"Balanced" Drafting Variant Request and "Balanced" Championship mode

[bludgeon]

For 4 players, what is the logic behind giving the best drafting to the '1st' car. Or do I misunderstand what 1st means?

[RazorOz]

For 4 players, what is the logic behind giving the best drafting to the '1st' car. Or do I misunderstand what 1st means?

1st does mean 1st on the grid. The logic is that 1st faces the biggest disadvantages off the grid in the vast majority of races. No adrenaline, no opportunity to slipstream. You can easily massage the numbers to put any position on the grid in any of the options you like of course, one of the reasons it's like it is is to keep it as close to the original as possible, to make as few changes as possible which helps in memorising the orders. One of the added bonuses since AnDagda come up with the idea of how to play like this on BGA in private games is that it's far easier to run a draft that doesn't deviate as much from the standard draft, the more it deviates the more messy it becomes.

[bludgeon]

We all have our own experiences to draw upon when evaluating what's balanced about the game and what isn't. For each of us the sample size is limited, but collectively there is statistical validity to our shared experiences. From those shared experiences, I see clear evidence here that starting position is not viewed as materially impactful on game outcome, but draft order is.

The most logical way to proceed is to figure out draft orders that are as close to balanced as possible, which you appear to have done well, and then randomly assign them to players each game. Then, over time, there will be data to evaluate impact of starting position and impact of draft order separately to determine the impact of each, and we can validate or disprove the hypotheses about balanced draft orders and irrelevance of starting position.

The most important thing, though, is making some kind of improvement to the current state of things, which you've put the work in to enable, so thank you for that.