Mapmaking for Dummies [Mapmaking Thread] [Yes there are spoilers] [lurkers only]

[mackoti]

cairo has right, what pin is doing is very bad.I understand he has eneiught beter step down and let someone to at least try defend.

[chumchu]

As the game is now over I have looked through this thread. What I want to say is that I really liked the concept of the map. Either fighting for a bigger share of the rings or peacefully going for the islands. To my mind the idea was good but the dimensions were off and that is something hard to know before you play it.

If you had put the players roughly 4 tiles more distant that would have made rushes harder and less necessary as both get a border city with the other and the distance to cover is longer. (I also think that Zulus should have been banned with such close starts).

That would have made the donuts bigger and left less for the island which would have been a good thing. As it was now I only really had a border with 2 players and still had 35 cities. I think 20 cities is more reasonable. 35 makes an invasion very daunting as after the initial surprise you need to fight an opponent for ages to conquer them fully. Also, had we been closer to the player on the other donut diplo would have been more interesting. It would for instance have been easier to rein in early runaways, I failed spectacularly with that due to a brain fart getting me thrashed by North Korea just as I was going to build up for my attack on Cairo. Even with that he could not conquer me and I was left as a weaker neighbor to Cairo. As it was now OT4E and Cairo had so much land and so little border that it was very hard for the other players to have a chance to build up while they were fighting.

I also appreciated the funky handcrafted terrain. A well balanced start, lot of nice puzzles about settling and fun to explore "islands". I had a lot of fun this game.

Good work! But you would probably have needed someone to look over the map thoroughly to rein in your creativity early in the design.