We've had more than our fair share of mixed map/map draft/civ draft tournaments as of late. It seems in fact to be the new default tournament setting: just swap out a few maps, put a new banner on it, rinse and repeat. Here are some stray thoughts for tournament organizers to hopefully spark a bit of change going forward:
1) You can have the maps for each game in a series be pre-set instead of doing a map draft + home map pick. If running a multi-round event, you can play different maps in different weeks
2) You can run a tournament on just one map or one style of map
3) You can have players ban more than just a few civilizations. Heck, you could ban half the civs if you wanted to, it's your tournament. No pro is going to be ruined if they can't play Spanish/Malians on Nomad
4) You can ban specific civs on specific maps, like EGCTV does in aoe4
5) You can still have a civ draft but also incorporate predetermined mirrors into the series (mirrors can be fun in low doses but we never see them anymore)
6) You could do semi-random civs, where matchups are randomly generated by the admin and then players ban out the ones they don't want to play (think Fair Civs cup but with more randomness)
7) You don't need 15+ maps in a map pool, you don't need new crazy maps, and you don't need maps with 50 gold/stone piles on the outside or water in the corners
8) If your tournament has several rounds, you can have a different civ pool for each round or take the Wandering Warriors approach and ban most popular civs in the previous round
9) You can play around with game settings, mixing in Empire Wars or even Castle Age start along with RM (I personally think Castle Age start has a ton of potential...new build orders, shorter games, etc.)
10) If hosting a TG event you can make it a mix of 1v1s and TGs. It doesn't need to be one or the other
11) When making groups/seeds, you don't have to use some formula in a spreadsheet to rank players. You can have the players rank themselves, or you can do a GSL-style selection where the players actually draft one another to create groups (this used to be great fun, and is sadly discontinued. It would be wonderful in aoe2).
12) You can run single elimination events. For big tournaments I don't think it's best but they absolutely have a place in the competitive ecosystem. They're undeniably cutthroat and exciting.
TLDR there are lots of ways to run a tournament. Please make tournaments more interesting.
1) You can have the maps for each game in a series be pre-set instead of doing a map draft + home map pick. If running a multi-round event, you can play different maps in different weeks
2) You can run a tournament on just one map or one style of map
3) You can have players ban more than just a few civilizations. Heck, you could ban half the civs if you wanted to, it's your tournament. No pro is going to be ruined if they can't play Spanish/Malians on Nomad
4) You can ban specific civs on specific maps, like EGCTV does in aoe4
5) You can still have a civ draft but also incorporate predetermined mirrors into the series (mirrors can be fun in low doses but we never see them anymore)
6) You could do semi-random civs, where matchups are randomly generated by the admin and then players ban out the ones they don't want to play (think Fair Civs cup but with more randomness)
7) You don't need 15+ maps in a map pool, you don't need new crazy maps, and you don't need maps with 50 gold/stone piles on the outside or water in the corners
8) If your tournament has several rounds, you can have a different civ pool for each round or take the Wandering Warriors approach and ban most popular civs in the previous round
9) You can play around with game settings, mixing in Empire Wars or even Castle Age start along with RM (I personally think Castle Age start has a ton of potential...new build orders, shorter games, etc.)
10) If hosting a TG event you can make it a mix of 1v1s and TGs. It doesn't need to be one or the other
11) When making groups/seeds, you don't have to use some formula in a spreadsheet to rank players. You can have the players rank themselves, or you can do a GSL-style selection where the players actually draft one another to create groups (this used to be great fun, and is sadly discontinued. It would be wonderful in aoe2).
12) You can run single elimination events. For big tournaments I don't think it's best but they absolutely have a place in the competitive ecosystem. They're undeniably cutthroat and exciting.
TLDR there are lots of ways to run a tournament. Please make tournaments more interesting.
Last edited: