PBEM25 Mapmaking and Lurking

[Krill]

Depends how much work you want to do: I'd bet £50 easily that if you generated 10 pangaeas at least two of them would be much better than those variations on a theme. Personally I think Pangaea is better than that ring of shit (I can also wheel out Commodore if I need another opinion to back me up).

Ref, I think this script works better at large and huge sizes from what I recall, it is trying to generate 7 separate seas, and it just doesn't have the space to do it on small. It basically makes a few ponds. They'd be achieve what they want with Primordial though. I wonder if that needs to be floated (or is TAD scarred from the idea of floating a settler to an island?)

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I'll roll up some Pangaea maps tomorrow morning, hopefully can ahve one edited by next weekend.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Note that I still have no idea how to place or test player starts & city-states.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Pangaea candidates. Only rolled 5 for this one in an effort to get this show on the road. Overall shapes:

Pangaea 1:

A generic blobby shape with a long mountain chain east-west dividing the continent into clear northern and southern halves. The north is considerably roomier and more open than the south.

Pangaea 2:

A strong candidate. Big central area with a handful of peninsulas branching off. Players could be positioned in a rough ring, with everyone having decent land prospects and roughly equal neighbors. Not perfect but nothing is!

Pangaea 3:

A very weird snaky continent that seems like it'd be tough to balance. 

Pangaea 4:

What the fuck, Civ VI. This one seems like an obvious miss to me. 

Pangaea 5:

Another strong candidate. Hard to get 5 areas without isolating one player in the east, though. I really like the landmass otherwise. This one or Candidate 2 get my vote.

I will probably balance on map 2, although 5 is a bit more interesting. If anyone wants to make the case for any map, I'm listening.

[Krill]

5 is interesting but it would be impossible to invade the Eastern player if they played their cards right. 2 is sound.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Okay, last step. Place and balance starts on the map. 

We'll start by slicing the map as evenly as I can into 5 equal areas of influence, producing something approximately like this:



It's crude, but I think it seems mostly fair? Start 1 in the Northeast has more tundra and ocean than others, but also has a fairly large and roomy peninsula to compensate. 

Start 2, in the North-center, has a lot of land area but also the most neighbors, and a fair amount of tundra. They'll have easier access to more city-states to hopefully compensate a bit, but I DO think this is the most challenging start. Not a lot I can do here unless I add a bay or a mountain range to section them off, and that's more mapmaker interference than I'd like. 

Start 3, in the Northwest, has a bit of ocean in its "zone" but also has a smaller nearby peninsula to compensate. 

Start 4, in the Southwest, has the most raw land area of any start, but also the most desert and tundra. 

Start 5, in the Southeast, has a large bay in it but also its own little peninsula. 

Are they perfectly balanced? No, probably not. But with an assymetric map nothing will be, and I don't think anyone is screwed from the start here. Everyone has opportunities and a bit of space for expansion, without any singular start being wildly better or worse than the others (except maybe Start 2, due to all the neighbors). 

I'll next place the starts in the center of the zones, like so:


Not perfectly centered, but everyone is near fresh water. I did edge starts 3 & 5 closer to start 4 than to start 2, in a small effort to balance things out a tiny bit. 

Next, we'll place city-states. One between each zone, and one within each zone, if possible. Does anyone know how I can dictate which city-states MAY spawn? I can assign specific ones or random ones, but if I assign specific ones then that's a balancing nightmare and if I assign random then we'll get spawns like Zanzibar and Nan Madol, which have been discouraged.

Anyway, attempting to place city-states equidistant between players, and ensuring that no areas of the map are devoid of city-states nor too crowded, we get a map something like this:

 
What revisions should I make here? Some city-states are remote, some players have city-states virtually guaranteed, others have none guaranteed but are near several, they're in neither especially juicy nor especially worthless places. Whether they get eaten or not should depend on suzerain bonuses and the player's strategic needs, with no obvious right answer just from the map alone, I hope. 

Anyway, that's a rough draft of the map layout. I'll wait for feedback, adjust it, and then finally balance starts - essentially ensuring everyone had equal access to strategics and one or two good tiles at their spawn.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Will place & balance starts this afternoon. 

So far:
Archduke - Gilgamesh?
Yuris - Steam Victoria
Woden - Nader Shah
Pindicator - Kanuni Suleiman 
greenline - reroll.

RNG 1-5 spat back a 4 for greenline's re-roll, so he gets:

Amanitore
John Curtin
Wilhemina

[Jabah]

I would try to have starting position on a river. Missing a river for your capital might be some handicap (for watermill euraka)

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Yep. Every start position has:
1)A nearby river, if not directly ON the capital then within a turn or two move.
2)Horses & iron within 3 rings, coal & niter within the local neighborhood, oil within the "sphere of influence" pictured above.
3)Access to 4 city-states, with the exception of Start 1 (northeast corner start).
4)A plains hill deer & a marsh rice, so everyone has at least two good tiles to work to get things off the ground. I didn't mess with any tiles beyond that, because that level of balance is too much map manipulation involving dozens or hundreds of tiles if I did it at every start, and makes things too mirrored. Those extra tiles mostly matter at size 3 and beyond anyway, and by that time people are settling second cities so it shouldn't make as much of a difference as the players' overall strategy, which is what I'm going for.

I didn't balance natural wonder spawns. Galapagos is off the west coast and the Bermuda Triangle is buried in the eastern ocean, but I haven't found the other two yet (y'all can check the screenshots for Pangaea-2 above to see if you can spot 'em).

[Krill]

Part of me thinks that is still too much balancing.