The Shipbuilder's Triathlon (Idea, WIP)

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Normandy
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The Shipbuilder's Triathlon (Idea, WIP)

Post by Normandy »

Warning: This tournament is extremely complicated. Not for the squeamish. However, should you master these rules, you shall find them to be incredibly flexible in allowing you to design aesthetically pleasing, as well as utilitarian ships.

Tournament Overview:

This is a tournament with 3 parts: a fleet battle, a one-on-one tournament, and a beauty pageant. You win points for winning matches, but you also win points for looking good while doing it. You cannot win the tournament purely through battle, but you cannot win the tournament purely through aesthetics either. You may lose a few battles, but if you look good while doing it, you have a great chance to win.

The Scoring System:

Warning: This is not necessary to read in order to compete. Therefore, I'm going all out on it.

Fleet Battle Scoring:
Battles are scored based on how many ships are left on the winning side after the opposing side has been totally destroyed. Every ship earns 10 points. That may seem unfair to battleships, but this tourney is biased towards battleships: they are, point for point, far stronger than frigates.

However, there are also penalties. You choose one flagship. If that flagship is destroyed, you get a 25% penalty on your score. Also, depending on how much percentage of your fleet was destroyed, you get the following penalties:

Code: Select all

10% | 5%
20% | 10%
30% | 17%
40% | 26%
50% | 37%
60% | 50%
70% | 65%
80% | 82%
90% | 100%
It's based on an 'at-least' system, so if at least 10% of your ships are destroyed, you will get a 5% penalty on score.

Lastly, you get points depending on how many points your opponent has gotten, so don't despair if you were paired with hard opponents. You get half of what was subtracted from your opponent through penalties, so if you managed to destroy 40% of your opponent's fleet before going down, and they had gotten 100 points, the 26% penalty would mean your opponent now has 74 points, and you have 13 points.

Actually, this is lastly. Your scores will be averaged out.

Aesthetics Scoring:
Aesthetics will be score much like in Anna's Beauty Pageant. However, since you are required to enter a fleet, it will be judged on the merits of not the singular ships, but the fleet in general.

Each fleet will be judged upon the following criteria:
Grandeur - Does the fleet inspire greatness? (10 points)
Continuity - Does the fleet fit together? (10 points)
Originality/Theme - Is your fleet either original, or is it based upon other works? You get points for going either way (10 points)
Backstory (opt.) - How does the fleet's backstory fit in? (up to 3x multiplier)
One-on-one Scoring:
One-on-one battles will be fought out through tournament-style, double-elimination, first elimination putting you in the losers bracket, second one kicking you out. The winners bracket is a standard tree style, but the losers bracket, in order to compensate for losers from the winner's bracket, will have two tiers before half the competitors is eliminated.

The prizes for winning are as follows:

Winner's Bracket:

Code: Select all

Winner (1)           |  60 points
Runner-Up (1)        |  40 points
Semi-Finalist (2)    |  20 points
Quarter-Finalist (4) |  10 points
Loser's Bracket:

Code: Select all

Winner (1)           |  30 points
Runner-Up (1)        |  20 points
Semi-Finalist (2)    |  10 points
Quarter-Finalist (4) |   5 points
However, points in the winners bracket and the loser's bracket are mutually exclusive: If you got quarter-finalist in the winner's bracket, but then winner in the loser's bracket, you will only get 30 points.

You do, however, get 2 points every time you battle, so those in the loser's bracket get nearly twice as many of those points.

Overall Scoring:
Overall scoring is based upon a curve: the less points you got in an event, the larger percentage that event takes up in your overall score.

I won't go into the specifics since it'll confuse the hell out of you even more than the rest of this tournament, so I'll give you some examples:
Scores: 67, 36, 40
Overall Score: 91.31

Scores: 100, 2, 60
Overall Score: 77.78

Scores: 52, 40, 45
Overall Score: 90.8
Ah fine, since Himura asked, here's how it works:
Find percentage of total score that a single score makes up.
Subtract that from 100%
Multiply the score by the number you just got.
Repeat, then add.

