We definitely need to be able to draw with several parties remaining. You can generally guess based on the map how many people it'll take to draw. I've played maps which supported 4 players in a very stable setup. Not being able to draw on these maps is frustrating and broken. I think a turn count limit to auto-enable draw should exist so that after a certain amount of time, draw will always show up. If you wanted to be extra fancy about it, you could watch for territory sizes to be stable for a given period of time, or assign maps some metric to indicate sizes of isolated islands and the number of entrances. I'm way to exhausted to think of one of the top of my head, but I'ma say something something min-cut something. I might try to work something out if I find myself with some free time...
Honestly, I think a min-turn count for a draw is the best solution to this. You can't really stop people from only playing n00bs unless you implement some sort of matchmaking system, and that would be a huge pain.
I suppose you could weight experience gained by level difference, but that would make high level players stand very little chance of going up in rank. *glances over at no one in particular*
techgump wrote:A turn limit itself is not sufficient. Your solution, adude159753, does not stop any of the problems I originally posted about. This is not an issue of making the draw point longer. It's about people using it inappropriately to increase level and win ratio. No amount of turns limits will stop that.
That said, IMO Bounty42 has a decent approach as well.
If someone wants to spend 30 minutes to reach the turn limit on a large map to get to a draw to game xp, I say let them. At that point, they're playing the game, right? I'm against a draw lowering point rewards by much. It seems like drawing on a map that you worked quite hard to get into second after knocking out the several players that placed next to you, and fighting the lone guy who had the map to himself into a draw should reward some amount of xp...
How is XP calculated at the moment? I haven't figured it out myself.
It seems like the current draw system requires all territories to be owned. This doesn't seem like a good idea. Say someone has all 8's and quits. Reclaiming those territories might give you a disadvantage that could give the other player the win.
I'd much rather see draws made in a way that makes sense to people playing legitimately than in a way that can't be gamed. If it's bad enough, log data and try to detect that sort of behavior.