. Then we're back to the Luck Factor, which is actually magnified, not minimized, by all the conditions and rules I'm seeing. Ah but wait, there are four games to score, so that should weed out those who take too great of risks, right? They might get lucky once, or twice, but four times? Well... you would have a point there. But with the contest being THAT MUCH based on luck, and the luck easy to "fix" in any number of ways, not all legitimate to the spirit and/or rules of the contest... we're also then back to the question of whether players will honor all of those rules.
It's that blur factor that has left me disinterested in the GOTM. The game itself rightly deserves most, if not all, of the blame for that. The combat system in ancient times allows for that much luck to enter in, and that's the fault of the designers. But... there could be ways to minimize that. IMO this concept seems to be heading in the exact opposite direction, toward maximizing it.
Thoughts? Comments?
- Sirian
) might not get a victory every game? I really didn't think I would be alone in that, though. 
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