FreeGameDev Planet - Games

A short video demonstrating the isometric map routines I’ve written for GearHead: Caramel. The big advantage of this new system is that it allows sub-tile movement of characters and animations; instead of jumping from one tile to the next, things can move smoothly across the map.

The 0.20 tournament has concluded! A hearty thanks to everyone for coming together and participating in our community. And especial thanks to all our server administrators, developers, organizers, and contributors for putting in their work, time, and passion to make this tournament possible.

Both the individual player competition and the clan competition were very close this year, with lots of lead changes. Read on for details of the amazing achievements players made this tournament. We’ll also discuss some tournament statistics and even an unsolved win rate mystery!

Individual Winners

The champion this year is ManMan with 7291 tournament points and 31 wins. This is ManMan’s first tournament championship, although he made a strong showing in the 0.19 tournament as well, coming in at #9, and has participated in many past tournaments. To maintain his lead ManMan pulled off a number of outstanding games, including the first all-rune win, a speedy 47 minute win, a third place low-turncount win in 17728 turns, and an incredible streak of 15 wins, the longest of the tournament! His 15-streak was ended on Swamp:4 when his Barachian Transmuter got paralyzed by a wasp from shambling mangrove. Respect the forest!

The silver medalist is Yermak with 7052 points and 33 wins. Yermak is no stranger to this competition, being the previous winner of the 0.19 and 0.18 tournaments. Yermak pulled off an incredible 10406 turn win (less than 1k behind WR; third fastest all-time), got the highest scoring run of the tournament, got the second all-rune victory, got third most combo high scores (10), and won 19 Tier-III banners! His best hope for retaking first place with a streak late in the tournament was hindered by an unfortunate crawl bug. Item slot key mappings can be ignored when purchasing previously unidentified items from shops, thus leading Yermak to read the wrong scroll and die to a berserked ettin. Sorry Yermak, we’ll try to get that bug fixed soon!

Third place goes to Ultraviolent4 (playing as YTcomUltraviolent4) with 6155 points and 18 wins. Ultraviolent4 also had the fastest and third fastest real-time runs of the tournament, his best being an incredibly fast Deep Dwarf Fighter won in 38 minutes, 17 seconds (4th-fastest all-time), a win that he improved from his third place DDFi won in 44 minutes. Additionally Ultraviolent4 had the second win of the tournament and the third longest streak at 12 wins, which was ended abruptly when his Troll Conjurer became a snack for the Dis Serpent of Hell. Streak snacks are its favorite!

Clan Winners

The first place clan was Who Left the Gnolls Out, with Demise (captain, #4), ManMan (#1), Ultraviolent4 (#3), Alcopop, gammafunk, and Pekkekk, scoring 22933 points and 93 wins. Fielding a majority of the top 5 players, it’s no surprise that this clan was so competitive. They gained an edge with 46 streak wins (compared to 40 for the second-place clan), having the aforementioned 15 streak by ManMan and 12 streak by Ultraviolent4, but also a 12 streak from team captain Demise. Demise also got the first win of the tournament and had the second-fastest real-time win, a MiBe won in 38:12, a mere 4 seconds behind his teammate Ultraviolent4.

Coming in at second place was Tolkien Minorities, with dying5ever (captain, #10), mibe (#8), koboldina (#11), araganzar (#20), minmay, and Doesnt, scoring 22018 points and 74 wins. This clan had the second most combo high scores of any clan at 33 high scores. Mibe’s streak of 13 games was the second-best of the tournament, and team captain dying5ever (also known as Hellmonk) was no slouch himself with a 12 streak. Minmay was the first player to reach the end of a Ziggurat as well as the third person to kill all 76 uniques, helping to make her clan the first to harvest them all. Finally, Doesnt had the second fastest turncount win, a DDFi won in 13912 turns.

Third place is awarded to Gozag or Go Home, with Ge0ff, Beargit (#5), Faldahar, Kenran, sage1234, and toastedzergling, scoring 19584 points and 70 wins. This clan had the most high scores of any in the tournament with 41 in total, aided by Beargit who had the most combo high scores of any player at 14. Beargit also got the third win of tournament, and team captain Ge0ff was the third fastest in the tournament to reach the end of a Ziggurat.

