Topic: Tournament 2025

Hi everybody,
Great news are approaching: a new release (1.3) is underway bringing amongst others the long wanted trading feature.

And what would be better suited to test such a big feature then a tournament, like it has been a good tradition in widelands.

Any players interested in participating shall respond to this post or send me a PM.
Subscriptions will be open until the final start of the tournament.

The Tournament is planned to start mid July 2025

For the rules see 3rd post.

Map Suggestions are very welcome, setup suggestions to intensively trying the trading feature as well.

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Provisional rules (may be subject to small changes)

Thread for results and replays

Please post your results in the Results thread

Version to be played

tbd. most likely the rc for widelands 1.3 might be the first version to use

Maps:

tbd

Rules

copied from previous tournaments thanks to King_of_ Nowhere

The tournament will be played with the swiss system.

The pairings will be declared at the beginning of every turn, so keep an eye on the forum. Once the turns are declared, contact your opponent and set up your game. after the game, notify the result to me and send me the replay.

There will be one week to play normally, and one week overtime. People are expected to play in the first week. Going overtime is penalized, except in a few specific cases, most notably if you start a game without finishing it, or if you announced in advance you would be missing for a few days. after two weeks, games not played will be assigned by forfait as a loss to both players, except for a few cases. Games started but still ongoing will be assigned by a judge, generally as draw unless there are good reasons not to. In no case a game will be allowed to continue after two weeks, as all the results will be needed to make the new turn.

I, hessenfarmer, will be the arbiter for all disputations, if no other not participating senior member will volunteer. However, in the interest of having a judge who is not a player and therefore potentially biased, some old and respected player will be appointed the supreme arbiter. If you think my judgment was unfair, you can appeal to him, but you have then to accept his decision.

FULL VERSION

0) basics

Playing which map? For all games the map declared above is used. Choice of position is free, if not set in the announcement of the round (might be the case due to balanced position issues).       
If participants can't agree on positions the lower ranked (second) participant has the first pick.     
Playing which tribe? Choice of tribe is free as long as it is not declared in the announcement of the round.      
If participants can't agree on the order of selecting tribes, the higher ranked (first) participant has to choose first. Switching after choosing is completed, is not allowed.    
Startcondition is always "Headquarters". Unless declared otherwise in the announcement.        
The game version should be the version announced for each round (see post #4) . exception: in round 4 the official version is the one of round 3. But if both players want, they can play the version of round 4. Make sure to take care that every player in a match uses the same game version.      
Games are hosted by one of the players or another person. If you need to find someone to host for you, ask in the IRC chat.       
After every game, all players post the following results in a separate thread.     
    Who won.     
    Bugs / Glitches observed while playing.     
    A replay of the game (see next section for instructions).

1) pairings and ranking.

The tournament will be played with a swiss system pairing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament). Basically, first turn is paired at random, who wins get one point, draws (can happen by agreement between the players, or by either players failing to win after a long time) are awarded half a point. For further turns, players are paired against other players with an equal score, so winning will progressively give you harder opponents, and losing will give you easier opponents. Nobody will be eliminated.

There will be five turns, eventually a last round may be addded if to many equal results are present.

Due to the fact that matches with naval warfare tend to be much longer then normal games it is suggested to increase the gamespeed by one each 4 hours, unless players agree otherwise. Please ensure to keep the 2 weeks limit for playing.

The final ranking will obviously be given according to the score. To sort players with equal score, the Bucholz system will be used: the Bucholz score of each player will be calculated as the sum of the scores of all his opponents; a higher score means one has played against stronger opponents. If two players also have the same Bucholz score, they will be ranked according to how their direct game ended, if they did play against each other. Otherwise, the tie will not be resolved. Exception to the whole Bucholz mechanism is for deciding the winner.

