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RoW II: The Boots & Tracks Brawl (Part VI)


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White4,

I'll see what's up with Tom Norton.

To All,

If you really did not like one or more of the scenarios, please tell us why. I think constructive negative comments are at least as helpful as words of praise when it comes to scenario design. Don't be shy, but be constructive. Write me some scenario reviews I can pass on to Boots & Tracks. Thanks!

Fight On!!

Treeburst155 out.

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Originally posted by Treeburst155:

To All,

If you really did not like one or more of the scenarios, please tell us why. I think constructive negative comments are at least as helpful as words of praise when it comes to scenario design. Don't be shy, but be constructive. Write me some scenario reviews I can pass on to Boots & Tracks. Thanks!

Fight On!!

Treeburst155 out.

I guess we can cover these in our AAR's. I still need to write them on the two scenarios I've finished.I'm also very curious to know what the Nabla results will be on all three scenarios. Hard to judge their balance accurately from a single game.
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Aaah, Tom is still with us. Excellent!

I've been getting killed by work recently; BUT, starting Sunday I have five full days off. This means I will be updating my results sheet and sending it to those who have finished their games, ONLY if they email me requesting it.

At this point I'd estimate that 40% of the games are completed. The deadline we are trying to make with this final round is the holiday season. To me that means I should be announcing the winners by December 15th. If you're a slow poke, keep that date in mind please.

Fight On!!

Treeburst155 out.

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(physically and emotionally cut to pieces and bleeding from myriad wounds, he staggers in and reports)

I have returned--sort of! After cybernetic battles to which my friend George and I gave our all, I finally appear to have a stable Internet connection

at last and have managed to reinstall CMBO, complete with the 1.12 update. I still need to locate and reinstall my previously saved and compressed PBEM and Scenario folders, locate and reinstall my huge E-mail files, then download all my backlogged E-mail. I think I have two turns to send out and one to process. Am far from being out of the woods, but I can see pools of light here and there.

By dint of superhuman restraint, we managed to avoid .357 1.0, Battleaxe 5.0 and other extreme solutions to a problem which cost us over 12 hours today alone. To test the "seismic grunching theory," we took my computer over to his house a few miles away. Eventually IDing a botched E-mail setting not caught by my ISP's tech troops after multiple queries, we got the computer running Netscape Communicator 4.8 on a phone line. CD drive was recognized and ran fine. Considerably more work with his AT&T cable modem tech types (not much Mac experience there) eventually got blinding performance via Ethernet. Great! Not quite. Also, we should've taken the SuperDisk drive with us. We paid for that one later. In spades.

We come back here, and the computer goes insane and intermittently on strike. The CD drive no longer reads, though sometimes comes back after a reboot; Netscape doesn't run much of the time. We get errors we've never seen before, and to compound our joys, we find that the SuperDisk drive, whether plugged in directly or via the hub, somehow aborts

bootup completely. Unplugging the drive restarts the boot. We had drivers, settings, even wires coming out of our ears. While there have indeed been several correctable problems here, including a splitter cable used to support the computer and fax, it is a gross understatement to say we've seen highly anomalous computer behavior as well, behavior so bizarre and unexplainable that my friend considered chaos well organized by comparison. I have even gone so far as to call the Electrical Engineering Chair of a nearby university, with the specific goal of seeing whether I can convince the Chair to send out a field research team with appropriate measuring equipment (especially an E-field meter) to see whether there's some detectable phenomenon taking place here.

I am profoundly sorry my long sojourn in cyberhell

has been such a spanner in the Finals, but the worst appears to be over. I hope. The last crash was around 2:30 a.m. PDT, when I lost the Netscape connection with the 1.12 update 93% done. Grr! At least the second try worked!

Keep those positive thoughts coming. I can definitely use them!

Regards,

John Kettler

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OK, last game finished, all reports sent into Treeburst. As a priority, wanted to express thanks again to all involved in setting this up and putting together a bunch of fun scenarios, which were challenging and frustrating and rewarding in turns. Kudos to Treeburst, whose effort and dedication is nothing but remarkable.

I wanted to add that finishing these final scenarios also brought with it a measure of sadness, as it is also the passing of CMBO as the primary game in my life. Like many others, I'm still warming to CMBB and just beginning to appreciate its depth and possibilities, and anticipating the patch. However, it is clear that CMBB will be surpassing CMBO as my main focus. The ROW tourneys were a source of some of my best CMBO experiences, and I hope that the CMBB tournaments serve the same purpose.

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Time for a quick update. I did manage to get most of my E-mail files (everything but the vital Sent file) restored, and I was able to download a staggering 428 backlogged messages, almost all of which were spam. I even found a couple of CM messages from my foes in the Finals.

