How does BidBot decide who wins each nation and for what price?
Since multiple nations are up for auction, and we want to speed things up as much as possible, every player bids for every nation simultaneously. Each player enters the number of points they are willing to lose at the end of the match in order to play as each nation. Bids can be in half-point increments.
Once all bids have been placed, the nations are assigned to players. The first nation to be assigned is the one that received the highest bid. That nation goes to the player who placed that highest bid. That nation and that player are then removed from the auction, and the process is repeated until each player has a nation assigned to them.
What about ties?
What if two players bid the same amount for a nation? Ties are broken by reverse player order. Whoever is last in turn order for the first round wins ties against all other players.
What if a player bids the same amount for more than one nation? This is where things get tricky. Players are allowed to bid the same point value for more than one nation. In case that bid value is the winning bid at any step in the assignment process, and more than one of those nations are still available, BidBot needs a way to decide which of those nations to assign to that player.
To do this, BidBot asks players who bid the same amount for more than one nation to rank those nations from first choice to last choice. There can be more than one group of such nations. Players are asked to rank the nations within each group. When a player wins the bid for more than one nation at a time, the nation assigned to that player is the one they ranked ahead of the others in that group.