On Isolated Positions and Fairness

[Hans_Lemurson]

I'm not sure how much specific detail I should go into, but I have witnessed a player in a very bad strategic position completely separated from the rest of the team.

The land of this player is fertile, and it looks like a good position on the surface, but through no fault of their own they are facing a war which will likely doom them to an early death.

This, combined with the poor starting location that California was dealt made me wonder:
-How are team start-positions actually determined?
-Is there any way to ensure better clustering?
-Or is this a sort of problem that is very difficult to solve algorithmically?
-How much do we care about "fair starts"?
-Is it possible to pre-screen maps to make sure that they don't screw anybody over?
-Is it even possible to ensure that in a 35 player game, that nobody will suffer misfortune? (5% chance of bad start multiplied by 35 players = 84% chance of somebody being screwed)

[Wahazar]

In LT44, Ukrainians had position completely separated from red team, I don't recognize them to be completely dead.
And remember what General McAuliff said about such situation:
"Men, we are surrounded by the enemy. We have the greatest opportunity ever presented an army. We can attack in any direction".

[Corbeau]

Yeah, fairness in non-linear games is always an issue.

This issue is more prominent in team games where you don't choose who your enemy is based on in-game conditions. In said cases, players ended up in bad locations not because their locations were bad, but because their neighbours turned out to be their enemies by out-of-game means. Under "normal" no-teams play, you could still try to use diplomacy to persuade, coerce or bribe those neighbours to be your friends (and possibly fail, but at least you have an opportunity). In a team game, well, we're left at mercy of the map creation algorithms and fixing them is the only way to help this.

Another possible solution - for team games - would be to have the whole map completely uncovered. Hell, if we are playing a team-based war game, then it's not an 4X game anyway and there is no real need for "eXploration". This would make it more fair because:
- an element of luck about who discovers a nice resource first is eliminated
- at the start of the game we can have criteria to determine if the game is generally set up fairly, and if not, to restart it

[Wahazar]

Another possible solution - for team games - would be to have the whole map completely uncovered...

If I would want to play absolutely fair game with well known map, I would play chess

[wieder]

In LT32 the map was known and the teams chose the start locations. That was quite complicated and resulted with starting locations to have too much importance.

Someone could check the map in advance but that would be also lots of work and there could be errors because of so many nations to check.

Maybe the generator will be improved for 2.6? Or is.

[Hans_Lemurson]

In LT32 the map was known and the teams chose the start locations. That was quite complicated and resulted with starting locations to have too much importance.

Someone could check the map in advance but that would be also lots of work and there could be errors because of so many nations to check.

Maybe the generator will be improved for 2.6? Or is.

Yeah, I don't want to just dump more work at your already busy feet.

[kevin551]

Wieder in LT32 the map was shared before the game and start positions were chosen in a very fair transparent manner.
Teams chose city spots one at a time from a big list of possible sites.
Everybody could see what was going on.
I agree it was complicated, but it needed to be so to be completely fair.

That the winning team chose the best starting position is not really a surprise.
Our strategy was based more on Go than Chess.
But it still took 8 months of intense play for that win to be realised.

LT32 was a far superior game to LT44. I much prefer an open map with chosen placement, than the random unfairness we have now.

[wieder]

It's true that the location picking process was fair and transparent. It's not that but the importance of the locations. Some players were just better than other with picking the start locations. Then again it's a question about if this would be something the players want? For LT45 there were no resources for dong that but if we have a volunteer for organizing and editing the locations, we could do it again.

I hope LT45 is still enjoyable game for the participants. At least I can't see any team that would be clearly superior to the others. Or maybe not even slightly superior but that's hard to say since I don't see the map