The good news is that not only did I have the E-mail, complete with bookmarks, running, but I also reconstructed most of the other programs and drivers as well. Was up until 6 a.m. local time working on things. The bad news is that today Netscape, which worked perfectly hours before, is on total strike and instantly generates a no socket message. My workaround, a freebie AOL deal which allowed me to independently verify things like proper modem operation (huge source of error messages earlier when trying to connect with my ISP), also crashed today on the first attempts, only to finally grace me with the connection which allows me to post this.

Effectively, because not only of the Communicator

problem, but also the difficulties tracking down the carefully compressed and saved PBEM and Scenario files from the Finals and my present inability to reach my friend who moved the files to somewhere on my hard drive, I still am nonfunctional as far as the Finals go. I shall of course do all I can to get fully operational on this end, but I don't have control over certain fundamentals like my connection and couldn't play right now since critical game files are wholly absent. I have no desire to further delay proceedings, so conclude that it may be time for Treeburst155 and the other officials to consider taking over my games in progress so that the Finals finish before CM II is out.

Please post any reply to this thread and do NOT E-mail me privately, since I may not be able to pick up my mail again any time soon.

Regards,

John Kettler

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I'm curious on how the Nabla scoring system behaves for very unbalanced scenarios. Let's assume 25 percent of all games results in an autosurrender. There will be a lot of scores in the area 85-15 (for those autosurrender games) and then a gap down to those who managed to keep the game going until the end, roughly score 70-30.

A player who almost made it (autosurrender last turn, lost a single man more than what was needed to keep the morale up) ends up with a 17-83 loss. The next one is the one who just made it, morale is on the edge after the last turn, resulting in a 28-72 loss.

Will this 11 point difference be very obvious with the Nabla system? The two losers above performed almost equally good (normally only 1 pts difference without autosurrender), but will Nabla correct that? Otherwise, winning or loosing the whole tournament will depend on being on the right side of the cut in that unbalanced scenario.

Nothing bad about the Nabla system, just curious if it can handle the above scenario as the it is designed to take care of unbalanced scenarios.

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Visom,

In a scenario where half the players on a side slip into auto-surrender and the other half don't, there could be a gap between the two halves as you suggest. The Nabla system does not treat these situations in any special way. It assigns scores based on the scenario median and the standard deviation from that median.

Treeburst155 out.

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Received turns from and replied to Fate and Boris. Am halfway through my, er, fight with Fate and around a third of the way done with Boris.

As far as my computer goes, someone didn't pay attention to what I said. I said it ran great at a friend's house but went berserk once over here. At my friend's, we had it running fine via dial-up and via cable modem. Interestingly, shortly after a 7.9? hit Siberia, my ISP connection started working again after two weeks of failed efforts here. I suspect there may be a connection via release of strains causing plate crushing and grinding, which in turn may have fed my machine all sorts of false instructions via strong, uncorrelated broad spectrum electromagnetic emissions from the crust. Japanese telecommunication research scientists have shown in lab tests that squeezing granite at appropriate pressures generates piezoelectrically created frequencies read by the computer as operating instructions. There were many reports in the Pacific Northwest of PC malfunctions, hard drive failures, even fried PCs before the Seattle 6.8 quake. Therefore, I believe that my cyber woes are not because I have an iMac, but rather, because I happen to live near three faults, faults which load up before a big quake and grind, generating enormous amounts of broadband EM interference. Apropos of this model, I also observed malfunctions in our answering machine and DTV reception before the Siberian quake hit. Am trying to get an engineering field team out here to take some measurements.

Regards,

John Kettler

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Wow John! Let us know if you manage to get an engineering team out there. Oh, and welcome back to the world of the unseismicly disturbed. smile.gif

Tourney Status Report

Emilville Exit completed: 9 (41%)

Lab Rats In Norway completed: 10 (45%)

North Of Epron completed: 6 (27%)

Total complete: 25 of 66 for 38%

The only section that has finished completely

is the prize eligible Section One (not Group One).

There are a few individuals who have also finished.

It's a bit early to start revealing results I think. I am keeping requests for scoresheets on file, and will process them when we get to 50%. If you requested a scoresheet, and I do not have all the scores for your games, you have been notified.

Let me know if you have any MIA problems. It's

time to pick up the pace if you've been slacking. smile.gif

Fight On!!

Treeburst155 out.

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Treeburst155,

Only moments ago I got off the phone after talking about this very matter to the head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Cal State Long Beach. That worthy was not personally familiar with the phenomenon but was impressed enough by what I told him to ask me to send him research paper references so he could look into the topic for himself.

Regards,

John Kettler

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I've completed all my games!--I believe the finalist section of tourney II has just one more game left to go.

Many thanks to TB155 and the great people at B & T for all the outstanding work they put into this tourney and to Winecape for their generous sponsorship. And thanks to all my opponents in both tourney phases for some excellent and exciting games. It's been fun! Can't wait till we can talk over all of these games.

[ November 20, 2002, 10:35 AM: Message edited by: CombinedArms ]

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