Reposting from the Colosseum thread in case not everybody who is interested is reading both threads;

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Ok, so, for those who are interested, here is the setup I would recommend:

- use umodded RTW 1.2; this means no custom mods either; we want everything to be the same and pristine in every experimenter's case so as to make the data cross-comparable
- take the Britons (thanks rcp ), medium/medium imperial campaign
- for the control, play 15 turns without doing anything; this literally means don't touch a thing other than the end of turn button; 15 turns is enough to bring two consecutive sieges that ended in starving the garrison out, I believe, hence I think this is a good number - not too big, not too small
- once 15 turns have passed (you hit end of turn for 15 times, to be exact), toggle FoW off and count the number of provinces that are not owned by the original owners; this means rebel provinces as well; this requires you to know beyond any doubt who was the original owner of the province - write it down beforehand if you think it's going to be necessary, or something to that effect
- for the "treatment" group, do everything like you did it in the control group - Britons M/M, hit end of turn (EoT) 15 times, don't touch anything - with the exception that now each turn you hit quicksave(QS) and then quickload (QL); hence, start - QS -QL - EoT - QS - QL -EoT -... etc. until you have hit EoT 15 times; at that point, turn FoW off and again count number of provinces not owned by the original owners
- if at any point in either your control or treatment campaigns you get attacked, abort that campaign, and start anew; we don't want to interfere at all, even if it's only autoresolve, and hence discard that campaign and instead do a new one fromt he begginging until you have the 5 controls (without reloads) and 5 treatments (with reloads)
- make 5 separate control campaigns (each running from fresh start to 15th EoT), and 5 separate treatment camapigns (again each running from fresh start to 15th EoT); save the campaigns at that point to a regular save, zip all those saves (you should have 10 of them, and this shuldn't take up much space) and keep them on your HD for the time being inc ase we need to send these to someone or verify something
- PM me the results, but keep in mind that I can only have 5 PMs at a time, so if I don't write back saying I got it in a day, PM me again; I'll do the analysis of the results, and post them here; I will not soup up the results, or do anything else to them other than analyze them - I do this kind of stuff for a living, and I know how to keep my personal feelings out of it, believe me


It is paramount that we all do it the same way, so please, if you think that you won't be able to do it in the way we all agree to do it, do not send me your data. I really do not want to deal with falsifications, souped up data for whatever reason, results that were collected through deviation of the basic rules, and similar things, as this would invalidate everybody else's effort as well. Let's do it right, or not do it at all.

This should tell us whether there is something fishy going on or not with saves.If we can't get 10 people (well, 9 other than myself), maybe each of us could do more runs. Say, 8 or 10 per control/treatment. Added bonus to this is that it cannot be said that it is due to a single PC configuration, or having FoW off all the time (which is a cheat and hence not an out-of-the-box game functionality). Please feel free to comment on the guidelines I posted above. If we agree, and there are no further comments until about 6pm GMT Friday, we can get to work, and by the end of the weekend, we should already be able to discuss the results.

Cheers,