Tech thread

[Krill]

Comments on Greener Tectonics (small):

• 70% water (Earthlike) will put people on astro continents, not great in a 5 player game when a 3-1-1 split happens. It also puts players 6 tiles apart. I'd say this is an unplayable random map.
  
  
• 60% water is essentially the same problem, but often gives pangaea. The 6 tile starting distance is still present. I'd also say that this not suitable for our purposes.
  
  
• Pangaea gives us a PB75 style map. I'd say this is a legit option. Normal gives us a map that can have quite a bit of plains and desert, wet basically turns desert to plains. IMO Normal aridity is absolutely fine, it's never looked quite as bad as PB71, but it's definitely bad compared to RB standards and worse than PB75 in terms of numbes of grasslands. Start distances can be as close as 10 tiles though. PLains cow and a billion forests starts happen quite frequently as well. It's playable but might not be what people want. I'd also suggest modding out Pyramids (changing it to be buildable only in ancient era starts) would likely be better for the game.
  
  
• Lakes maps look either awesome, with no real terrain aridity prooblems (players get more than 10 grasslands, unlike some starts on Pangaea) with solid start distances that mean we don't all go HBR first to HA rush each other, or trash. Usually look pretty sound though. There can be some really funky ones, but by funky I mean unusal ie rare. Occasionally there is an unfair "land split" but not insurmountable: fine for a "Play the hand you're dealt" style approach to a game. Resources don't seem to be a problem, not abundant but better than PB71 on every map I rolled.
  
  Note though that the map can be anywhere between 30% to 70% land. I keep on getting flashbacks to PB1 even though that was handcrafted
  
  
• Islands - just no, looking at maybe 30 tiles per player.
  
  
• Mediteranean - No
  
  
• Randomized Actual Earth + RAE (Old world start) - maybe if we wanted to play on standard? Not exactly a "random map" though.

TBH I'd say go with Lakes, but also mod out Pyramids. Small map should be fine, but if you guys want a game that is slightly less of a brawl (given the histories of PB71 and PB76) I would suggest that we could push the size to standard given it's a classical start, the cities get spaced wide, and there are parts of the maps usually far away from anyone so there is stuff to fight over later in the game.

I also strongly suggest that everyone rolls a few maps to know what we're all getting into.

[Thoth]

Lakes sounds like the best bet of those options. I wouldn't mind doing an Earth map game (either randomized or with tweaked resources for balance) at some point but not for this game.

I've been messing about with Totestra in SP and noted two things:

1) all the religions give a missionary so no need to delete.
2) Totestra gives a lot of land for the map size and with the "full of resources" option enabled it gives pretty good terrain and resources. We have the option to all start in the Old World, anywhere, or on the largest landmass. AFAICT the landmass is random and Pangaea is possible (there is an option to break pangaea but I'm fine with navy being secondary/non-existent after PB 76)



As far as settings go: No choice in leader or civ is ok. No artillery for the barbs thanks. Barb horchers are going to be enough fun to deal with as it is. Especially if we go for a map with lots of land.

[Krill]

There's one caveat to true random leaders - someone might roll Sid of Firaxis. This isn't really a problem though because if we want to we can roll the leader/civs manually and set them in the PB server before starting so it doesn't affect the random map.

Thoth, I'll have a look at totestra, I haven't done that in a while.

Edit: Totestra is interesting because it regularly gives half the players no food in the capital starting area. I'm not sure how I feel about that on a random map.

[Thoth]

There's one caveat to true random leaders - someone might roll Sid of Firaxis. This isn't really a problem though because if we want to we can roll the leader/civs manually and set them in the PB server before starting so it doesn't affect the random map.

I don't think we want either Sid or Firaxis in this one.  

Thoth, I'll have a look at totestra, I haven't done that in a while.

Edit: Totestra is interesting because it regularly gives half the players no food in the capital starting area. I'm not sure how I feel about that on a random map.

The lack of food would be a problem but from what I've seen, there is food within a turn's movement from the start location.   Which I'm fine with given that there is a very low/no opportunity cost for a non-Spiritual leader to move 1t due to the anarchy turn (if revolting on t0).

[Krill]

Some of the maps I just rolled require three turns of movement to reach food. Its not a huge issue except every player except player 1 starts with units stacked so don't know where to explore to settle for food hence there's a lot of luck involved.

There is a solution, play advanced start but house rule we only buy FoW visibility.

[Thoth]

I like the advanced start with FoW buying idea.

[Tarkeel]

[*] Lakes maps look either awesome, with no real terrain aridity prooblems (players get more than 10 grasslands, unlike some starts on Pangaea) with solid start distances that mean we don't all go HBR first to HA rush each other, or trash. Usually look pretty sound though. There can be some really funky ones, but by funky I mean unusal ie rare. Occasionally there is an unfair "land split" but not insurmountable: fine for a "Play the hand you're dealt" style approach to a game. Resources don't seem to be a problem, not abundant but better than PB71 on every map I rolled.

I'm happy to roll a lake map and check that it's not one of the weird ones.

[pindicator]

I like the advanced start with  FoW buying idea.

I'm on board. I like the idea of increased visibility to counter potentially wildly different starts

[Krill]

I'm going to have a quick look tonight at advanced starts, mainly because I'm interested if there is a way to do about the first 40 turns worth of development with a decent house rule setup. Ie each player must buy 2 settlers, 1 worker, 1 scout, 300 beakers worth of tech etc. I think it will make some of the mapscripts that don't do start balancing usable, but at tue cost of significant headaches on t0 for optimisation.

[Krill]

Well, this is kinda straightforward.

Advanced start will give us a decent visual of the starting area, essentially a BFC 9 tiles wide. Plenty for what we need. Then we only need to change the starting points to something like 300 to house rule players need to place two cities or a city and a settler, an archer, worker and scout.

The starting points take into account the trait bonuses (so EXP workers cost fewer points, PRO granaries cost 30 not 60 points). So if we want to just play it straight, we can do that with minimal house rules and any "spare points" get converted to gold at the end (so spend them!) Or we could kick in a few extra points if people wanted.

Now, we can play this is a classical era game (so we all start with the Classical era techs), but there is scope to play a fast ancient style start, the caveat being techs are problematic. I state this purely because it is probably worth exploring in a game at some point but I don't know what you guys want to do.

Personally, I think that Advanced start can work fine for what we need, but we probably do want to stick to the lower number of points (anywhere between 300-400. Settler*2, worker, archer, scout is 300 on the dot. With this, I think either Greener-Tectonics or Totestra can work.