[NO PLAYERS] Lurker Thread for lurkers lurking loudly

[Catwalk]

Then I'd recommend giving each player a highly comparable complement of resources in their lands (different versions of course), with a few extra for the middle guy. I haven't done a count of the screenshot above, do you have a resource count handy? I agree that the PH plants are obvious choices that noone will/ought to move away from.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Then I'd recommend giving each player a highly comparable complement of resources in their lands (different versions of course), with a few extra for the middle guy. I haven't done a count of the screenshot above, do you have a resource count handy? I agree that the PH plants are obvious choices that noone will/ought to move away from.

See the spoilered section of the second post in this thread. It's already a lot closer than you see on most non-mirrored maps. Also, feel free to load the worldbuilder file linked in the same post for a wider view of the starts.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Swapped sheep for deer/forest.






















New link:

PB19_7.0.113-RC.CivBeyondSwordWBSave

[spacetyrantxenu]

To the players, please post in this thread any number between 0 and 100, no duplicates. This will be used for my own nefarious purposes.

Now no one can blame me for choosing who gets put in the middle. The screenshots above are named for player0 - player6. I'll put the players' numerical responses from the tech thread in order and match them to the corresponding start. So whatever complaints they have I can now pass the blame back to the players, saying they picked their own starting locations. Look, the blood rinses right off my hands!

[Catwalk]

Alright, grabbed the resource info from that spoiler. A few observations:
Happiness looks okay at first glance. Each player has 5-7 luxury types, and each has 2-3 early luxuries. Is there any particular reason for putting wine at each capital? Do you want to boost early Monarchy? Not saying this is a bad thing, just wondering.

Food resources looks quite uneven:

39 food resources (6 deer, 5 clam, 1 rice, 3 sheep, 4 sugar, 2 cow, 3 wheat, 3 corn, 2 banana, 6 fish, 2 pig, 2 crab).
34 food resources (4 crab, 3 cow, 3 rice, 4 fish, 2 corn, 4 pig, 3 deer, 3 clam, 5 sheep, 2 wheat, 1 banana).
31 food resources (5 crab, 3 deer, 4 cow, 3 corn, 2 rice, 1 clam, 4 fish, 2 pig, 3 wheat, 3 sheep, 1 whale).
33 food resources (3 clam, 5 deer, 2 corn, 5 sheep, 2 pig, 4 cow, 2 sugar, 1 crab, 2 wheat, 2 fish, 2 rice, 2 whale, 1 banana).
34 food resources (6 fish, 3 rice, 3 clam, 3 deer, 2 banana, 2 sugar, 2 pig, 3 sheep, 2 wheat, 3 cow, 1 whale, 4 crab).
24 food resources (4 rice, 5 cow, 2 banana, 2 wheat, 2 corn, 2 pig, 2 sheep, 1 deer, 1 clam, 3 fish).
27 food resources (4 sheep, 4 wheat, 4 pig, 2 crab, 1 corn, 2 fish, 2 cow, 5 deer, 2 clam, 1 rice).

I haven't gone through these in detail, but a gap going from 39 at the high end to 24 at the low end looks drastic to me. The one with 24 food resources doesn't seem to have high quality food tiles either, whereas the 39 tile guy has 6 deer and 6 fish, along with 3 wheat and 3 corn. Was this intentional, and do you feel it balances out with other advantages? Location also matters a lot, but I'm wary of this.

Strategic resources look fine, but why does one guy get 5 copper tiles? This guy and food guy both look like they get a lot of goodies. Again, placement is of course crucial to analyse this further.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I'm not trying to balance each and every tile, that would be insane. You'd have to use a script built for that kind of thing, or make a map and then mirror/scramble it. The absolute numbers doesn't have to be even, the starts all have to be fair and playable to the point that the map isn't what decides the contest. If you open the worldbuilder file you'll see that there is a wide disparity in the kinds of tiles these resources are on, from river grasslands to tundra and ice. And different players have different quantities of those base tiles. For instance, our player in the center of the map has zero tundra or ice, while players around him will all have varying quantities of those. To make up for the better base yield of a lush jungle belt of land that player may have fewer additional resources piled on top of those tiles. In the list you've provided I checked back, those quantities refer to Player0-Player6. The highest value, 39 food, is for the India start which includes these tiles:

(106 grass, 71 plains, 8 deserts, 16 tundra, 22 snow. 72 forests, 16 jungles, 1 flood plains, 0 oasis. 63 hills.)