If there is an odd number of participants, a forfait will be included, i.e. a virtual player who will always lose without playing. If one player retires, a forfeit will be put in his place. So a forfeit is a free win, but since the forfait will lose all games, it will sink your bucholz :-)  If there are two forfeits, they will be eliminated.

After the last round, if one player leads the ranking alone, he will be the winner. If there are several ex-aequo winners, then they will play one final match on the map. If there are more then 4 ex-aequo winners a new map will be provided for this.

after the game, the players must post the replay. It is enough for one player to send it, but sending it twice to be safe cannot hurt.

2) time schedule

Ideally there should be one round per week, but up to two weeks is considered an acceptable delay. Never a turn will last more than two weeks. Therefore, when a round is started, every player is expected to play within one week. Since people from different time zones cannot reasonably play except on weekends, and need a couple days to set up a game, if the turn is declared thursday or later in the week, the deadline to play will be extended until the next sunday. Taking more than one week to play will entail penalties, and after two weeks the game will be assigned by the arbitral decision **as detailed below**:

If two players fail to play within one week, then they will be penalized by -1 point on their bucholz score. If they accumulate 3 such penalties, it will instead be commuted to 0.5 points in the score (so it could make you lose the tournament if you were tied up for the first place). If they still have not played after two weeks, the game will be assigned as lost to both of them. A few exceptions below:

if it can be demonstrated that the delay was clearly the fault of one player (for example, if one player failed to be there at the appointed time of the game, or if one was only available for very narrow time windows while the other was much more available) then only the player at fault will be penalized. After two weeks, the game will be won by forfait by the player declared not at fault. Of course, if you failed to play and think it was not your fault - or not only your fault - you should send me some kind of proof that your opponent set an unreasonable schedule. Copy of mailed messages is the preferred method.

if two players did play for some time but had to interrupt the game and continue from a reload at a later date, they will not be penalized for taking more than one week. At the end of two weeks, if they produced at least 6 hours of in-game gameplay (taking into account game speed; they can get away with only playing 2 hours if they used 3x speed for example) and they sent the replays to me and still there is no victor, then the game will be considered draw unless one player has a clear advantage.

If one player will notify in advance that he will have problems playing one week, he will not be penalized for going overtime; but please don't do it too often. If he still can't play after the two-weeks deadline, he will be declared loser by forfait, but will not face any more penalties. If you know you cannot play, you can try to agree a draw with another player with a similar score: if you find one willing, I'll try to manipulate the turn so that you can be paired against each other and get a draw by agreement.

3) arbitral decisions

Since I, hessenfarmer, cannot be considered an impartial arbiter on this matter, since I will also be a player, someone else, an old and trusted player or developer who will not be participating this time, will be the final arbiter for deciding which players should be penalized for tardiness and how to assign unfinished games. The arbiter is still to be declared. Though I will make the first decision in any game, anyone can appeal to him if he believes my decision is unfair.

It was never necessary to appear to the final arbiter, though. This has always been a clean and sportsmanlike community. Let's try to keep it that way.

4) lack of communication

If one consistently fails to answer communications (i.e. never answering, or never discussing game schedule; missing one message is acceptable) for more than one week, he's considered retired from the tournament. Though this would be a pity!

5) bug/glitch abuse

Abusing of known bugs and glitches as documented on our github repository will be forbidden. If any player has the suspicion that the opponent used a bug he may object. If the used behaviour is found to be a real bug by our senior developers, the match eventually needs to be repeated. Players won't be penalized for using undocumented bugs. (one motivation for this tournament is to find them).

6) allowed features

All new features of widelands are allowed in principle if both players agree on it: e.g. peaceful mode, custom start position, diplomacy  etc.

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WorldSavior wrote

I'd suggest that the tournament will be a 2vs2 tournament. Trading with an ally is much more interesting than trading with an enemy. What do you think about that?

I had this in mind as well, however I hoped for some other suggestions to use the feature. maybe a 2 vs 2 with changing / newly drawn teams each round. I am still open for suggestions.

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I'm in too

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