Design Flaw: Failure to prevent a tie

ID:89181
 
Jan 3 2010, 6:45 pm

Poll: How should potential Tie situations be handled?

Chess-inspired restrictions 16% (3)
Allow a draw game 38% (7)
Give the win to the current player 11% (2)
Posted a comment with a better solution 16% (3)
Just make it an option 11% (2)
The winner should get to dance! 5% (1)

Login to vote.

It was my goal to get a beta of Breach out a while ago, and I'm still hoping to before I go back to school (Tuesday D:)

Anywho, I just realized a rather blatant failure of my design document: it doesn't handle ties!

So, I thought I'd throw this poll up. It's rather pointless, since you don't know anything about the game...

Here's the gist of it:
Players are trying to get to the opposite side of the map, like a pawn in chess would to turn into a lost queen. The first player to step onto their opponent's line wins.


(I also re-did the old tokens. They look better in the game; I indexed the colors to reduce the screenshot's file size)


There are four actions you can take on your turn: swap two friendly units' locations, place a new unit on your line and move that column up, signal a charge (more on that later), or move all of your force (line included) up.

The possible event of a tie comes up from that last action: if you have a unit one tile away from the enemy line, and your enemy has a unit one tile away from your line. In this situation, your unit will move onto their line and "win," and then your line will move forward, and the enemy unit will now technically be standing on it and "win."

I'm thinking about taking an element from chess, and forcing the player to take action against any enemy units next to their line (by placing a new unit on the line in front of it) before they can move the entire line forward. However, that doesn't help me handle the possible situation where there are two enemy units next to the line, as a player could only try to kill one of them before the opposing player takes their turn and wins. Should that just be akin to a checkmate?

The other two options are, of course, to allow a "draw" game, or to just give the victory to the player currently taking his or her turn.

Now that I've thought this all out by typing it (blog post to the rescue!), I'm leaning towards the chess-inspired rule. 'Course, if anyone wants to argue against it I'll consider alternatives (game option?)



In other news, the copy of Darker than BLACK I ordered based on a glowing review should arrive tomorrow or the next day. Just in time to distract me from my college work. Also, we'll be using Game Maker 7 in my Game Dev I class. I've never used it, but I can't wait to see what my "homework" is like >:)

(Oh, and I might try to get my teacher to take BYOND for a spin at some point)

Oh, and for those who were in Chatters that day (2% chance one of them reads this), Madness.PNG is still getting 8+ downloads a day. It's at 5748 downloads now...

My god, could I put anything else in this post? Well, sure. Thanks to whoever linked to Slay Radio, I'm loving their music. Downloaded the 09 playlist.

Oh, and I'm enjoying Red Faction: Guerrilla. Kaboom.

I'll stop now.
Jan 3 2010, 6:54 pm
Draws allow for witty players who are losing badly to go for a tie which is better than a loss. Usually, the draw situation should require some level of craftiness to pull off.

The game looks great. Can't wait to play it.
ts
Jan 3 2010, 8:11 pm
If Star Trek has taught us anything, the guy going for a draw should, in theory, aggravate the guy going for a win enough that he'll quit.

Oh, and for those who were in Chatters that day (2% chance one of them reads this), Madness.PNG is still getting 8+ downloads a day. It's at 5748 downloads now...

Haha! 8 potential new BYONDers a day. You should get a medal for my brilliance. ;)
Jan 4 2010, 4:15 pm
Well, it looks like the consensus is to just allow a draw. Works for me, since it's less code anyways.

Maybe later I'll add in the other rules as options.
Jan 4 2010, 6:20 pm
red faction guerrilla is in itself a great game, but the PC version is plagued by massive console-itis (all thanks to Reactor Zero, the people who ported it, not the original devs). there are all sorts of FPS/crashing/input lag issues, and the multiplayer doesn't even have text chat, amongst so many other problems
Jan 4 2010, 6:58 pm
Zaole wrote:
red faction guerrilla is in itself a great game, but the PC version is plagued by massive console-itis (all thanks to Reactor Zero, the people who ported it, not the original devs). there are all sorts of FPS/crashing/input lag issues, and the multiplayer doesn't even have text chat, amongst so many other problems

Yea, I noticed how the GUI didn't seem to respond properly to the mouse. However, I had assumed the low FPS and all of the crashes were because of my specs.

Oh well, it was ten bucks. I'll be happy if I can just play through the single player.
Jan 5 2010, 4:26 am
I had this problem in Microsoft Chess Online. I got it with my PC when I had Windows 7 installed. We came to a stale mate, and we both just both ended up moving our pieces back and fourth until one or the other got fed up and logged out.

There are several ways to work on this. The first and most simple is to have a player record of wins, losses and ties. Just have a tie end the game.

The second way to do it, is allow players to decide with one another who is the winner. An option would come up that allows one or the other player to agree to surrender or give up. If neither are willing to do so, the computer can do a computer generated coin flip to make that decision.