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WineCape

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Posts posted by WineCape

    Grenades Vs Shermans and 1st Shot hits

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Need more parameters to get a test bed. Where both AfV's moving, at what speeds each, size of AFV, experience of crew, were it head-on shots or not, how many times did it occur given amount of samples tested etc. to make any limited observations regarding first-hit occurrences.

    I have tested non-moving (immobile) 400m & 800m head-on first hits and Charles eventually, given the findings after many hours of testing and a specially created test scenario, tweaked certain parameters slightly to give greater variances.

    What you see could be an outlier or a possible issue. We will not know until a test scenario is created with certain parameters and run many times.

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    Will the Rumblings of War tournament (Row) be Returning

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Would an adaptive scheduling policy be out of order? That is, at the beginning schedule only the first round (first scenario), then schedule the second round (second scenario) based on the results of the first round etc. This, combined with result propagation discussed above, might provide some fascinating possibilities. But I understand that it might be difficult to run such a tournament in a reasonable time due to the fact that PBEM can be so slow, especially with participants all over the world.
    Aye. As per Swiss system style, used in Chess tournaments. It's usually used in big Open Championships were there a many a participant. This could be a solution, but unlike Grandmaster Chess where you have, say 40 moves in the first 2 hours, with a secondary time control after this, in PBEM, as you indicated, it will play havoc with schedules, even if you set a (rather short) 20-day limit for Scenario A to be completed by all participants.

    In fact, this might be the ONLY way to schedule/rank all 72 players in one go and decide who meets who in the next round; those that have scored roughly the same amount of points/wins in previous round. Tie breaking systems, as used in chess, will then decide those winners who scored the same wins/points after all scenarios played. But scheduling a time limit to Scenarios are fraught with danger. Some play fast, some play slow, some can't send a single email move for x-amount of days due to Real Life. Unless we find an acceptable scheduling/time frame solution, or a way/solution to only pair match players for the next round AMONG those that have indeed finished their previous round.

    The question, Nabla, is if the above Swiss based system, after looking at other possible methods, is in fact your ONLY choice to rank players effectively from #1-#72 when not all players have met all in combat. For we then don't have to invent the wheel, as Swiss play and their various tie-braking systems are very well documented.

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    Will the Rumblings of War tournament (Row) be Returning

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    When can the waiting list expect to know whether they're in or out and how? Via PM?
    Timeframe of RoW VI as follows:

    (1) Nablah reasoning of a tournament, which is a pair <N,A> where N is a finite set of at least two elements, which we will call players, and A is a zero-one matrix, such that its diagonal entries are zeroes and for all i, j ε N, i ≠ j, aij +aji = 1. The interpretation is that each pair of players in N played each other once, and aij = 1 if, and only if, i beat j.

    (2) Nablah gets a bright spark, drops the "h" in his name, and produces another beautiful math equation for ranking/rating RoW in different sections. Failing that, repeat step (1);

    (3) He writes a new front-end for NABLA, to be used by moi, the tourney director;

    (4) Demo and CMBN by now released in wild. Everyone forgets NABLA and RoW for awhile;

    (5) Scenario designers approached with concept paper for designing 7 scenarios specifically for RoW to test players abilities w/ every CM unit capable of being clicked w/ mouse pointer;

    (6) Invited Scenario designers goes in evil genius lock-down mode and design diabolical battles, never seen before; the need to wear clothes while doing so not obligatory;

    (7) Invites and dates set and announced on forum for tourney start. Vets that showed interest to play RoW VI will get 10-14 days grace to reply to invites, following that invites send to newbies, who showed interest in playing, all via PM.

    (7a) (7) above not possible for Newbies without obligatory thesis titled: Why we should character assassinate your name upon drop-out;

    (8) Great fun and gnashing of teeth to be had for +/-150 days, depending on state of intoxication while playing;

    (9) Winners announced, I drink wine, send corks as prizes, winners fêted as the greatest ever to set foot on Normandy.

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    Pre order cancellation

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    As a pre order purchase or after release?

    If pre order, before or after VAT? :D

    In any event the answer is no, but nice try!

    Note to self: got to find out how to be able to win the ROW tournament without a copy so I can get one after I win. Hmmm.

    You will be disappointed then you if win the tourney and some of its prizes could be wine. Denmark is quite iffy with wine taxes collected once the parcel of liquid arrives at your doorstep.

    Heh, can I take it you are off poor Steve's back? He's worked hard the last few years and he needs a serious holiday, with your pre-order monies, of course. It's all a scam, really.

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    Will the Rumblings of War tournament (Row) be Returning

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Greetings.

