Congratulation Tully (and not Mop). If it's true that both did half of the work, it's abundantly clear who did the good half. Next year you should drop your partner. He's only bringing you down.
[/ QUOTE ]
Hah, you're sweet :P Though really, MoP deserves as much credit as I do(even if it does irk me a tad that people who don't read the posts tend to give it all to him). If I'd been trying on my own, I wouldn't have finished! He knows all those technical bits that I've not bothered to learn. I got most of the fun stuff on this one and he was good enough to do most of the parts that I don't like. I really oughta learn, so maybe I'll do that over the next year and we'll go it independently next time. We'll see!
Posted this on the gameartisans forum, but not sure how many people read that forum, so cross-posting away!
Thanks a ton for organizing this Fred, you did a helluva job, and I appreciate it.
I think one thing that would definitely improve next years comp, like others have mentioned, is more focused judges. Yes the ones this year picked their favorites, and that is their right as the selected judges. However by selecting from such a broad base, it makes the finals almost completely random.
I think you could easily have next year's comp judged by peoples mothers, or taste-testing judges, and they'd pick their favorites, and you'd get a point based "fair" set of finalists, but it'd be very random, to say the least, and that's how this years results felt. I think having a character art comp judged by character artists is really the way to go.
Minor preferences aside, I think given time, these entries could very well be put in a reasonable scale from best to worst, by competent character artists. There might be some slight arguments on whether something is a 5th place, or a 6th place, but we wouldn't get characters that are almost unanimously agreed should be top 5, not even making it in any of the judges mention.
I forget if it was you Fred, or not, but I liked the suggestion of each forum doing an internal vote of their top 10 (or 20) to send on to the final comp. That way you have a mass of real-time content-creation peoples narrowing it down. Then have just 4 or 5 professional, top-tier-talent character artists going over the finalists, and trying to vote for more than five places. I'd prefer they vote for 20, in the order they like them (with no divisions based on forums).
I just think that you can separate the outrage from some people being upset their personal entry didn't place, and still see enough people who legitimately feel that the final results were off by a lot, to use as a barometer for how the judging went. Last year I think most people felt fairly satisfied with the rankings, and couldn't argue too much. This year it seems like a lot of WTF moments all around.
talked it over with rawk, and here is something we came up with. Personally, I like it a lot
To insure only the best entries remain, he suggested there should be an elimination round every week for 3-4 weeks until finally, judges choose their favorites. So for 3-4 weeks, dominancewar.com would dispense a list every monday that says who made it into the next round. Once people get kicked off, they will appear to the public and go back into their respect teams(homes) display. The ones that go into the next round, remain hidden from public view until they themselves get eliminated or the champions are announced.
This method insures only the pure best remain because no one would kick off a fantastic entry. So best entries would never be overlooked. Plus, people will immidiately know their skill level because if they get kicked off in the first round, they know they have one year to work harder on improving for the next war. Those who make it into the final round... they know they are really gooood!
There is only one tiny thing of note. I will have vito power. If I think an entry gets kicked off before he or she rightfully should be, I will not allow it.
dominance war idol, eh?
i think it sounds like it would be a good solution to iron out the problems this competition appeared to have in terms of quality models getting passed over. and would also help take the edge off the waiting for all the people--especially since there's talk of next year having even more forums, it would definitely make it even more of an event for everyone. cool stuff.
oh, and i think you mean veto power. Vito power, as in the elder god Vito that runs and operates much of polycount, would be far too powerful a position to grant yourself
oh and as others have said, thank you personally Fred, for all the time and effort you've put in--in apparent sacrifice of your own entry, no less. it was a lot of fun for me, and i was halfway around the world unable to do any direct participation other than crits and insane-o cheerleading!
Smells like the same turd but from a different ass.
Once again it will be a judge's favourite and each judge will have different tastes, whether they are a lead character artist or not.
So technically it's not a modelling competition anymore, its which entry can impress the judges most. Anyone can make a piece of shit model, but throwing some spec and some bloom during post may make the piece of shit look better, but at the end of the day its still the same piece of shit!
We need a scoring system (like I mentioned in my last post), where each aspect of the character creation process is looked at. From concept, to modelling, to texturing and finally the presentation. Each area should have its own scoring criteria. The points tallied and average out of 10 score is given.
But whatever...
[/rant]
I Think That's a great Idea Fred.