That's a lot of low base value tied up in deserts, tundra, snow, and hills. The lowest quantity of food resources is the player in the center of the map with 24 resources:

(136 grass, 67 plains, 2 deserts, 0 tundra, 0 snow. 47 forests, 37 jungles, 0 flood plains, 0 oasis. 54 hills.)

With no tundra or snow tiles and few desert tiles, and fewer hills, that's a higher base food yield, so it needed less lushing up. Comparing the "total food potential" is a bit better:

India (northern) start: 649.5 total food potential.
Aztec (center) start: 550.0 total food potential

Those numbers seem unfair, but they're skewed by virtue of the map generator crediting many more water tiles to India than Azteca (140 to 91). A better food comparison would use "food per non-ocean tile", and those break more fairly at 1.79 against 1.86 per tile. So it isn't a large discrepancy in total food value once you average in all the food bonuses (which was the point, to make more barren lands lusher). And all of this only looks at food. The map balancing tool also factors in total hammers and commerce potential for the civ's assumed set of tiles.

When looking at a map that is completely asymmetrical like this one you're definitely going to see discrepancies when measuring any one category against another one. Making all of that seem fair at the end is what makes for a more entertaining match, I think. If one player has significantly more food than someone else, yet is balanced by the other having advantages in production and/or commerce, as long as it seems fair to the players it serves to make things more interesting, to compare methods of production. With that said, if you ignore the water tiles the range in quantity only goes from 19-23 from least to most food resources. Obviously we can't ignore water resources because the players certainly won't, but getting counts on water tiles is much harder than it is by land and I don't try to balance that using the numbers. I just put food where I think the players need it, kind of doing a visual dotmap as I go. Water resource allocation is anything but scientific, if any of this whole operation is.

Regarding luxury tiles and strategic resources, if you look at the output that excludes water tiles each player has five different kinds of happy resources available by land. The resources they can get on an island later on are relevant but I'm more interested in getting quantities set properly for the early game. By the mid game players have done a lot of their exploration and can properly value Calendar versus Monarchy (and HR). Wines at the capital is because it's a fairly low yield tile and because I wanted to put it there. I'm not saying Monarchy/HR is the One Right Choice, but if they have wines resources they probably ought to put them to use. Anyway, I wanted to give a fairly early happy resource close nearby and gold/gems speed tech too much. Then there's the bit where I swore you'd need an airship to find gold/gems at the start, too....

After that, all the extra resources are just to boost output on the map. I like settling cities next to spare iron and copper sources, it speeds up production nicely. Maybe I made a more lush map than they wanted but it's the kind of map I'd want to play on and it treats all the players basically the same, so I think it's fair enough.

[Catwalk]

I'm concerned that you place too much weight on "total output" and not enough weight on short-term output. The player with 39 food tiles may well run out of good tiles sooner than the one with 24, but he may well be set for an awesome early game which will snowball into advantages that far exceed having more plains and a bit of tundra. In a nutshell, the best tiles matter a lot more than the worst tiles. So I don't trust your metrics much, and I suspect that you're about to repeat PB17

That's all from me, I'm off to bed. Good luck with the final version of it!

[spacetyrantxenu]

I don't understand, you just got through commenting about how many food resources there were. Those are the best short term tiles you can have because the yield is higher on those compared to non special tiles. And it isn't like all the good to tiles are stacked together in one clump, I did spread them out. I'm not sure what you mean by repeating pb17, at this point I suspect you're trolling me.

Thanks for the suggestion about using the deer earlier, that was the thing I missed on the capitals.

[Catwalk]

I'm not trolling in the least. I'm arguing that how many good tiles a player has available is far more important than how many mediocre tiles he has available. Balancing extra tundra and coast with 39 food tiles compared with 24 food tiles sounds way off to me. Location also matters (the closer a resource is to the capital the more "value" it has for map balancing purposes), but I don't think it matters that much whether they're clumped together or spread out. Player A will be able to settle far more cities next to a food resource than player B. I don't think it's insane to balance the amount of food resources from territory to territory. I'm not saying they all need the same amount either, you can probably argue that 33 vs 39 is fair if the 33 guy gets other advantages. 24 vs 39 just sounds too far off.

Also, I assume that the players know and are cool with marble and stone not being on the map?

[novice]

I kind of skimmed through this thread, but I'd like to point out that factors such as where food resources are, closeness to the capital, and short term versus long term yields are indeed important balance considerations and I don't think my tool is addressing those factors very adequately in its current implementation. That's not to say that its output is worthless - just use it in conjunction with other considerations.

@Jowy: As far as I can tell the Tides of War game being set up is not by invitation only, there's a signup thread begging for attention.