    It's been a while since I've been here. So long that I have lost my Nabla account password and access to my old email address - hence the modified username. Incidentally I bought CMAK a couple of months ago and have now been playing it occasionally. Had quite a workload for a few years.

    I am happy to see the tournaments back. The further development of the tournament system stopped when Treeburst155 suddenly went MIA; hope everything is fine with him. Now that we have an active tournament manager we can put the show on the road again.

    The Nabla system was developed for ranking groups of players that all play against each other. Typically you'd have a number of players in different sections all playing against each other. You would rank the players within each section to choose those that proceed to the final round. In the final round, all those selected players would again play against each other to find the winner of the tournament.

    I have understood that in the current tournament there would be no second round. If this is the case, then the current version of the system is probably not the best one, since it provides very little information for comparing players in different sections. Thus a modification to the system would be needed. This sounds like an opportunity to do some interesting math and coding, which is fine by me, but would take some time and effort. Therefore, I would appreciate it if WineCape could verify that a different system is really needed before I proceed any further.

    What kind of a different system could we have? There are many possibilities. I want to make it clear at this point that I am currently not on a first name basis with any of these: while my background is in machine learning and computer science, I am not specialised in ranking systems. Anyway, as for the different possibilities, item response theory has been mentioned in this thread. It seems to have been developed for assessing capabilities of individuals based on tasks, not pairwise competition. Statistical models of pairwise comparison and other methods have been used to learn rankings, for example, in college football.

    One option is to device a system heuristically based on the current system - as compared to a fully fledged generative probabilistic model and the associated estimation method. The first heuristic idea that came to my mind is the following. Let A > B denote the fact that A played better than B in any scenario in a tournament, where better is defined in terms of the median score. If A > B > C < D, then not only does A gain final points w.r.t. B but also w.r.t. C; however, the chaining would stop at D. The propagation of the score could be weighted in a geometrically decreasing manner: luck plays a role in the game and different scenarios test different skills. The chaining would be taken into account in scheduling the tournament.

    This kind of a system would have its own side effects due to the assumptions in the system. For example, assume that B played seriously against C with the end result B > C, but would then lose interest with the end result A > B. These battles would imply A > C even though it might well be the case that A played worse than C. However, regardless of whether a heuristic method or a fully specified model is used, the fact is that this is a learning problem, in which we try to learn a ranking from pairwise game results, and you can not learn without assumptions. In a full generative model the assumptions are laid out explicitly so that everybody can see and discuss them. In a heuristic model the assumptions are included somewhere in the system. This does not necessarily mean that a completely probabilistically specified system would be better: it can be much more complicated, more difficult to understand and discuss, intractable (impossible to estimate) and, at the end, just as questionable when it comes to the underlying assumptions.

    In any case, I am convinced that we will have an electrifying tournament with hopefully a less electrifying :) scoring system running for you soon.

    A long quote, since you're usually quotable in toto. The "h" in your name don't fool us. Get working. :D OK Nablah, here's my take on the tourney format, being aware that changing the format might be not good, depending on your workload in re-programming NABLA to accommodate it:

    Firstly, I would love to NOT have to have a knockout round. The tournament can still be 72 players total, but you will have 3 x 24-player mini tourneys within the tournament, each tourney having 3x8-player sections, with each player battling with 7 scenarios total. Given the underlying assumptions of the current NABLA, is this possible/desirable? The idea is not so much having a single winner out of all 72 players, but having 3 Tourney winners within the overarching Tournament. This would be the only change I would like to make to Nabla scoring/scheduling, if nothing else.

    The issue is for Nabla to compare players accurately, that among the 9 x 8-player Sections total , you get 3 x SECTION winners WITHIN each Tourney. The best/highest section scored winner within EACH of TOURNEY I, II and III should get the prize as the overall 3 winners of the Tournament.

    The reason is simple: No extra play-off scenarios are needed, and more importantly, not ALL losing participants in their respective sections, after losing out on qualifying for the play-off is previous RoW's necessarily want to play these extra play-off scenarios to SCORE them more accurately for the NABLA system for those involved in the play-offs. In the past, we at RoW had no issue in "cajoling" losing section players to do so. But it is not ideal. Can this be accommodated in NABLA? Thus, instead of having a sectioned round robin + a play-off format, you have only a round robin format with 3 winners.

