Veni Vidi Vici, or, the travails of a Tank Engine.

Well, it turns out that the story V3 was the journey of an inexperienced player from this:

to this:

Tank Engine, a player whose interest in Impetus is cursory. Who bought a mere two boxes of plastic Mongols in order to field as inexpensive an army as possible. Tank Engine, Hail Caesar.

In summary, the day came off without a hitch. I was a teeeeeeeny bit worried about the excel spreadsheet I was using packing it in and reporting random scores, but lucky the DEV/TEST/UAT process worked alright this time. This is mostly because the alternative scoring system in the Advanced Impetus 1.7 update is...strange. From looking at it closely though I noticed that there was a good chance that in a 3-game format you'd have every chance that going into the final game pretty much anyone with at least one under their belt would be in contention.

And so it came to pass.

As the first round came to a close I noticed that Pelarel and Tank Engine were still playing down to the 5 minute warning, but I chose to enforce the time limit and made them call it as per "ze rulez" (he does his best nazi accent). This was a little unfair to Pelarel, who had Tank on the ropes, only needing 1VD to end him, but rules be rules, and many players where indicating they wanted to be away early, soooo... an 'Honour on the Field' result it was.

It turns out that this lead to an unexpected result.  The way the draw fell out, both Pelarel and Tank would have been playing each other in the 2nd round, so I had Pelarel (5th), play Pooch (7th), and Tank (6th) play Prinny (8th). This turned out to be advantageous to Pooch, who looks to have demolished Pelarel's longbows with knights, and Tank gained a tight victory over Prinny. 

This means both Tank and Pooch walked away with ~8000pts for the victory.  But... because in the first game Tank has gained an 'Honour in the Field' he had scored 3000 points, and Pooch had taken an 'Honourable Defeat' he only scored 2000. 

Going into the final game McZermof was sitting on two victories and 16,160 points, Tank was on 11,116 points, Pooch was on 10,130, Scotty was on 10,111 and Russell was on 10,100. The rest of us were languishing on <10,000pts.

Now by my reading this meant that any one of the top five could still take the game. It was feasible that if the top players mauled each badly enough Russell could have carried it.

SUCH TENSE.

But since I was the only one who understood the scoring they were all remarkably relaxed.

As it turned out, McZermofs seemingly unstoppable Teutons were ground to a halt by the Horsemen of the East, 8090 to 1010. And victory went to Tank Engine!

Overall I think the scoring system worked well. Short games can mean a lot of draws and inconclusive results, but the alternative system rewards pressing your opponent hard and trying to kill at least a 1/4 of their army. The limited number of games leaves the competition nicely open, and you're not looking at any one player streaking away.

Will have to see if there's an appetite for more next year.