Ok the most current cargo round ended, here is what the results read as.

[11/27/04 23:00:01] [202] Cargo shipments completed. Total delivered: Itani 2978, Serco 4626.
[11/27/04 23:00:01] [202] The Serco Dominion received the most cargo deliveries, and have been able to construct a special weapon. This weapon will be available at all Serco stations for the next seven days.
[11/27/04 23:00:01] [202] Scheduling new shipments. Nation cargo surplus: Itani 595, Serco 0.

Now, it just so happenes that i checked the cargo captures page about 3 minutes before the cargo round ended, and the totals were
Serco Total cargo delivered = 2074
Itani Total cargo delivered = 1461

Now if one side had a handicap, i could understand one of the sides not showing correctly, but for both sides to be off?

Perhaps one of the devs could take a moment to tell me where the numbers come from. I'm just kind of curious.

Serco had the handicap last time, but all that means is that more cargo gets delivered to Serco throughout the week.

The numbers are all mixed up. 2x what they should be plus some.

which was kinda my point durgia. Where did the itani numbers come from.

And if the handicap only means that more cargo gets delivered through the week, then neither side should be off. The numbers arent even the same amount off, either in direct, real numbers or as a percentage. they dont seem to have any real bearing on each other. lol

The handicap is supposed to be one side starting off with a surplus. In this case, Itani starting off at 595 and Serco at 0 but as to the numbers, an explanation would be nice.

Maybe previous surpluses got added in?

All I know is that I stockpiled 100 nIII's like ten minutes before the round ended, so I'm happy.

Hah. Yeah, at the end of the round the cargo was being counted twice, plus the surplus. Great. I went and fixed all the last rounds, and you can now view the previous rounds on the website(!).

So yeah, the surplusses for the next round were being calculated incorrectly as a result of the carco sums being doubled. And as you can see, the first round uh, didn't add up. But now at least the accounting should be working... now we just have to fix all the other 1000 things wrong with CTC. sigh.

get to it peon!

Toil!
TOIL!
tooooooiiil!!!

I think that the handicap should be greatly reduced (or removed altogether) Giving one nation +600 cargo for the week is almost an insurmountable obstacle to overcome. I can see it being a help if one nation got to be much more powerful than another, and thus would balance the power. But with how close the Scerco and Itani nations are at this point, it makes trying to erase the deficit not worth trying.

The surplus always help the team who lost last time(am i right?) so therefore it gives both sides a chance to win every other time. Although in some ways it's bad, depends on what faction you are, how you look at it, and other things. Well I think all and all CTC is better then it was before.

I think the surplus is bad for the following reason.

It encourages mediocrity. You want to win, but you dont want to win by a lot or the other nation just has a huge advantage the next round.

Maybe a cap on surplus would help? 200?

Don't worry Spellcast, Itani will push to win by a huge margin this week just for the beauty of it :))

More seriously, the way the surplus is calculated does not make sense to me. It should be a % of the cargo brought home by the losing nation during the last round. This way, both sides would keep an interest in fighting till the last convoy of the round, even if one is clearly losing.

I personally like the way the surplus works now, for a few reasons: it creates a tendancy for the winning nation to flip flop back and forth, which is a good thing (reference the recent threads bemoaning the loss of Neut MkIIIs - which I think is fine, because thanks to the surplus, you're likely to get them back next week). Also, it creates a challenge: How long of a stretch can we keep winning CtC, even with the surplus handicapping us? If Itani can only keep it for one week, and Serco keep it for two or three (or more), that's awfully embarrassing for the Itani (or vice-versa). I also had another reason that I forgot while typeing... oh well.

I think a cap on the surplus might be good, *iff* it was a weekly cap - i.e., the first week a nation wins the other nation is given a surplus of up to CAP (whatever CAP is); if the winner continues to win, the next week the loser would give a surplus of up to CAP times two, and so on. Thus we'd still have the flip-flop tendancy, but it could take more time to really take effect.

Just my thoughts.

The surpluses should tend to only be around 200-300 anyways. Last week's surplus was doubled also because of the accounting error.

We mainly didn't want one nation to always be dominating over the other all the time.