SP - General Improving Tournaments

[EverKira]

I think that there are a lot of ways to improve tournaments form where they stand right now. Currently they run on the Ricky Bobby system of "If you ain't first, you're last" and that's not that interesting IMHO. So how do we fix it?

1. Scoring has gotta change. 5 points (and renown) for winning 3 points for placing second and 1 point for making the third round.

2. Charge 100 denars to compete and the first place competitor takes the 1600 denars plus the prize.

3. You should be able to bet different odds to reach different tiers (think horse racing).

4. Not every single Tournament will be a group melee! Give me an archery tournament with targets and distance! Give me a joust with the fence in the middle in Vlandia.

5. Named characters need a competitiveness rating to determine if they respect you for beating them in a tournament or they burn with the desire to beat you.

6. Red team needs to always start diagonally from Blue team and Yellow team needs to always start diagonally from Green team to keep the action focused more in the center of the arena. Fans would riot if they couldn't see the action in a tournament.

7. Vlandia's arenas are a mess. They're supposed to have pride in their cavalry but if you get given a horse and lance in their arena it's damned near impossible to build enough speed to couch the lance.

8. Shake up the teams more during the tournaments, a la reseeding in order to make the final more interesting. I hate it when I drag a recruit to the final and beat him in one shot.

I made this thread over on Reddit and decided to put one on here to get developer eyeballs on it.

 

[Kreu2009]

There is so much you could do to make Tournaments more interresting. I really hope at some point they will have enough time to flesh out that feature. All the points you said are valid and would be nice to have. Also a horse racing though obstacles would be fun.

 

[Vekar]

I made a post a while back on this as well, tournaments are just so god awful boring as they are and unbalanced as hell. As others have pointed out: grand tournament... Peasant with stick wins. Why? Broken AI and UTTERLY broken tournament system! Personally I LOATH the idiotic bs of getting the most kills in a tournament, then get knocked out by peasant #454-336B and instantly losing... Because my TEAM lost. Screw that!

You have a lot of good ideas there that would make it REALLY neat Everkira, hopefully the devs will read that and listen but as it stands they wont. AT ALL. But a big +1 to your post!

 

[Kompootor]

Warband's Floris mod had a good tournament system (not sure what original mod it was based on, but credit to that). You get points for each individual KO plus points if your team wins, and there is no elimination, just six fixed rounds. They also had extra awards for fiercest competitor, strongest cut, etc., though not sure how that was implemented or how much sense it made in the end.

Yes single elimination is easier to illustrate and easy to understand, but awarding points in each round based on last-man-standing as opposed to say number of KOs per team is less so (and there's even a score counter already implemented!).

The arena overhaul in Floris was silly imo: messy beaten-up terrain with obstacles that would be downright dangerous to run a horse through, random trees and shrubs that would obstruct spectators' views, all making zero logistical sense (similar to the giant immovable rocks in Vlandia tourneys in BL). Historically in arena games, creative obstacles were definitely a thing, but so was practicality. You had to be able to move obstacles into and out of the stadium, you had to be able to see the competitors, and you had to not cripple the horses and gladiators just by moving through them.

To the latter point in general, arena games really should not look so obviously deadly to horses and competitors. This would require a lot of redesign and a lot of new development, which is also why we won't be seeing jousting or even archery competition any time soon. We can still ask.