Grand Challenge Quest rules discussion

Basically, the objective on Grand Challenge Quest is to find a fleet capable of beating all previous winners. Once your fleet wins, it joins the other Grand Challenges, making the GCQ harder every round. The Grand Challenge Quests are posted in the Tournaments Forum.

Those are the rules for the Grand Challenge Quests.

1 - Three arbitrary builds (with an expected good performance) are chosen from the existing challenges and become the first three Grand Challenges.

2 - The first forumite who manages to make a build that can beat all three Grand Challenges without changing deployment in any way (even rules). Shall post his build as a challenge and describe it in the forum in sufficient detail as to let other people test his build’s ability to beat the previous ones. Don’t forget to post which are the Grand Challenges your build beats (see rule 6).

3 - The first who manages to make a build that can beat all four challenges, posts his build. As so on, with five, six, etc.

4 - The Grand Challenge Quest ends when we decide the combination of Grand Challenges is unbeatable or when GSB changes version and significantly nerfs something used by any of the grand challenges. At both points, we can start a new edition of the Grand Challenge Quest with three new challenges.

/–other infos–/
5 - “First” will be counted by forum post date.

6 - To avoid a “race condition”, as soon as someone posts a challenge stating that he can win the Grand Challenge Quest as it is at that moment, you can already post another one that beats all the previous Grand Challenges plus the new one. Then, when that one is checked to be sufficient, yours will be considered the first entry.

7 - All challenges will have to be in the same scenario. We’ll change scenarios in further Grand Challenge Quest editions.

8 - The initial three grand challenges will not be chosen among the hardest, to avoid locking the Grand Challenge Quest on round one or two.

9 - Name you challenges with the following structure: “Grand Challenge Quest I Entry 1 - Whatever text you want to add.” . (the first I will change with the next Grand Challenge; the second number is just to differentiate your own entries)

10 - All ships must have at least one engine.

What an amazing idea. I love it!

I think this is also a great way to find out if any combination is overpowered. If you can make a ship that beats all other well-rounded builds, there’s a case to say that the combination is overpowered (of course, a specialized ship could take it out). If nothing else, it certainly encourages finding what we should really be after – balanced ship designs.

Given the somewhat RPS nature of this game, I think 3 ships is a reasonable starting point. It’s easy to make a build that’s good against one or two builds, but three builds that cover the range of distances, armor/shield penetration, speed, and size, should pose a formidable challenge to any new build.

I think it’s fair to say that two of those three builds will be a heavy plasma cruiser and a fast fighter fleet.

I also think the part you said about sharing and explaining it on the forums is key. Not only does it help foster the community, it helps teach us less-fortunate strategists how to think about designing builds and why things work.

I can’t wait.

Second that, I am in.

Well, I’ve learned to value both your opinions so it’s enough for me.

Tonight (in a couple hours) I’ll try to find three reasonably hard and different builds and I’ll make a thread with the first Grand Challenges. I’ll essentially let the challenge votes and the rate of Wins/downloads, guide me.

So:
1- Plasma tanks.
2- Fast fighters.
3- The most voted of the hardest.

Might want to limit the number here some how. We can try it, but could quickly foresee it becoming unbeatable just because one fight was plasma heavy formation at the top, then the next is heavy plasma on the bottom. And your fleet does great against one, but not the other, just due to movement.

It could be a limit of one “type” of fleet. Or a max of 4-5 fleets, which the fleet that gets defeated the easiest to knocket out. Or if a fleet gets defeated with a certain percent left on the other side is knocked out. This way you could be up to a lot of fleets (say eight), and someone comes up with a super counter, totally destroying 4 of them. Now it’s that superfleet plus the 4 remaining fleets that didn’t get totally destroyed.

We can try anything to start (or just leave it the same) and see how it goes.

I’ll have to investigate the part about positioning. I’m not sure of the effect it may have.

Anyway, if the first try becomes unbeatable at 4 or 5, we can review the rules to correct such artifacts.

I’ve created the first Grand Challenge Quest.

I’ve also updated the first post, to reflect some things I’ve seen while choosing the challenges.

I think a rule should be added that no-engine ships should not be allowed. I know lokis222 beat them with a fleet like this, but now no one else can use a no engine fleet, or you get into stale-mate situations. I think it’s just bad taste in general to use fleets like that, and am hoping the in the future of this game in general you can’t make ships with no engines.

QFT

If my fleet is positioned as far as possible forward, another stationary fleet could be used. It would also not seriously hamper my fleet to take off one heavy armor and toss on an engine. I tested that build too.

I have rebuilt the fleet with engines. It took down all four challenges. I would like to enter this as a replacement as the complaints voiced here are valid. It is called Grand Challenge Entry Missile Test with Engines. This was the fleet that I built after four hours of missiles tests last Sunday and I wanted to see how it would fair. I glad it did okay, but I understand the objections to it.

Personally, I think building ships without engines should continue to be possible in the game, but would like to see it disincentivized through clever game mechanics and balancing. Basically I like having the option to build anything I can think of - even if some of those things are really stupid. :-p

To keep this post at least half-relevant to the thread, though, for the purposes of the challenge quest, I’d also vote for disallowing engineless ships. In the present state of the game, it messes things up too much.

If you disallow engine-less ships, won’t people just place one single lowest class engine on their machines? .1 speed is basically the same as 0

.1 speed is actually completely different than 0. 0 speed allows for stalemates, and requires that the challenger put in engines, while the challenge fleet has no engines. .1 speed means that the two can be matched and balanced.

It’s subtle, but allowing Quest Challenge fleets to have 0 speed gives them an edge. As I just posted in a separate discussion, there are ways to beat fleets that don’t move; but they require placement. So to beat three fleets in a row without changing the placement of the ships doesn’t seem fair if the Quest Challenge fleets can go without engines.

Evilmeat

I agree with the “No ship without an engine” rule, to avoid stalemates and/or giving an advantage to the first unmoving fleet.

I’ll add it.