Fleet Design:

You may submit an unlimited amount of designs, but you may choose to use only 5 designs for any one specified battle (including your flagship). Choose designs you ask?

The Battle System:
Instead of submitting one static fleet, instead you choose which ships you wish to do battle with against your opponent in the coming battle. This opens up many strategic opportunities. Just PM me or the judge in charge of your battle for your battle-plans. The only limitation is that you must always fight with your flagship.

Classification + Costs:
I hope you're all good counters, because the classification system is based on how many squares the ship takes at it's longest axis. (Horizontally or Vertically)

Code: Select all

Frigate     |    1-7    |    20
Destroyer   |    5-13   |    30
Cruiser     |   14-21   |    60
Battleship  |    19+    |   100
Now you may be asking, why do some overlap? Well, that's because you can choose if you want your ship to be the lower class or the higher class.

Now, take a look at the second column. That is the cost of the ship. You get 400 points to build your fleet each battle, so choose wisely. A fleet with 4 battleships may be incredibly combat-effective, but will get you a maximum of only 40 points if you win a match. A fleet of 20 frigates may get you 200 points if you win, but chances are you're not. At least not without that 82% penalty. (which will leave you with 36 points).

Ship Design

Basic Rules:
Remember, this is an aesthetics design competition as well as a combat competition. Be sure to not sacrifice form for function, but not sacrifice function for form. Here are the ground rules:

1) All pieces must be physically attached to one-another.
2) You may not overlap 3 pieces. 2 is allowable.
3) Your ship must be within bounds of reason. You're not going to have a ship with a megatachyon the size of a battleship.
4) You must remove aegis from your ships when entering combat. It may seem like a waste of points then, but properly used aegis can make your ships look great.

Ship Points:
Ship points are your general, overall unit for equipping your ships.

Code: Select all

Frigate     |   50  |   20
Destroyer   |  150  |   65
Cruiser     |  500  |  230
Battleship  |  800  |  485
The first column denotes how many points the ship gets for equipment. The second column is the ship's base WMP. WMP are explained later.

Specific point values will be posted later.

WMP, Weapon/Module Points:
Each ship will be given a certain amount of WMPs, or weapon/module points. As the name suggests, they are for weapons and modules only. Normal points can be spent towards weapons and modules as well, but WMPs cannot be spent on things such as sections and speed. For every section on a ship, you get a number of WMP (depending on the ship.)
Frigates get 2 WMP per section.
Destroyers get 3 WMP per 2 sections (rounded down)
Cruisers get 1 WMP per section.
Battleships get 2 WMP per 3 sections (rounded up)
A quick way to take a tally of the number of sections you have is to make a new piece off the core, and using "set W. Depth" to find out the depth of the piece. Subtract one and you've your your number of sections.

Sections:
This is a rather interesting one. As I am familiar with many ship-building techniques, I know I cannot impose set limits on sections without seriously impeding many artistic styles. As far as I'm concerned, there are 3 generally accepted forms of non-standard sectioning (subject to change):

1) Ablatives - Layering of pieces as to achieve an armored feel.
2) Outlining - Usage of bright sections covered by dark sections.
3) Reactor/Engine - Aegis'd sections meant to represent glows from energy or whatnot.

So, to compensate for this, base section cost and health is very low, but upgrading health is rather cheap. Also, you will only get WMP for sections with greater than 150 HP.

Base Cost - 4 points
Base HP - 50
Cost to Increase to 150 HP - 3 points
Cost to Increase by 25 HP (up to 300 HP) - 1 point
Cost to Increase by 25 HP (up to 600 HP) - 2 points
Cost to Increase by 25 HP (after 600 HP) - 3 points

Speed and Related Stats:
Well, th15 told me a long time ago that making inter-dependent values and curves for speed would not be necessary and superfluous; a 1.10 speed ship won't exactly have that much of a huge advantage over a 1.07 speed ship. So, I have decided to make speed rather simple.

