Tournament Suggestions/Improvements

lol those armies are bigger than all of mine combined in all cities(for now)

er...shouldn't this be merged into lionz heartz earlier post, or at least be moved to the suggestions & game enhancements forum?

Kumomoto wrote: Does anyone have a pop analysis on all the players in the last one? I'm almost positive Amorphias one city was lower in pop than a number of the other competitors. Some comments being bandied around in Global about him winning because of pop are simply untrue. I do agree with the equadistant point, though. We should try to do that. I think the existing format, with handicaps (city size and number limitations) for the bigger players works quite well. We just need to make the location relatively equadistant and then I think the playing field is even more level (but you guys did a great job of getting it there in your first run!).   K.

Making the tournament have less players is always an option if there are not enough to join.

The pop sizes ranged from 3K to 15K in this tournament and the army sizes from 500 => 4500 (estimated) - I had 3600. 

By my calc Smoking GNU and Duuvian had approx 8.5-9K troops between them which combined with Smoking saying in global that he had 4.5k approx means duuvian had about the same (I think).  The interesting thing about that is that someone with 1/3 the pop (5000 vs 15000) had 1/3 more troops.

My conclusion from that is that the only way to limit "size" is just by troop count/upkeep.  Doing it by pop or barracks level will still result in massive mismatches.  I mean, Imagine if the Tourney had been  a  3K - 5K pop limit.  Duuvian would have wiped the floor with everyone.

Making the Tourney limited by upkeep does two things:

1) It adds more strategy since players have to decide what types of troops to use to make the best of the upkeep limit.

2) It avoids any issues around small people with huge armies and larger people with small armies being mismatched.

With regards distance - we really need the ability to stage troops at an empty square (at a minimum distance from the flag) then you can keep an eye on which troops are there (for the upkeep limits) and prevent issues with players being too far off.