I also would like to thank you for all the hard work you put in getting this thing together. You need to get like g4 or spike t.v in on this, make it like the superbowl of character artists.
I wasn't really talking about how champions from the final round of entries (around 30-50) will be selected and judged. I was just talking about how we would narrow things down so that only the true best remain. We are trying to prevent good entries from being overlooked.
Gauss -> Thanks man. Your comments were always a pleasure to read. I could hear you cheering for polycount all the way from cgchat hehe
well the people judging aren't complete n00bs, so i don't think really crappy entries will be getting very far, like the entries that people keep bringing up may not be that great, but they're in general much better than alot of entries from last year.
This contest is getting more and more saturated and that makes it very hard for judges to rank things objectively, which is why a stage elimination system makes sense. Here's an example of how it would go, at stage 1 everything except for 50 entries gets thrown out, at stage 2 another 30 get eliminated, leaving only 20, and from that 20 the judges have to then pick out the top 10. this makes sure all the crappy and mediocre work is out and the judges get alot of opportunities to get really familiar with all the entries and really pick things apart, which will help eliminate the "shiny, cool at first glance" type of work.
i dunno probably a small group of judges, there could be different judges for different stages with like a core group who will go all the way, plus fred vetoing to make sure good stuff doesn't get thrown out for no reason.
Four communities take part. Each community has its own non-participating judges whom select their community's Top Five qualified entries. These Top Five from each of the four communities are submitted as the offical DomWar finalists.
The DomWar judges receive 20 total entries from the four communities. They put the twenty entries in order of best to worst. On each judge's ballot, his first place is awarded 20 points, his second place 19 points, etc, with last place being awarded 1 point.
All points are tallied from the judges' ballots. Highest score wins first place, second highest wins second place, etc. Points for each team are also added, so that the community with the highest total score wins the challenge even if they don't take all of the top spots. In the event two or more entries have the same score, a run-off vote is held by the DomWar judges to determine placement.
The actual number of final entries or point values can be whatever, but I think the approach would fix the problems some people had with the voting.
*edit*
I think having the first round of judges drawn from each specific community helps solve the issue of overburdening/biasing the finalist judges, and it also gets the individual communities more involved in sending their 'best of the best'. Kind of like national time trials to qualify for the Olympics, etc.
well the actual point system for the top 10 needs tweaking... and i'm sure fred will be up to the task of making it good. As far as community judges, i think that might not be the best idea, at least as long as there are enough people from outside either forum doing the judging so they can make impartial decisions.
[ QUOTE ]
Four communities take part. Each community has its own non-participating judges whom select their community's Top Five qualified entries. These Top Five from each of the four communities are submitted as the offical DomWar finalists.
I think having the first round of judges drawn from each specific community helps solve the issue of overburdening/biasing the finalist judges, and it also gets the individual communities more involved in sending their 'best of the best'. Kind of like national time trials to qualify for the Olympics, etc.
[/ QUOTE ]
It seems a bad idea for one person from a community to make a cut to 5 entries. That leaves a lot of room for complaining of bias before the real judging has even started. A collective judging all the entries and finding the top 50/20 seems more likely to ascertain a more objective sample.
Also immediately having only 5 entries from each forum might encourage people to switch to weaker forums for a 'potentially easy ride'.
How about each site votes on the top 20 everybody on that site gets to vote. Then that gets dropped to 10 by the people who got the top 20 spots. We wouldn't let anyone know who placed where only who made it to the top 10. That info would come out once all the judges votes were in. If they are good enough to get in the top 20 they know whats good. Liklyhood they would vote for themselves isn't that great.
That way the judges only have to take 10 from each site.
This elimination idea reeks too I'm sorry to say. What you need to keep in mind is that a lot of people join these to learn and improve their skills. Its not all about the prize. Your essentially destroying the learning aspect of this contest by introducing an elimination process by which the best contestants are well hidden from the public and people are prematurely eliminated because they simply don't have the skill level or popularity of some of the veterans of the industry who enter the contest.
Whats wrong with a good clean contest where everyone has a chance to cross the finish line? Like the last two wars have been?.
either way, all I really ask for is a smaller panel of judges. Actual guys involved with creating or managing character art so noone can question their knowledge.
A smaller number of judges so we don't get watered down results.