    For clarity sake:

    A 'Tournament' = 72 players total [RoW VI]

    A 'Tourney' = 24 players each within the Tournamet [named Tourney I, II, & III]

    A 'Section' = 8 players each, playing 7 battle scenarios [can be #'ed sequentially, or just plainly "1-3" within each Tourney]

    Secondly, and certainly a "less wanted feature" given the drastic change in mechanics of scoring to accommodate it, if we decide to do away with Section play altogether, is it even desirable/possible to lump all players in one single group/Tournament to play a "Round Robin" / a-la-Swiss style Chess tournaments, battling against SOME opponents only, and still declare the top 3 winners, despite these 3 not having played each in the tournament due to design? Maybe this method is just to much of a drastic change on the existing NABLA scoring/scheduling to bother about? Don't bother with scoring method if this if a pipe dream altogether. :)

    I'm not worried really on the second method, but the first proposed method would certainly be a "wish" for any tournament director, or at least to have such an extra option within the NABLA scoring/scheduling system. That is, no knock-out phase.

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    Will the Rumblings of War tournament (Row) be Returning

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    For those interested in the NABLA scoring system for RoW, I have re-established contact with Dr. Jarmo Hurri, creator of the NABLA, and to refresh some questions asked, herewith:

    "The problem with the Nabla system being discussed here is that it rewards those who win big playing the weaker side of an unbalanced scenario. A highly skilled player could get either the strong or a weak side of an unbalanced scenario; such a player would win anyway, but if he wins big playing the weaker side, then Nabla disproportionately rewards this player than one who wins big playing the stronger side."

    Nabla's comment on this issue is as follows:

    "Still assuming the old percentage scores, let's say the medians for a scenario are 80-20 (allied - axis). Then it is possible for an allied player to score 20 marks above the median, while it is possible for an axis player to score 80 marks above the median. Therefore a strong player playing axis side has an advantage over a strong player playing allied side, in particular if both are playing against a very weak player.

    This is a good point. First I'd like to make the following observations.

    1. If a 0-100 score [axis win] is obtained in such a scenario, it will increase the

    mean absolute deviation of the scenario, which is used to normalize

    the results, and hence the result will decrease the importance of the

    win in the final overall scoring.

    2. The nonlinear scoring curve also greatly reduces the importance of

    such a large "victory" in a single game.

    We could introduce an additional mechanism such that in a single scenario the maximum positive score is at most the absolute value of the minimum negative score. Not sure if it's needed, though, because of the reasons mentioned above, and not sure what would be the best way to mathematically implement the idea.

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    Will the Rumblings of War tournament (Row) be Returning

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Notes taken for those posting here regarding the invite list. Note: All Vets as well as newcomers will be formally invited to participate in RoW VI when due date arrives, despite showing their (Vets/no Vets) willingness/interest to play here on this forum.

    We cannot assign anyone an automatic tourney slot based on their interest shown here by posting. You might be away, on holiday, sick, divorced and/or dead when due date arrives to kick-start the tournament. So in a way, nobody gets guaranteed a place until he receives an invite (detailing the tourney details and his commitment therein) and replies YES/NO in kind via his Battlefront Forum email.

    Posting here just makes my workload easier: who should be send first invites in their respective Vets/Newcomer groups during the Vet grace period signup, and thereafter.

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    Any chance of getting an update on the update BFC?

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    Unfortunately Charles had a little... uh... incident, that will delay everything. He was busy coding the demo in his secret overseas hideout when all of the sudden men in balaclavas rapelled down from helicopters onto his mansion's roof, shot his Arab manservant and confiscated his computers, then took off with them and the body.

    It's not clear who was behind this, Matrix Games is under suspicion but it doesn't matter: either way, Charles needs a new aide to mow the lawn. PM him if you think you can help.

    Mother of all that is holy Sergei, there goes my stab at an attempt to do serious "PR" work, and to soften the blow, to complete smithereens! Thanks. Over to you from here onwards. You certainly have a way with words.
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    Any chance of getting an update on the update BFC?

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    I completely 100% understand and respect that. That said...you guys are aware no matter how hard you scrutinize this thing, something will be found by the thousands of people playing it once they get their hands on it. :)

    As Mr. Smith said, "It is inevitable."

    Obviously, that is a given Dadekster88. There are always major and less major issues discovered, no matter how many testers you throw at any testing cycle. Major ones include the Demo/CMBN not even installing properly due to reported problems on machines running certain OS/AV software etc., to give but one example. Deliberate anticipation created on BFC's part, knowing that their product is 'perfect' for general release, is certainly not BFC's modus operandi. That, many here on the forum, can assure you.

    But as all know, only Charles and Steve can make that decision when CMBN/Demo's imperfectness is 'perfect' enough for Battlefront to release for general public consumption. In short, BFC's oft-quoted statement in these matters, "It's ready when it's ready" sounds cruel to the waiting public. But it IS the honest, short, brutal truth ;)

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