Starting 3rd Zero X Season

On July 7 2012 we start the 3rd Zero-X season. This will be the first season with
the new level "Clone War". The best agents of the 2nd season will be among the first participants.
For now this are Virgina, Say Cheese, Scorpion King and Unexist.

But don't worry as soon as you accomplish the first level "Greenfields", you get
immediately access to the next level. The conditions are still the same:
You need to participate in a least 5 tournaments and win 40 points.

Looking forward to see the first winners.

Winner of 2nd Season Greenfields

Wood Elf strikes again! The winner of the 1st Zero X season is also the winner of 2nd season.

In the 2nd season disengage was introduced and the combat damage, was changed in the favor of the attacker and therefore rewarded a more aggressive behaviour. But little has changed here as a look at the ranking list shows.

As announced at the beginning of this season: you will need an agent with at least an average of 4.0 EPS and 5 tournaments to get to next level "Clone War". Here are the top five agents, who achieved that goal:

6.62 Wood Elf
6.08 Mild Gruyere
6.08 Bulldog
5.66 Rincewind
4.24 Gruyere

The usual suspects at the top, let's have a look at the agents that have won more than one tournament:

1st places
3 Rincewind
2 Wood Elf
2 Bulldog
2 Oreiller

At first glance it looks surprising that Oreiller didn't made it for the next level with two 1st places. But taking a closer look we can see, that it didn't perform very well between the 2nd and 6th tournament. I'm sure he will join soon as well as Tentacle Cat, both are only a few points away.

In the next few blog posts I want to take a closer look at all the new features of the new level Clone War and introduce them step by step.

www.zero-x.net

Combat Damage in Season 2

The combat damage in ZeroX has been quite high. Until now the combat damage has been divided inversely proportional to the population size, both agents suffered the same combat damage.
With season 2 this will change in favor of the bigger adversary. The combat damage for the smaller will remain the same. But the damage for the bigger will also be inversely proportional to the population sizes. Let's compare the two algorithms with a seek and destroy sequence with:

		Season 1		Season 2
step		Agent 1	Agent 2	Agent 1	Agent 2
1	population	1000	1500	1000	1500
	combat damage	600	600	600	400
2	population	400	900	400	1100
	combat damage	276	276	293	107
3	population	124	624	106	993
	combat damage	103	103	96	11
4	population	21	521	10	982
	combat damage	20	20	10	1
5	population	1	501	0	981

As in season 1 both adversary were classified excat the same, therefore they suffered the same damage. The bigger one could never take advantage of his population superiority. This will now be considered.

The End of Season 1

The 10th tournament ended actually with two winners, Bulldog and Rincewind. Both made 6.8 points, Bulldog is only ranked first, because he has a better overall ranking.

After 10 tournaments, it's time to look back. The first tournament began with 9 agents, by now the agents have doubled. They not only have become more, no they also have become better. FireLion the winner of the first two tournaments, looked in the beginning very promising, but in the meanwhile has been displaced to the 10th rank. Others have come with a better strategy.

After total 46 games, the ranking list can grouped in three parts:
There's the 5plus group, agents that have an average of more than 5 points. Means they don't only survive in most of the games, the also achieve better ranks. WoodElf, Bulldog, Gruyere, Oreiller, Mild Gruyere and Rincewind are in this group.
The second group are agents that survive sometimes, they have an average of 3 to 4 points. And then there's the last group that have less than 3 points, meaning they don't survive very often.

But remember this tournaments are not only about winning or loosing, in fact I don't see any loosing in contributing an agent. It's about to figure out which strategy works better then another.

After 10 tournaments we make a break and end the first season. We will continue the tournaments in October, the exact date will be announced.

Congratulations to everybody and see you soon for the second season!