Dominance War is first and foremost a community building and learning excercise. The elimination setup is quite intimidating and will mean that a lot of the less experienced artists won't even bother trying because the super elites will inevitably take out the competiton spots.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by hiding things from the public but you'll be reducing a lot of the communal spirit and the chance to learn from other's processes.
Skanker and Casey's suggestions combined seems like the best way to work. Have an unambiguous brief, a strict set of criteria to judge on and use a small selection of appropriate character artists who havea good understanding of the processes necessary to create good game art.
oh, and if they stray from the initial concept description, then they're out. Simple as that. Who cares how good it is. It's more of a challenge to stay within the given direction.
You would never get anywhere in this industry if you kept going around your AD's back and making characters that just didn't fit the brief.
First and foremost, judging and elimination doesn't start until the contest is over. One week after everyone from every forum hits their submit finals button, the elimination will begin.
However, I don't agree with cutting everything down to 50 on the first pass. There will be other forums entering so raising the first pass to 100, then 60, then 20 then champions could be better. four stages will give everyone a good approximation of where they stand as artists because it would be a form of a grading system.
Jack -> Hidden? Hidden means after the contest is over and after people have uploaded their final images, only judges will see these pages here. Then, every week (or few days) people who have been cropped will be revealed to the public. So the public can now access these pages here.
Example:
after the first round of cropping, 100 finalists remain hidden and everyone else's entries will show up back in their home forum pages hereherehere and here
Next week, more people will go back home. On the final week after cutting everything down to just 20, a list will be shown on dominancewar.com that shows who still remains. From these 20, champions will be selected. Of course, their is a small flaw to this plan. If we narrow things down to 20, people could potentially know which forum will win. If one forum has 10 spots of 20, chances are good they will win
Sounds good to me Fred. I agree with skankerzero though, that the judges need to be people more strongly associated with character art in general. It's much easier to respect the opinions of people who are leaders in the character art field and work with this sort of stuff every day.
Thanks again for organising all of this, I can't wait to get going on the next one
In all honesty, I would also welcome a change in themes.
How many times can we really do this 'future Quake-Unreal-styled-war' thing anyways? If anything, that's what really bores me about the DomWar so far.
What about some kind of time device was used to take the war to different times or whatever? Then we can get some cool entries like polar bears riding T-Rexes or whatever.
Yep, I'd definitely go for a different theme for the next one, I think "futuristic armour-wearing badass" has been totally worn out by this and the previous contest... not to mention 50% of computer games out there.
Next year, domwar will head in a new direction. This will be talked about after the prelims But, I'll be sure to make tighter briefs, less variance between the teams, and also set up a watcher council that goes around each forum warning people that they are breaking the rules and could potentially be disqualied in the first round of cropping.
rollin --> Yeah, it would be fun alright. I am sure a few might suffer a stroke waiting and praying to make it into the next round hehe. It's kind of cruel but oh my, it will be cool!
Although I liked the judges this year, it never hurts to give new people a try. I'll look into finding hard core character artists for next year.
Thanks everyone for your understanding in this. I am sure together, we can cram out the kinks in Dominance War's design and set up Since there was no mention of it, I guess people are ok with having the team best. This will stay in next year too then.
Perhaps it's an idea to, rather than lay out themes and guidelines, actually have something that people MUST adhere to? I'm thinking along the lines of a Dominance Race, where every character has to have a mount/car/spaceship/whatever or something along those lines. Or HAVING to make a team of x members, rather than just one character.
At the moment, the themes for the sites are cool, but I think people sometimes found them too restraining and simply ignored them... which sort of ruins the whole idea behind it. It restrains the style of your model rather than the objective, and doing it the other way around might be something worth considering. (I realize that there's the Assassin objective this war, and General in the last, but let's be honest... Could you have told just by looking at the entries?)
Oh, and I forgot in the last post. Thanks a heap, Fred. I've had the war of my life
Fred, might I suggest that we split the champions and team best apart more. Meaning that if you are in the champions section, you cannot win in the team best section, as being a champion is like a team best for all the forums in the competition. This would eliminate the double prizes (which I know some will not like) but this would allow more contestants a chance at a placement. If you do go this way, just have the 10th place prize, be slightly better than the team bests 1st prize and I think that would be good. Just an idea:)
You have a valid point, unfortunately, it would be impossible to break them apart:( If champions are not bests too, it wouldn't make much sense. Additionally, this feature was put in as a means to soften the blow for forums who didn't make it into the top 10. However, there is another solution. We could do away with team bests and increase the amount of champions to 20-30. This will insure each forum is mentioned somewhere in the finals.. even if they are number 29 and 30.
