Random v non-random HW assignment

[BongoBob]

Figured more appropriate to post this here than in the trucks3x comments section.

For background, I originally asked:
Can starting Homeworlds be assigned such that teammates start close together? If randomly assigned, any teams that start close together may have a significant advantage over teams that don't.

Reply from drwr:
Presently, homeworld assignment is random. The good news is that, being random, everyone has an equal chance of being lucky. But, hmm, trying to place teammates close together initially is not a bad idea; but the problem is, "close together" is difficult to define from a perfectly objective point of view. And then you start niggling over details like "team A is 4 worlds apart but team B is 6 worlds apart--no fair!". I'll think about it, though.

My follow-on (posted here rather than clogging up the comments):

I had another look through "advanced somnos" mapset. My non-random placement comment/suggestion really should have been directed at the highly constrained, defined-HW maps Arena or Tessaract. Having played Arena, the map design causes you to have initial contact on two fronts with a single other player. If that first contact happened to be with your own team-mate, gameplay dynamics would be quite different than if contact was with an opponent (allied or not they are still your opponent in the points ranking). In Tessaract you could start as direct neighbours, or "pinching" an opponent whose team-mate was across the map. These sorts of starting positions, whist potentially quite interesting (more opportunities for alliances, faster mapping/expansion), could also lead to imbalance (getting quickly crushed between two team-mates while your own struggles to even find you). The starting positions on these maps would be very easy to get "balanced" either by pairing or equally splitting up teams.


The highly connected Hypercube or Chickenwire (which is a great map IMO) have a kind of "controlled chaos" to them that likely makes initial starting positions less important, or at least less likely to get blamed for a poor game showing. Icosahedron is defined, but features enough connections that initial distribution is probably not important. These maps would be harder to "balance" as well.

Interesting, the maps where team relative starting position could most easily be imagined to affect gameplay would also be the ones that would be easy for an "unseen hand" to evenly distribute.

[somnos]

Wow - neat analysis of the effect of the maps on team play, especially one where it's a team of 2. Perhaps I should have included a much bigger map set for this game.

Sure wish a 5th team would sign up to play. Also the other 2 advanced games I proposed are languishing for lack of a couple players.

El
Somnos