For the past year or so, many of us who love playing Warlords by email have mused about the idea of having a "World Championship" PBEM tournament. The file compatibility of the Mac-CD and the PC Deluxe versions makes such a tournament technically feasible. However, there have been numerous reports of PBEM cheating, and the inability to ensure a fair tournament poses a tricky problem for those who would like to organize a world championship.
There has been a fair amount of discussion in various Warlords circles about the possibility of fixing up Warlords to create a cheatproof play-by-email game which could form the basis of a worldwide tournament. A lot of ideas have been sent to the Web site here with ways to make this possible by adding security measures to the data files, altering the game software, and so on. This will require substantial work on the part of SSG, and while they are moving in the right direction, I don't think they'll get a really cheatproof game engine for at least another year.
However, it should be possible to design a set of playable and interesting PBEM rules that can support an interesting and verifiably cheat-free game. While such a set of rules requires eliminating some features of Warlords, and therefore affects the style of the game, it should make for a fair tournament which tests the depth of everyone's Warlords skill. And if we can organize a semi-functional tournament of our own and make it work, it would probably help motivate SSG to improve the game engine to support a better tournament in the future!
The first attempt to define such a set of rules was John Harrison's Experiment game. The Experiment experience showed that a cheat-resistant game could be played provided players were allowed to revert, reroll battles, and do other things technically allowed by the game but normally prevented by PBEM etiquette. However, simply playing a regular Warlords game with reverting allowed proved to be a terrible way to go, because players spent several hours each turn reverting in order to get the best possible outcome; those who didn't quickly vanished, overrun by hordes of wizards!
The second attempt to create a cheat-resistant, but playable set of rules was a tournament proposal I wrote, now known as Chesslike Warlords. This keeps John's core idea of allowing reverts, but then limits the game in order to limit the amount of reverting required. Heroes are banned and all units are the same strength, so that attackers do not need to revert many times in order to win battles. Since attackers can always win, movement and position become critical factors, and the game really is a bit like chess (only much more complicated!). However, many players were unhappy with the number of fun features of warlords that were eliminated in the Chesslike rules, with the main complaint being that it might be a fun game, but it wasn't really Warlords, so a tournament based on the Chesslike rules wouldn't be a true warlords tournament. Playtesting showed that the Chesslike Warlords variant was still fun and very challenging, but the criticism was on target - it's not the same as classic Warlords.
The most recent breakthrough came when Gary S. Best suggested a compromise between the cheat-resistant, reverting-allowed Chesslike Warlords rules and traditional PBEM play. The main motivating principles of the original proposal were kept, but more thought was put into creating rules to allow traditional warlords features such as heroes, allies, and armies of various strengths and skills. It was realized that heroes could be allowed, to be replaced one at a time, provided the number of allies one received was limited to avoid unbalancing the game and forcing too many reverts. (Most of the reverting in the Experiment game was to receive a hero with three wizards in the choicest location each turn, and then using the wizards to overrun everything in sight.) Quests are banned, but ruins and items are allowed. Most importantly, battles can be resolved without unfairness, by using the battle odds calculation tools to determine the "average" outcome from a battle and requiring attackers to do no better than that average outcome. This allows all army sets and scenarios to be used.
The latest tournament proposal is based on this compromise approach; let us know what you think!