Code: Select all

           | Base Speed | Base Accel | Base TurnR | +0.1 |
----------------------------------------------------------
Frigate    |    3.00    |    0.20    |    1.50    |   1  |
Destroyer  |    2.50    |    0.15    |    1.25    |   2  |
Cruiser    |    1.75    |    0.07    |    0.75    |   5  |
Battleship |    1.00    |    0.05    |    0.40    |  10  |
Take your base rate. If you wish to increase that, spend the amount of points listed in the fourth column to increase it by 0.1 (With the exception of Acceleration. Acceleration is +0.01). Open to exploitation and inbalance? Yes. Does it matter? Not so much.
Last edited by Normandy on Sat Mar 29, 2008 4:34 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by ArcaneDude »

Battle-ready ships that look good? I'm your man, as long as this begins after the other tournaments I'm in are finished.
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Hiant
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Post by Hiant »

I'm in, but is there any weapon/module limit or points that you will spend for each thing you make on your ship?
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Post by antisocialmunky »

I'd support it.
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Lloyd16
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Post by Lloyd16 »

I'm in. are they limits on what we can build? and weapon stats.
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Post by derekiv »

I'm in.
ChaosTheory
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Post by ChaosTheory »

Hand me a stack of rules and I'm in. Finally, a tourney that takes a broad range of skill to win. However, I request 3 things:

1) No Aegis allowed.
2) Unlimited weapons/section, as long as they don't initially touch
3) Unlimited down-scaling, but only 4 up-scales and each up-scale requires a down-scale in the other direction.

I can't wait for this to start.
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Post by TheBlueEcho »

Weapons are the only things that are concerning me. But I pretty sure your working on that.

But other than that this sounds great! I'll try to jump in on this bus.
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Post by BoVinE »

I'm in, assuming stock weapons (how else would ships fight balanced-ish?)
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Post by Himura.Kenshin »

Can you send me the curve for how the tournament scores average together (the one you left out)?
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Post by EndlessInfinity »

Heh, I'll join just to make everyone look better ;)
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Post by Hiant »

ChaosTheory wrote:Hand me a stack of rules and I'm in. Finally, a tourney that takes a broad range of skill to win. However, I request 3 things:

1) No Aegis allowed.
2) Unlimited weapons/section, as long as they don't initially touch
3) Unlimited down-scaling, but only 4 up-scales and each up-scale requires a down-scale in the other direction.

I can't wait for this to start.
is it just aegis deflectors or the both deflectors?
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Post by antisocialmunky »

TheBlueEcho wrote:Weapons are the only things that are concerning me. But I pretty sure your working on that.

But other than that this sounds great! I'll try to jump in on this bus.
Here's a proposal. Instead of mounting tons of weapons, can we just use one weapon and multiply its damage output(in the case of beams) or clip size(for projectiles) and HP by the base amount instead?

Its going to be difficult to make a pretty ship if its covered with weapons so I'm proposing this.

It wouldn't be too imbalanced since all its doing is making a weapon equivalent to X amount of weapons. The HP makes it so lancets don't kill the mount that's equivalent to X amount of weapons in two shots. The damage makes it so its does the damage of X amount of weapons. The clip size modification basically makes it so X time the amount of projectiles are shot at the same time so PD don't break the stacked weapons.

It wouldn't be a custom weapon tournement technically. The slight balance issue with the lack of power fall off(from weapons getting progressively shot off) wouldn't be a huge issue since you risk losing all your weapons with one lost section and all ships will have this advantage.

The only concern that I really have is that its makes weapons harder to shoot off since everything has to hit one mount(which is very hard for lancets) so I'm thinking that for every mount whose weapons are stacked, increase the hp is increased by 50% of the base instead of 100%.

Anyways, that's my two cents with regards to weapons.
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Post by Hiant »

Mjolnir
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Post by Mjolnir »

ChaosTheory wrote: 3) Unlimited down-scaling, but only 4 up-scales and each up-scale requires a down-scale in the other direction.

Only problem with this, is that if you make the ship as small as possible, its nigh on impossible to hit, especially without beam weapons.
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