I like the suggestion of ranking each submission through a grading system. Say have 5 categories with a ranking of 1 to 10 or something along those lines. Then at least people can see how they ranked compared to other submissions. Just my opinion though
I would be happy with that, as it then alleviates the double prizes, and allows more of the participants to feel like they won something for there piece.
Yeah, I agree that makes more sense than team bests. Having a top 20 instead of a top 10 and eliminating the team bests would probably lead to more feeling of accomplishment for more participants.
[ QUOTE ]
I realize that there's the Assassin objective this war
[/ QUOTE ]The shadow thing was pretty ambiguous. A lot of people just assumed that Shadow = Assassin, but this wasn't specified anywhere in the brief. Its nice to have freedom and an ability to work through loop holes (at one satge I was going to make a massive colossus because he casts his massive shadow across the battlefield), but ultimately some strictures need to be in place.
Avoiding the "You're allowed to have 10% of your character mechanical" would definitely be a good idea too.
public votes would be really unfair, cuz most ppl would vote based on popularity, or how 'cool' something looks to them. And since 'the public' is LOTS of ppl, the opinions would be crazy-weird.
i like the current idea of weekly eliminations. Im just wondering about what the theme is gonna be if its going 'in a new direction.'
Whatever it is, i hope its good. [are we gonna time-travel back to the foundation of these empires by _any_ chance... and [lol, wait for it] prevent one of the other empires from ever forming? [insert evil laugh here].
Replies
1. place 10pt -> 10. place 1 pt
so:
3dtotal 10 + 7 + 5 = 22 pt
polycount 8 + 6 + 2 = 16 pt
cgchat 9 pt
cgsociety 4 + 3 + 1 = 8 pt
edit: this doesn´t explains how a specific entry gets it´s place
and i don´t say i like this system
Congratulation Tully (and not Mop). If it's true that both did half of the work, it's abundantly clear who did the good half. Next year you should drop your partner. He's only bringing you down.
[/ QUOTE ]
Hah, you're sweet :P Though really, MoP deserves as much credit as I do(even if it does irk me a tad that people who don't read the posts tend to give it all to him). If I'd been trying on my own, I wouldn't have finished! He knows all those technical bits that I've not bothered to learn. I got most of the fun stuff on this one and he was good enough to do most of the parts that I don't like. I really oughta learn, so maybe I'll do that over the next year and we'll go it independently next time. We'll see!
edit: oh yeah, and it also just reinforces my belief that guidelines/"theme" are always best ignored for these sorts of things.
[/ QUOTE ]
Or perhaps better left for the site itself to decide.
Frank the Avenger
Thanks a ton for organizing this Fred, you did a helluva job, and I appreciate it.
I think one thing that would definitely improve next years comp, like others have mentioned, is more focused judges. Yes the ones this year picked their favorites, and that is their right as the selected judges. However by selecting from such a broad base, it makes the finals almost completely random.
I think you could easily have next year's comp judged by peoples mothers, or taste-testing judges, and they'd pick their favorites, and you'd get a point based "fair" set of finalists, but it'd be very random, to say the least, and that's how this years results felt. I think having a character art comp judged by character artists is really the way to go.
Minor preferences aside, I think given time, these entries could very well be put in a reasonable scale from best to worst, by competent character artists. There might be some slight arguments on whether something is a 5th place, or a 6th place, but we wouldn't get characters that are almost unanimously agreed should be top 5, not even making it in any of the judges mention.
I forget if it was you Fred, or not, but I liked the suggestion of each forum doing an internal vote of their top 10 (or 20) to send on to the final comp. That way you have a mass of real-time content-creation peoples narrowing it down. Then have just 4 or 5 professional, top-tier-talent character artists going over the finalists, and trying to vote for more than five places. I'd prefer they vote for 20, in the order they like them (with no divisions based on forums).
I just think that you can separate the outrage from some people being upset their personal entry didn't place, and still see enough people who legitimately feel that the final results were off by a lot, to use as a barometer for how the judging went. Last year I think most people felt fairly satisfied with the rankings, and couldn't argue too much. This year it seems like a lot of WTF moments all around.
talked it over with rawk, and here is something we came up with. Personally, I like it a lot
To insure only the best entries remain, he suggested there should be an elimination round every week for 3-4 weeks until finally, judges choose their favorites. So for 3-4 weeks, dominancewar.com would dispense a list every monday that says who made it into the next round. Once people get kicked off, they will appear to the public and go back into their respect teams(homes) display. The ones that go into the next round, remain hidden from public view until they themselves get eliminated or the champions are announced.
