RBPB4 Lurker Thread

[Gazzahk]

Thanks for all the comments.

Surely if all the players realised that the map gave an advantage to LP, why did they all sign up for such long and continuous NAPs with LP allowing him to benefit from the perfect storm identified? Surely they have contributed to their own demise, if indeed their demise is the end result.

If a map is so-called unbalanced it is surely the challenge of dealing with what you have been dealt that is the key issue. Different geographical circumstances will lead to different geopolitical outcomes. The donut in PB2 was extremely well balanced, but to my mind this is somewhat more interesting because of the differing outcomes all over the place.

I suppose he was the smartest player realising how the game was likely to pan out based initially on his reading of his geography. LP wasn't to know he had an advantage or not. Plus, doesn't he have only one far flung source of iron? Doesn't seem like much of an advantage to me. He settled aggressively quite early on in his south, creating the in-fill potential; he manipulated the other players to keep on signing NAPs. Looking at the graphs posted in the last game turn it would appear to have been clear from around 500AD that he was pulling away and that would have been the time to slow him down by not signing those NAPs which allowed him to luxuriate with minimal military.

The dog-pile seems like a suitable reaction to him 'running away with it' but as far as I recall only 1 team involved in that has a stated plan to win, through a possible culture victory. The rest just seem focused on making sure LP doesn't win - fine but ultimately boring. Given the game situation the dog-pile would make sense - the challenge being balancing one's contributions to that with the other eye on winning the game in your own way. Surely, this is the whole point of the game and not, as some appear to be getting close to, just seemingly giving up....

It is the decisions around this challenge which seem most interesting, and hopefully this game is far from over. As someone just observed, how will LP actually win? If he gets dog-piled he will surely be setback for a while at least, allowing the smarter other players to take advantage and go for their own win.

I hope all is not lost simply because of the difficult challenge of this stage of the game. To win you have to work for it, surely?

[Kuro]

Quite frankly, I think that they just were dumb signing the NAPs and that's that. They didn't analyze what LP would do with them properly and paid the appropriate price.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

The donut in PB2 was extremely well balanced

That map may have been balanced in terms of land split, but it was not balanced in terms of quality of land.

[Ellimist]

Surely if all the players realised that the map gave an advantage to LP, why did they all sign up for such long and continuous NAPs with LP allowing him to benefit from the perfect storm identified? Surely they have contributed to their own demise, if indeed their demise is the end result.

#1 mistake the players have made is signing NAPs, and LOOONG ones, with a guy who has no military.
Gaspar eventually figured it out:

As far as a NAP is concerned, can you enlighten me why we've had all these NAPs in the first place? You're never going to attack us unless you're completely out of your mind. You don't need any more land to win, and even if you did somehow take ours, you could never hold it, because plako and/or Locke would surely take advantage of that opportunity. So beyond you running through and pillaging/razing out of spite, we don't have anything to actually fear from Egypt. Most of those same facts apply to us attacking you, and even if not you've had Nationalism for a bit now, I'm sure you wouldn't have that hard a time taking a break from building all the wonders in the game to draft up a few units to repel any Viking invasion.

[novice]

So, I've been toying with the idea for some time of making a simple map viewer and/or editor for worldbuilder saves. So I decided to drum together something real quick. Behold my advanced map viewer:



(In case you can't tell, that is the PB4 map).

More usefully, I added a Balance Checker that does a breadth-first traversal from each player's starting position to determine each player's sphere of influence. The program then counts the various resources found within that sphere.



Black tiles are either peaks or islands not reachable by any player without boats.

I thought this could be fun information given the recent discussion on this map's balance.

[Jkaen]

To be fair that looks pretty similar to the land they did actually end up grabbing (except 2 pushed into 7 with the war).

Seems happy wise (and land) 7 got screwed and 6 got lucky, which reflects the outcome of the game so far

[pling]

I think this is the right assignment of number --> name, and listed in order of number of landtiles from most to least:

1 = Adlain
9 = SleepingMoogle
6 = Lord Parkin
3 = Locke & Cervantes
2 = Plako & AntiSocialMonkey
4 = Regoarrarr, Sunrise etc
0 = Mackoti & Ioan
8 = Nakor & Gaspar
5 = Luddite
7 = WarriorKnight (ex-Warlord)

[Cyneheard]

So, I took your list of data, put it on a spreadsheet, and measured the 10 players on the following categories:
Land
Coast
Ocean
# of each of the 4 kinds of resources (Strategic, Food, Happy, Health)
# of unique Strategic, Happy and Health resources (3 players don't have Aluminum (Luddite, LP, WK), and 1 doesn't have Coal (Luddite))

So, a total of 10 categories. For each category, I divided each player's result by the average value, and then multiplied it by a weight (30% Land, 20% Food Res., 8% Coast, 2% Ocean, 10% each for Unique Happy and Health, and 5% each for the other 4: # of Strategic, Happy, and Health Resources, and # of Unique Strategic resources). So, 60% of it's your population capacity (Land, Water, Food), and the other 40% is population efficiency/efficacy.

Order:
1. Adlain (122%) - There has never been ANY excuse besides poor play for Adlain's status. At or above average in everything.
2. Lord Parkin (119%) - Huge amount of Ocean and Happy resources, but above average in everything but Unique Strategic resources b/c of no Aluminum.
3. SleepingMoogle (106%)
4. Regoarrarr (105%)
5. Plako (101%) - The fact that he didn't settle his north very well is huge, as it gave someone with a lot of land to begin with even more.
6. Locke (98%)
7. Luddite (95%)
8. Mackoti (92%)
9. Nakor (83%)
10. WarriorKnight (78%) - He was in trouble in a lot of ways before the shooting started. He only had 69% of the average land.

Spreadsheet available here: Pitboss4 Land

[Kuro]

The fact Adlain has the highest Land, Food, Health, Strategic and second most Coast and is doing the worst of anyone in this game(Unless you count WarlordDR's short stint) is pretty bad.

[Maestro]

Novice, that is quite a handy little tool. I was thinking about the feasibility of something like this after reading your comments on the PBEM20 map. It seems to me that it could be very helpful for mapmakers moving forward. If you intend to keep working on it, maybe consider starting a new thread? I'm a software engineer and would definitely like to discuss it more, but I don't want to derail this thread with software design discussions.