Sorry for the MIAness. Had a little life intervening thing there but I was watching Toady's logs daily to make sure he wasn't about to start without us, but it looks like he might be closing in here. I'm going to update the participant/judge lists today and get the rules up shortly.
Questions answered:
My only request is that any quantifiable criteria (fortress wealth, highed noble, etc.) are done once by someone rather than each judge having to calculate it.
That is my intent. My aim is to squeeze in more quantifiable criteria without turning it into an obsessive grind. I'm looking to award points based on most of something, next most, and so on so if you come in 3rd, you really aren't that badly off, even if the top guy has you beat by 200% or some huge margin. Hopefully with less subjective criteria, judging will be faster/easier. My other aim is to make that quantifiable criteria stuff that nobody is yet good at, so I might accidentally specify something that I can't actually measure - but we'll see that as soon as the version drops and we can adjust accordingly.
Seems like you're doing good on judges now. How many are you angling for?
3-4 actually judging. That might mean more signing up as life intervenes for us all. You don't really need a huge number of judges.
I'm in as a player, even if I think that 8 game years is maybe a little bit too long for a challenge.
I considered that carefully. The current version typically hits a steady-state around year 4. That is, by that time, you're probably close to your popcap, you've probably exterminated all standing threats on the map and all migratory ones should be trivial to handle, and all that's left is sieges, megabeasts and disasters of your own making. Toady appears to be making a concerted effort to change that, with the possibility of opening up new threats in the underground, bigger/random megabeasts, and the whole military change-up, not to mention new nobles and such that might only start to come in play after 4 years. Getting a king the hard way can take a little while. As this is an exploration of the new version, I felt there needed to be enough time allocated to make sure that everything could be explored - including the stuff that is typically time-dependent. I'd hate to have a challenge and miss some of the challenging bits because we didn't run it out long enough. And as Jim Groovester says, this is supposed to be demanding. I'm more inclined toward 4 year challenges overall, but I think this situation warrants the longer time frame simply to explore the new features. Plus, players should remember that they won't be able to just map out a plan in their head and simply implement it when we start - there's a ton of new stuff here that will need to be learned/discovered, and that'll take some game time. In the current version I know exactly how long it takes to get my wrestlers trained up, how long to do an aquifer pierce and so on. A lot of that stuff will have changed - perhaps substantially.
I should also note, that I'm trying to tilt this one away from favoring the megaproject and toward a more balanced gameplay, specifically because it's a new major version. If people want to steer clear of giant waterworks and magma projects, that shouldn't penalize them. We're after innovation this time, not scale. I want something added to the wiki (even if quite small) to outscore a massive magmafall thingamabob. There will be plenty of time for challenges before the next major version to ratchet up the megaprojects.
I would like to know, however, if lowering the population cap in the init would be allowable, to not kill my piece of crap laptop.
Yes, that will be allowed. It will, however, put you at a little bit of a disadvantage on some of the scoring depending on how low you set it. Probably not a massive disadvantage, but if it helps get the challenge completed, that's really what matters, right? The disadvantage will be if some game feature doesn't activate due to the pop limit, but in the current version that already allows you to dial the game back quite a bit. The time length should allow anyone to make a very fine showing in all categories even with a fairly small population. Besides, I'm hoping Toady has made it hard enough, between new critters, changes to military training, and other ways for us to send our dwarves to their doom, that the popcap becomes significantly harder to reach.
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Topic: [CONTEST] DFM3: Trailblazer - Deadline: June 13 (Read 44337 times)