8th & 9th July at Ringwood Secondary College, Ringwood, Victoria Umpire's Report Congratulations to Troy Adlington for winning the competition with a perfect score, and to the 3C's for taking the team trophy with a great fight-back on Day 2. Perhaps the disappearance of these trophies north across the border will spark a better Victorian showing next year, or maybe some retaliatory attacks to steal some of their trophies. We hope that Troy and the 3C's will be back next year to defend their crowns. Thanks to all the players for making the competition a very successful and enjoyable weekend. The tournament attracted 41 players, including nine from interstate, making it the largest DBM tournament ever held in Victoria. Nearly half the players fielded armies from Book 2, with 4 Late Imperial Romans and 3 Seleucids being fielded. In contrast only three Book 1 armies were entered. Two were New Kingdom Egyptians, perhaps getting their last run before the spearmen disappear. The games were all played in good spirit throughout the weekend. Few umpiring decisions were required, and they were mostly unusual questions such as a naval flank march making enemy galleys flee or marching at night in mist. This may have been an indication that most players have now got a good understanding of V2.1 of the rules. Unfor tunately this will probably change as we move to V3.0 and I suspect it will take two or three tournaments before all the interpretations of the new rules are agreed upon. I think everyone enjoyed the weekend. A few players did express their dislike of the Win/Draw/Loss scoring system, mainly because they thought it changed army selection and playing style and encouraged unhistorical tactics like running sacrificial commands. Some player still fought cautiously and got draws. I noticed that after the first round the games that finished first were usually from the bottom half of the draw, perhaps suggesting that the players higher up were more intent on not losing. The scoring system separated players on the same number of Wins/Draws by summing their opponents number of wins and draws. This method of count-backs proved to be time consuming to work out at the end of the tournament, especially as we had to calculate the top ten positions to determine the Victorian rankings. I think a better method would have been to simply use the players DBM scores. This would also have alleviated some of the concern that players had regarding army selection and tactics. For the first two rounds interstate players were not matched against each other. Some people thought that this gave the interstate players an advantage as the good Victorian players could still played against each other. However, there were a number of clashes between the interstate players and good Victorians in these rounds with honours being shared evenly. Thanks must go to all the people who put in a lot of effort to make this tournament a success. Most notably Scott Nicholas who spent many hours behind the scenes organising and coordinating the event, as well as having the added joy of his wife giving birth to their second child a week before the competition. Thanks also to the players who gave up their Friday evening to set up the hall, to the W40K players who manned the kitchen throughout the weekend and to the traders and sponsors. Special thanks to Brian Hall for sponsoring the Victorian player of the year, and most improved player awards. Win/Draw/Loss Scoring Our use of the W/D/L scoring system was intended to promote an aggressive style of play amongst competitors. We did achieved a record level of 13% drawn game (average is 25%), that's 10 out of 78. This alone should vindicate our use of W/D/L, however we did receive some negative feedback. Comments varied from; (a) "Its more open to collusion between players?" We're not quite sure what is exactly meant by this or how collusion is any more prevalent with W/D/L than it might be using the standard DBM scoring method? (b) Players can design there armies so they can’t be broken, hence they will never lose a game? (draw yes, lose no!) There is a theory that placing more than half you army's EE in a single command and fighting with the rest is taking advantage of the W/D/L scoring ....... yet to be proven! (c) The comment "I fought hard for my draws, why should they be worthless!" This we agree is a valid comment but players shouldn't be playing for draws in the first place, it is against the spirit of the game. Its also extremely difficult to distinguish between hard fought draws and those that aren't (the latter being far more common too.) Feedback is welcome, constructive or not. We will no doubt post next years format for discussion prior to the tournament date to canvas all opinion and ideas. Acknowledgments Our thanks go out to Steve White for organising the hall and canteen provisions, to Cameron Coates, Iain Murphy & the WH mob for manning the canteen over the weekend (these guys don't even play DBM). To Martin Morgan for umpiring both days and doing an excellent job. To John Shaw, Glenn Harvey & John McCartney for their assistance with setting up/packing away equipment, plus the various other NWA members that assisted us on the Friday prior. Back to Table of Contents -- Kriegspieler #10 To Kriegspieler List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Kriegspieler Publications. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com