This method insures only the pure best remain because no one would kick off a fantastic entry. So best entries would never be overlooked. Plus, people will immidiately know their skill level because if they get kicked off in the first round, they know they have one year to work harder on improving for the next war. Those who make it into the final round... they know they are really gooood!
There is only one tiny thing of note. I will have vito power. If I think an entry gets kicked off before he or she rightfully should be, I will not allow it.
What do you think?
i think it sounds like it would be a good solution to iron out the problems this competition appeared to have in terms of quality models getting passed over. and would also help take the edge off the waiting for all the people--especially since there's talk of next year having even more forums, it would definitely make it even more of an event for everyone. cool stuff.
oh, and i think you mean veto power. Vito power, as in the elder god Vito that runs and operates much of polycount, would be far too powerful a position to grant yourself
oh and as others have said, thank you personally Fred, for all the time and effort you've put in--in apparent sacrifice of your own entry, no less. it was a lot of fun for me, and i was halfway around the world unable to do any direct participation other than crits and insane-o cheerleading!
Glad to see you recognizing that there could be a problem and addressing it Fred.
Thanks a bunch!
Once again it will be a judge's favourite and each judge will have different tastes, whether they are a lead character artist or not.
So technically it's not a modelling competition anymore, its which entry can impress the judges most. Anyone can make a piece of shit model, but throwing some spec and some bloom during post may make the piece of shit look better, but at the end of the day its still the same piece of shit!
We need a scoring system (like I mentioned in my last post), where each aspect of the character creation process is looked at. From concept, to modelling, to texturing and finally the presentation. Each area should have its own scoring criteria. The points tallied and average out of 10 score is given.
But whatever...
[/rant]
-caseyjones
What's to keep someone from just going and editing their shillouette in photoshop after the fact.
It should be broken up into a couple different stages like he mentioned above.
I also would like to thank you for all the hard work you put in getting this thing together. You need to get like g4 or spike t.v in on this, make it like the superbowl of character artists.
Gauss -> Thanks man. Your comments were always a pleasure to read. I could hear you cheering for polycount all the way from cgchat hehe
This contest is getting more and more saturated and that makes it very hard for judges to rank things objectively, which is why a stage elimination system makes sense. Here's an example of how it would go, at stage 1 everything except for 50 entries gets thrown out, at stage 2 another 30 get eliminated, leaving only 20, and from that 20 the judges have to then pick out the top 10. this makes sure all the crappy and mediocre work is out and the judges get alot of opportunities to get really familiar with all the entries and really pick things apart, which will help eliminate the "shiny, cool at first glance" type of work.
i dunno probably a small group of judges, there could be different judges for different stages with like a core group who will go all the way, plus fred vetoing to make sure good stuff doesn't get thrown out for no reason.
The DomWar judges receive 20 total entries from the four communities. They put the twenty entries in order of best to worst. On each judge's ballot, his first place is awarded 20 points, his second place 19 points, etc, with last place being awarded 1 point.
All points are tallied from the judges' ballots. Highest score wins first place, second highest wins second place, etc. Points for each team are also added, so that the community with the highest total score wins the challenge even if they don't take all of the top spots. In the event two or more entries have the same score, a run-off vote is held by the DomWar judges to determine placement.
The actual number of final entries or point values can be whatever, but I think the approach would fix the problems some people had with the voting.
*edit*
I think having the first round of judges drawn from each specific community helps solve the issue of overburdening/biasing the finalist judges, and it also gets the individual communities more involved in sending their 'best of the best'. Kind of like national time trials to qualify for the Olympics, etc.
Four communities take part. Each community has its own non-participating judges whom select their community's Top Five qualified entries. These Top Five from each of the four communities are submitted as the offical DomWar finalists.
I think having the first round of judges drawn from each specific community helps solve the issue of overburdening/biasing the finalist judges, and it also gets the individual communities more involved in sending their 'best of the best'. Kind of like national time trials to qualify for the Olympics, etc.
