Game ends in a draw?

Just finished playing a round on the new map and ended up in a draw position. Both of us had a toon on a winning point and neither was in a position to attack the other or he would loose the game. There should be a mechanism to resolve this, apart from waiting for the one with less time left to time out after passing back and forth for 10-15 minutes.

 

There are its called whirlwind, whirldind enemies, Firestorm, and im sure im forgetting some card. Also note how one of you guys has 2 stars meaning he can take a turn to position without losing anything on it since one point is meaningless in that situation. By your logic there should be a system to make one player lose if both have a wizard on each side of a wall with 1 hp since none will move around giving the other the first attack its just part of the game and it will happen rarely. Or are you requesting a mutual surrender option? If so i don't really have anything against that i guess but it just doesn't seem needed.

That said i suggested something like points becoming dead or hotspoted if they are camped to long but that was in reference to a map which had points on either side with walls between them making it practically impossible for someone to try and break the stale even if they wanted to.

 

Which are plentiful when there are two warriors left. Like in the example shown by the OP. It's mostly a map issue. Victory points should be easy to reach from other victory points.

 

Flight, teleport, free move, all available to warrior. They are 4 squares away from each other its hardly hard to reach. He can reach him next turn by saving his move and any other card that is hardly asking someone to bend over backwards.

If i play 3 wizards and you play 3 warriors there are little to no obstacles and the 4 victory points are in the middle of the map. I won't walk up to them and risk being in range of your warriors and you don't want to walk to them because then my attacks can reach you and i will start nuking you. That is not a stalemate per say its a question of one of us taking a chance when we feel it will benefit us but if we both refuse to chance it nothing happens. How should the game be designed to fix that?

 

The problem is that it's difficult terrain. So unless you have Scamper or another free move card you need to have two cards to even get into range for step attacks. And once you reach him you must be certain that you can kill him, because there is no going back. So again it's a map issue.

 

What he said.

 

But what he said was incorrect you don't need 2 cards to get in range for a step attack you only need one. Which guess what you get every single turn.

 

I do agree that this map is the issue, though. There are absurd amounts of unpassable terrain and Wizards and Teleports are in their prime here. Unlike Streams of Blood there isn´t even Impassable Terrain, just Blocked ones, which makes confrontations a pain. To get through those chokepoints you need not one, but TWO movement cards because, unless you flank the stage, there are 2 difficult terrains blocking the sidelanes. The other one that has this similar issue is Cave but even then a single Step can get you into swinging range from adjacent VPs and Dancing Cut can do so from oposite ones. This one has a large wall, difficult to exploit by even Fireball, and an unneeded ammount of difficult terrain that makes Teleport the one solution.

To be on topic, an agreement to draw should probably be handed carefully, specially if rewards are handed, even if small ones. Otherwise, a lot of people that had the time to grind it out would simply not accept the stalemate and expect a timeout. I know this is a thing from other games; some people take all the advantages they can for winning, this includes making you wait for 15 minutes

 

Look don't get me wrong at all i despise this map and the terrain on it has in it self lost me at least 2 matches out of 3 on this map. What i was saying was simply that this map isn't a draw problem and that draws them self aren't a problem as far as i can see.

 

Wozarg, I don't think anyone would argue that it's possible to break stalemate such as this if players have the right cards - but the point here is that such situations can occur when players don't have the right cards. Clearly either player _could_ cross the gap to attack their enemy, and but then if they aren't able to kill the enemy in ~1 round, they've lost the game.

One could argue that maps shouldn't be like that, but I don't think the map is the fundamental problem. I think heaps of really good maps could potentially have this same situation.

I agree wholeheartedly with the OP that this match should have been a draw. My suggestions is that if both teams do nothing but pass (and play traits) for 3 turns, then the game is a draw.

In Chess the game is a draw if the same position is repeated 3 times, and in Go there is a rule simply saying that the same position isn't allowed to be repeated at all (thus eliminating this kind of problem). I think these are fair analogies.

However, there is a bit of a problem with my suggestion which is that if one player has significantly more time left than the other, then the player with more time might deliberately prevent the game from ending by performing trivial moves such as stepping off and back onto the victory tile, slowly slowly forcing the other player to run out of time. So ultimately there may need to be a stricter draw rule, but I think the 3-pass rule would be a good start.

(In the case of the screenshot one could argue that the player with more victory points should be declared the winner, but I guess that's beside the point.)

 

Actually, the char in the middle needs three move cards to get in range of the other, though the last could be a step attack (all of them could be, ofc).

 

And than I need to do 25 dmg to win.

 

I think the Three pass rule if there is to be one could be a good way to go, but how do you work out rewards?
And then there may be people that would look to exploit this game setup.
Just pass three times and we both get a brown chest.

 

No, a draw should result in 2x Pickled Herring for both players. And that's all, ever.

 

It's hard to detect 3 simultaneous pass for both players. If I don't want a draw and want a win instead, I can just spam move at my location while the opponent pass hopelessly.

Unless, of course, we detect turn passing without using any non-racial-move cards.

During this stalemate, whoever had a handicap card that can deal dmg to himself run the risk of losing if both players just pass infinitely

 

I think in this situation it's not that the players want to still win something, it's that they don't want to lose their ranking points by losing.
so an "agreed draw" could result in no wins (no points, no chests, nothing), but also no losses at all for both players. you couldn't exploit that, and probably players stuck in a case like this would be fine with it.

 

I still think 2x Pickled Herring as mentioned above is the way to go. Combined with Logans suggestion it's pure win.

 

To be fair i actually suggested that in the second post of this thread but yes its most likely the best option. But having seen similar systems before most people will just refuse the offer and try to time you anyway.

 

Three passes might work, or just an option that both players can click to agree a draw.

As for the rewards, if gaming the system is an issue the win could be awarded randomly to one player.

 

Nah, it should just be as though no game ever happened. Except for the 2x Pickled Herring. Tactics Arena Online used a system quite effectively where a draw was declared upon 3 successive passes without any figure changing squares, or (IIRC) 12 successive turns passed without any damage being dealt. That seems like it could work here.