[SPOILERS] PB20 Lurker Thread of Perfect Hindsight

[Commodore]

But you like RB Mod, right? What's so different about this one? RB Mod made some pretty profound changes to Aggressive and Protective too, it just didn't rename them.

Krill covered it fairly well; RBmod changes gameplay but Aggressive and Protective are both just buffed, not fundamentally altered. And to be honest I hate the drill change for Protective there too.

Mackoti with Charlemange of Germany will rock the world, by the way. Which actually segues a bit; the intense stratification of skill level in this game means I'm not sure how much will be proved by final outcomes; I guess insofar as testing this mod goes we're just going to be looking at eleven different starts from variable skill levels?

[Krill]

Starts, already randomized:

Douglas Quaid

Gavagai

Gawdzak

GermanJoJo

Haram

HitAnyKey

Juro/wetbandit

mackoti

Parkin

Seven

Slowwcheetah

[Krill]

I'll never understand how people can beat deity and still not understand how to whip effectively.

[Ichabod]

A lot of new players. Nice!

[Krill]

OK, I've emailed the WBS to Commodore and Plako for a once over.

Basic aim was to make a map with the number of tiles in the region of 170 per player. As it is, I uncovered a small bug with novices tool that means it doesn't give accurate number of tiles per player if the starting units are not stacked. However, before I preplaced the scouts, the tiles varied between 192 and 158 per player; I originally was using a 100*40 map, but it gave way too many tiles to some players and basically nothing to others (sometimes as much as 400 to one player and less than 50 to another on the same map). So I had to drop the tile count slightly and then add in a bunch of tiles to get something that needed very little tweaking.

I have moved 3 settlers, and I have basically built one of yjr starts by hand: I would enjoy reading the guess about which start was hand built, if only to understand why people think that. However, there were certain rules that I decided prior to making this map. There were that every player would get a plains hill start, and a 3 hammer tile to work: I basically do not want any players moving given the potentially tight starts, so I must give them good starts. The other was that I would not change the type of food resources any player received: If you got 2 seafood, I may change them from 2 clams to 2 fish, but never to grains or animals, for example. I have changed the starting resources to try and make the amount of food more even, but not paid that close attention that the starts are identical. I also decided that every start got minimum of 5 forests but no upper cap and no additional balancing on these numbers.

Beyond that, I wanted a river at the starts because frankly most of the starts had them so didn't feel like screwing people over. The final point was that every capital should be coastal: only half of the starting positions were coastal, but the other half were like 2 tiles away so I just added a bit of coast here and there.

I will leave one final bit of trivia. I generated over 30 maps and ran them through novices tool from last night until this morning, prior to choosing this specific map. I chose this map because there is 1 body of water that basically wraps around the map almost 3 tines but doesn't actually wrap into itself: it really is one frigging huge lake. I hoped that every start would be on that body of water but 4 starts are not: they are on another single body of water that has about 15 places that it can be connected to the main lake. There are lots of places where the lake narrows to a single tile wide passage of water that separates other segments of the landmass, but there are also islands, from single tiles to one large enough to fit 5 cities on. The water on this map is just gorgeous to look at.

[Commodore]

Oh, that bug! I guess I should have mentioned it...in PB18 after I placed all the lurker civ great spies it gave something like 70% of the land to India...

...unfairness, 19,000...

[Krill]

TBH a couple of the base maps I generated were over 22,000 unfairness.

[TheHumanHydra]

I chose this map because there is 1 body of water that basically wraps around the map almost 3 tines but doesn't actually wrap into itself: it really is one frigging huge lake.

This sounds cool.

[WilliamLP]

I definitely want Egypt, because my MacGyver plan is to get up an Obelisk in the capital right as it grows to pop 5 and run a pair of priests starting on turn 25 or so. After Mysticism, I'm going to grab AH, Pottery, and Writing so I can swap the Priests to Scientists.

If no one has founded Buddhism when that GP appears, I can burn the GP to pop it,

Wait, wut?

[Twinkletoes89]

Seriously? That must be a troll post...