[/ QUOTE ]
It seems a bad idea for one person from a community to make a cut to 5 entries. That leaves a lot of room for complaining of bias before the real judging has even started. A collective judging all the entries and finding the top 50/20 seems more likely to ascertain a more objective sample.
Also immediately having only 5 entries from each forum might encourage people to switch to weaker forums for a 'potentially easy ride'.
need impartial judges
... might encourage people to switch to weaker forums for a 'potentially easy ride'.
[/ QUOTE ]
Welcome to CGChat!
-caseyjones
That way the judges only have to take 10 from each site.
Whats wrong with a good clean contest where everyone has a chance to cross the finish line? Like the last two wars have been?.
A smaller number of judges so we don't get watered down results.
Less = better
Dominance War is first and foremost a community building and learning excercise. The elimination setup is quite intimidating and will mean that a lot of the less experienced artists won't even bother trying because the super elites will inevitably take out the competiton spots.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by hiding things from the public but you'll be reducing a lot of the communal spirit and the chance to learn from other's processes.
Skanker and Casey's suggestions combined seems like the best way to work. Have an unambiguous brief, a strict set of criteria to judge on and use a small selection of appropriate character artists who havea good understanding of the processes necessary to create good game art.
You would never get anywhere in this industry if you kept going around your AD's back and making characters that just didn't fit the brief.
However, I don't agree with cutting everything down to 50 on the first pass. There will be other forums entering so raising the first pass to 100, then 60, then 20 then champions could be better. four stages will give everyone a good approximation of where they stand as artists because it would be a form of a grading system.
Jack -> Hidden? Hidden means after the contest is over and after people have uploaded their final images, only judges will see these pages here. Then, every week (or few days) people who have been cropped will be revealed to the public. So the public can now access these pages here.
Example:
after the first round of cropping, 100 finalists remain hidden and everyone else's entries will show up back in their home forum pages here here here and here
Next week, more people will go back home. On the final week after cutting everything down to just 20, a list will be shown on dominancewar.com that shows who still remains. From these 20, champions will be selected. Of course, their is a small flaw to this plan. If we narrow things down to 20, people could potentially know which forum will win. If one forum has 10 spots of 20, chances are good they will win
Regardless, it should be ok.
Thanks again for organising all of this, I can't wait to get going on the next one
and THAN start the elimination and judging process..
wich also makes the time to wait for the finals bit more fun
How many times can we really do this 'future Quake-Unreal-styled-war' thing anyways? If anything, that's what really bores me about the DomWar so far.
What about some kind of time device was used to take the war to different times or whatever? Then we can get some cool entries like polar bears riding T-Rexes or whatever.
rollin --> Yeah, it would be fun alright. I am sure a few might suffer a stroke waiting and praying to make it into the next round hehe. It's kind of cruel but oh my, it will be cool!
Although I liked the judges this year, it never hurts to give new people a try. I'll look into finding hard core character artists for next year.
Thanks everyone for your understanding in this. I am sure together, we can cram out the kinks in Dominance War's design and set up
At the moment, the themes for the sites are cool, but I think people sometimes found them too restraining and simply ignored them... which sort of ruins the whole idea behind it. It restrains the style of your model rather than the objective, and doing it the other way around might be something worth considering. (I realize that there's the Assassin objective this war, and General in the last, but let's be honest... Could you have told just by looking at the entries?)
Oh, and I forgot in the last post. Thanks a heap, Fred. I've had the war of my life
If you want to discuss any of this in real time Fred, just shoot me a message:
msn: prizm_teenstrike at hotmail dot com
y!: skankerzero
Mmm... tighter briefs...
[/ QUOTE ]
Bwahahaha!
Spark
Spark
I realize that there's the Assassin objective this war
[/ QUOTE ]The shadow thing was pretty ambiguous. A lot of people just assumed that Shadow = Assassin, but this wasn't specified anywhere in the brief. Its nice to have freedom and an ability to work through loop holes (at one satge I was going to make a massive colossus because he casts his massive shadow across the battlefield), but ultimately some strictures need to be in place.
Avoiding the "You're allowed to have 10% of your character mechanical" would definitely be a good idea too.
i like the current idea of weekly eliminations. Im just wondering about what the theme is gonna be if its going 'in a new direction.'
Whatever it is, i hope its good. [are we gonna time-travel back to the foundation of these empires by _any_ chance... and [lol, wait for it] prevent one of the other empires from ever forming? [insert evil laugh here].