Other Notables

murphy had the lowest XL win with a level 14 FeEn of Dith in addition to having second and third place for rune fetched at lowest XL. First place in that category goes to KoreanRuneSaw, who was the first to fetch a (gossamer) rune at XL 9 with a SpEn that died strengthless from a ghost moth’s bite a mere 17 turns later. murphy also fetched a (barnacled) rune at XL 9, this time with a different FeEn of Dith that would lose a felid life a mere 13 turns later to a merfolk aquamancer.

inmateoo was the first player to harvest all 76 uniques, doing so less than 6 days into the tournament, and Tegga21 has the distinction of winning with the highest combined AC+EV. Their GrFi of Zin ascended with 99 AC and 49 EV, aided by gold dragon scales, rings of Robustness and Phasing, and quite a few status high jinks. Finally, Dowan snuck in the last win of the tournament, their GrBe winning in 1:48:26 just 40 seconds before the end of the tournament!

The most commonly achieved banner was The Shining One’s Vow of Courage I, to kill Sigmund before entering the Depths, earned by a whopping 1624 players! The most rarely achieved banner was Beogh’s Heretic III, earned only by kuniqs and Rocknlol.

The most dangerous ghost was everyone’s favorite Crawl lua bot, qw, who claimed an incredible 150 kills, over three times as many as SirKenneth in second place, who had 44 kills. Playing over 21 hours a day on average during the tournament no doubt gave qw the edge here, and this also resulted in 25 wins and an overall player ranking of 23! Not surprisingly, qw and SirKenneth also respectively held first and second place in the most deaths to uniques ranking.

The most lethal monster in this tournament was again the gnoll, ending the hopes and dreams of 4306 characters. The most lethal unique was again Sigmund, reaping 1733 characters; that’s 1.07 kills per Vow of Courage I banner. You may be wondering how Ijyb is doing in the rankings now that she always has a wand but places a bit deeper. She’s moved up 7 ranks and killed 281 more players compared to the 0.19 tournament, with over 8 times as many wand kills compared to melee kills.

Statistics and Final Thoughts

Just under three thousand players participated this year! See here for a comparison of this tournament to the 0.19 winter tournament, here for a comparison to the previous summer tournament for 0.18, and here for an album of all past tournament stats images made by johnstein. Summer tournaments like this one tend to have a bit less participation than winter tournaments, but our total play time was still slightly higher compared to 0.19. That’s over 4 years and 187 days of cumulative playtime for 2997 tournament players! It looks slightly more reasonable when you consider it’s just over 49 minutes per day for each player on-average.

One statistic was significantly higher this tournament than we expected: the win rate. Win rate does tend to increase with each new tournament, since we don’t increase the game’s difficulty drastically with each new version, yet our player base keeps growing in experience. You players always get better at winning! However some versions have significant increases in win rate due to major changes or bugs. In 0.15 we removed item destruction and player burden, and increased the benefit of shield enchantment, which saw a 33% increase in win rate (1.34% -> 1.78% from 0.14 to 0.15). In 0.16 we had a the infamous melee bug that doubled melee damage and was fixed well after the tournament began, resulting in a 72% increase in win rate (1.78% -> 3.06% from 0.15 to 0.16). See here for a graph of tournament win rates for all past tournaments for which we have data, excluding games that were quit or played by bots.

This year win rate increased by 29%, which is a bit surprising to us here on the dev team, because on paper this doesn’t look like a version that would make winning significantly easier. New high-level wands, new scarf items, and slightly increased potions of hasting/heal wounds are offset by removal of rods, removal of the Repel Missiles spell, and removal of wands of hasting/heal wounds/teleport. Even though Ijyb was moved deeper and we removed hill giants (and their infamous nets), Ijyb always gets a wand now (and has gotten more kills), and two-headed ogres place earlier than hill giants did and are pretty nasty monsters!

The win rate for players with fewer than 10 wins before the respective starts of this tournament and last is also up 37% (0.7% -> 0.96% from 0.19 to 0.20). This higher than usual win rate increase may be due to a subtle bug we haven’t found yet, but it might also be that the cumulative changes have actually made the game a bit easier. We’ll keep an eye out for explanations and will continue looking at balance issues in 0.21 like we do for every version.

Once again, thanks for participating in the 0.20 tournament! We hope to post a bugfix 0.20.1 release soon that contains fixes made after the release.

Happy crawling!

Join LongTurn game 4 here!

This LongTurn game will have up to 250 human players, on a very large map with 30000 map tiles.

Every turn lasts 23 hours. You can play your first turn immediately now, and your next turn tomorrow.

Some information about the previous LongTurn game can be found here. Both the previous LongTurn games are still running, where 34 and 39 turns has been played so far. It will be exciting to see who the champion of the first two games will be also. Above you can see my starting nation after having played the first turn.

You can also find some more information about LongTurn on the Freeciv wiki.