charlesdale wrote:

If you took a poll of the players here I think you would find that the vast majority of them would prefer alternating starts. I do enjoy the games the way they are but removing a bit of luck out of the equation in this way would be appealing.

Agreed, there is more than enough luck involved already.

The only danger I see doing alternating starts is that if I played against you with the first seat in a very unbalanced board (regarding that issue); I would be tempted never to play against you again knowing I would get second for sure. Or there should be 2 games starting at the same time ?

RR tournaments with 2 legs would be great.

Toto wrote:

RR tournaments with 2 legs would be great.

+1

http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3716/Customize_Board_Option

The above thread is a response to this thread.. The only people who have participated in it are designers.. What do you non-designer types think of the idea?  Would you consider purchasing a board to be able to have control over practically any aspect of play - from who goes first, to dice and dice mods, to colors,  every rule, and right down to how many units start on every territory?  If so.. what might you be willing to pay for it?

Best would be to post your answer on that thread..

One final note and I will leave this thread alone. I have played a certain player here 16 times in the game titled Colossal Crusade. I have started on two of them and he has started on 14 of them. Guess who has won the vast majority of the games? The random starting system doesn't appear to be very random to me. Alternating starts is the answer.

While I agree that most boards played in two-player mode favor the player who moves first, it seems there are enough implementation hassles and potentially unintended consequences, that I don't feel strongly about implementing this for stand-alone games.  

For tournaments though, I've always wanted to see an option for two-player round-robin tournaments where each player played each other twice, once starting first and once starting second.     At the very least, it would be good if each player was guaranteed to move first in  half of their games in a tournament games even if they only played each other player once. 

I avoid two-player game tournaments because the luck of who gets seated first plays such a large role.   Yea, yea, I know the "great" players will win more often from the second position than the average players.   But, that doesn't change the fact that those who start most of their games moving second are at a decided disadvantage over those who are lucky enough to be seated first in most of their games. 

I would begrudgingly accept the idea of having alternating, or "balanced" 1v1 tournament game schedules, but that's about it.

Of course, even well-implemented, things will not be perfect.  Imagine a theoretical 128 player elim tournament playing a board where 60% of the first players are expected to win.  In the first round 77 players will advance having played white, and 51 having played black. If all of the winners who first played as black then play as white in the next round, that will leave 13 players who will get to play as white twice in a row ..netting them a 36% chance of getting to the third round.  Those who start playing black however, have a 24% chance of making it to the third round.  After that things should be able to be reigned in if a decent algorithm is used to ensure that no one plays white more than twice in a row.