eXodus eSports presents - LoC: The Arena (Tournament)

One thing you might want to reconsider, if not for this tournament, then for future ones, is the no-duplicate-commanders-per-match rule. It basically makes it impossible to come up with an elaborate strategy in advance if we have no idea which commanders we'll get, and this is a strategy game after all. You'd see MUCH better fights if you let people choose whatever commanders they wanted, and as many times. Imagine a team going for 3 identical combat commanders, and how different they would play from a team choosing 3 commanders who are better at building stuff, etc. It might be "unbalanced" you might say, but **** balance is what I say. Balance leads to boring short matches on mirrored planets where you know exactly where your opponent will be and everyone uses the same build. If you want to see cool, unexpected stuff happen, go for lack of balance.

Maybe we could at least have a system where people choose their commanders way ahead of the match? A kind of "dibs" system? I would even accept being allocated a commander by the organizers. I could at least practice with him in that way.

Also, on the Exodus site, the description says "double elimination", but the sidebar says "single elimination".

That actually brings up a good point with server mods that deserves an entire mega-thread of its own. The short answer is yes, the json files can be edited to change the commander names. The caveat is that it only works when host is the one with the edited version. Since the change would affect every player as well as the viewers, this won't be allowed in the tournament.

This brings me to the bigger, nastier issues;

There may be questionable copyright concerns when it comes to editing someone else's mod and then hosting games as you are essentially creating a derivative work. In the case of LoC, you can feel free to ignore that concern and make whatever edits you want. All I ask is that the mod name be changed so that people don't get confused as to what mod they are playing. If you redistribute it, please include me in the mod credit in some way.

The really, really big problem with server mods is a technical one; there is no way to validate a mod version in the lobby. In the case of LoC, that means that in a tournament or general game someone could host a secretly edited version of the mod and then choose to use a commander that has been changed to improve its abilities without telling the other players. The other players have no way of knowing whether the hosted mod is the official version or not. This is especially a problem in tournaments like this one where someone could secretly make changes in order to cheat. If there is suspicion that it happens, I do have ways of checking to see if this kind of cheating occurred but I can't check until after the tournament ends. To simplify the process of checking up on those games, any kind of change to the mod will not be accepted for this tournament.

I know this is important to you, so I made a version of the UI mod to make your gameplay experience more professional. Just go to %User%\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\mods and replace cLeagueOfCommanders_ui with the contents of this zip file.

Have a nice day!

Part of the challenge of this mod and the tournament is that teams are forced to adapt to choices of the other team during the picks phase. In practice, it helps to keep games from playing out exactly the same each time as the strategies evolve from one game to the next based on what people are doing. For casual games this mod can be played in the default mode with no restriction on commander picks just like you ask. The tournament will be using the picks mode so that no commander can be used twice in the match. Both are completely valid games and I have fun playing each of them, but we are doing it this way to try to introduce more variety to this tournament, which was the original point of the mod.

Thanks for catching that! Right now it is planned as double elimination and the "single" was an error. I don't expect us to get enough teams signed up to force a switch to single, but if we only get four teams I will probably change it at the last minute to round robin so that people can at least get a few games in. If we have less than four teams signed up, the event will have to be canceled or postponed.

Hmmmm shady guest gives me a file to use that might harm my computer and get me banned from the tournament... What to do, what to do.

You can trust me, friend.

lol jk, no probs, thanks.

The MOBA genre disagrees.

Never tried it. I didn't know it works this way. But from what I've heard, there's no strategy in it. It's just squad-based tactics on a single map.

At least in MOBA the players get to choose their characters before the match, no?

I can't speak to other ones, but LoL has a system similar to LoC where players take turns choosing characters in the lobby and no character can be chosen twice. A lot of the game is based on setting up team compositions that work well together and counter the opposing team.

That's really where the similarity between LoC and LoL ends because this is still a real rts with the whole tech tree and economy of PA, just with new commanders. LoL was a pretty fun game in the week or two that I tried it and I could see that there was a surprising amount of depth considering how simple it was, but I ended up quitting because I couldn't handle the immaturity of nearly every single player.

That's what's so great about it, you got the existing depth of PA, and then you add the depth of a MOBA. The possibilities are mind-boggling. And that's why you see me giving you guys such a hard time about the names. This should really be in the base game, in some form or other. The cooler and more professional-looking you make it, the more people will play it, and the greater the chances that Uber adopts at least some elements of it at some point down the line for the base game (even as just an optional choice).

Still disappointed over not being able to set my commander choice in stone before the game, even if MOBAs also do it. Imagine playing StarCraft without knowing which race you'll get before the match. That's how I feel about this.

We have 4 players so far, so one team for sure. I'll see if I can find two more to enter a second one. I am not registering anyone until I see exactly how many I have, so I can divide them between the teams accordingly.

I guess you might also be able to sign up a team with more than three people so that you have a backup in case someone doesn't show.

Me and Kiwi still need a third team member, anyone want to join our Team Jelly (team name is up for debate, just know that I will fight hard to keep that name)

Team Jelly is becoming a regular in these events... you can't change it now!

i will fight with team jelly(temp)

Sure, @KillerKiwiJuice do you mind having him on the team?

It's fine with me. I'm still not officially going to be there yet anyway.

Maps will officially be released yesterday, so expect them sometime. Maybe.