RBP3 [Spoilers] Capac of Mali

[Swiss Pauli]

incoming email from Babylon:

from Kyan P <kttwrbpb3@googlemail.com>
to "capac.mali" <capac.mali@gmail.com>
date 7 February 2010 17:26
subject Hello there!
mailed-by googlemail.com
Signed by gmail.com
hide details 17:26 (14 hours ago)
Hey chaps,

I am delighted to say that the fearsome, and i fear, soon to be deceased, warrior Novice has discovered your borders!

This is my first time doing this so bear with me. Firstly, i would like to offer you the warmest welcome from the Babylonian empire. As i'm sure you well know the Babylonians are currently being run by myself and TT and we have Whosit as a dedicated lurker of sorts. The good thing about 3 people, as i'm sure you've discovered is that you can always come to a majority decision one way or another.

It seems our empires are neighbours. This means we could take one of two paths, aggresion or co-existence. I'm not silly, i'm aware that every single civ is going to come along declaring their peaceful intentions, even aggresive rome would at this stage. You guys have had the good fortune to start next to one of the newbie teams instead hehe. We moved our warrior in such a way so a to not appear openly hostile (i.e. honing in on a diagonal). We have no idea if your warrior is at home altho our C&D shows us you started with a worker. Your capital may be empty for all we know but we pose no threat. If Novice survives his THIRD barbarian attack in as many turns then we shall immediately retreat from your borders. We genuinely wish to become close friends and have ZERO intentions of warring with you for now at least. Who knows what the future will hold?

We fore-see the game taking on a mega-alliance feel once more, much like the other game where i might add, two of your players are excelling in my opinion. We would MUCH rather have one secure front whilst building ourselves up. We are Pericles of Babylon, i think the picks alone show our intentions. We might as well have named ourselves the 'Super Happy Fluffy Bunnies Riding On A Dove Club'. We feel we could offer some significant strength in terms of teching ability late-game and i couldn't happen to notice that HC of Mali is an extremely attractive gold boosting combination. Let's not get ahead of ourselves though, whilst email is a solid method of communication it's not my preferred style. I would MUCH rather talk in a more fluid format. If that's something your team would be comfortable with then please let me know and we'll see what can be arranged. There are no hidden agenda's here.

We do have some information so far that we feel you would find extremely interesting regarding the map and civ placement but perhaps we should save that for our next communiqué?

Yours,

Kyan
Kysit's Periwinkles


P.S. I'm aware that Broker and Whosit have some past, hmm shall i say misdemeanours, regarding the other game. I sincerely hope this won't affect your relationship with our team.

No choke, and a probable ally. I'll edit my earlier proposal.

[Swiss Pauli]

Version 2. Will send today, unless you guys have objections and/or improvements

Well met Babylon!

It seems you've braved the gauntlet of lions to reach our borders; we hope you can survive the one on the forest to your warrior's SE. For our part, we have been less bold, and our warrior guards our capital.

You are the only nation we've met so far, and we look forward to working with you. Have you met any other civs? If there's one lesson to be taken from the MP games at RB, it's that friends and allies are priceless. Our civs have complementary economic traits (PHI & FIN), and defensive UUs, so we believe there is every ground for co-operation between us. We realise you may not wish to commit your empire to an alliance so soon, but be assured that any overtures in this direction will be warmly received by Mali.

EDIT: the above text was written before we received your letter, so it's clear that we're both thinking along the same lines. We're open to chatting about the game rather than emailing, but bear in mind that our chat availability will be influenced by work commitments, and time-zone differences. Finally, we're intrigued by your nugget of map info; our conservative approach means we've seen little but lions, and our immediate surrounds. The map features resemble a team battleground, and judging by the river-flow we're in the southern hemisphere.

PS: no need to worry about 'overspill' from the Romano-Korean conflict in PB2 affecting this game.

Kind Regards

Emperor Capac of Mali

[Swiss Pauli]

I sent this just now:

Hail Team Kysit!

I happened to be logged in as the turn rolled over, and witnessed your brave warrior defeat another lion! He's down to 0.4 health, though. There's yet another lion 2S, 3W of your warrior, so we suggest that you move either N, or SE to the forest to heal.

We'll send a reply to your email later today.

Cheers

Swiss

[dsplaisted]

Sounds good, I'm fine with sending what you have.

Daniel

[Swiss Pauli]

Message sent as per post #62. Turn played this morning, and it now looks like this:

[Swiss Pauli]

Two turns have passed, and little of note has occured in our less than mighty Empire



I moved the warrior to cover the worker who has stopped his mining and will pasture the sheep next turn. I think our new warrior (due in 3) should move down to the grass hill to see whether there are any more good tiles in range of the corn. After that he can head back into Sirian whilst our original warrior heads NW to check out the land around the FPs.

We received an acknowledgement message from Babylon (who haven't met anyone else judging by their EP spending).

[dsplaisted]

Looks good, although I probably would have sent our existing Warrior (we should come up with a name for him) south, and sent the new Warrior NW when it finishes. That would leave the worker uncovered, but barb animals won't attack it anyway.

[Swiss Pauli]

I'd like our stuff after the Rolling Stones...if we name the workers after Jagger's exes then we should never be stuck for a name (until the band's notorious lawyers send Gris a cease and desist notice.)

Still worried about a worker steal by another player, hence the conservatism.

[Swiss Pauli]

Incoming email from Bablyon:

Friend Capac of Mali,

We thank you for your concern for our Warrior. Fortunately, he has survived to fight lions another day.

We have not yet met any civilizations besides yours, though we wonder how much longer that can last. It is certainly our hope that none of the more aggressive civilizations are nearby! Like you, we believe that cooperation between our two civilizations would be fruitful. We are sure that we can both benefit from technology trades in the future.

As for the map, we seem to be thinking along similar lines. You actually mentioned Team Battleground script but i'll copy and paste my post from our thread here. We consider this to be very valuable information so please consider it a token of our friendship.

"Ok, so i've clearly said time and time again that this game has too much land. It doesn't add up properly to any default script. Not to mention the strange composition. the land screams minimal water to me and there's random desert all over the place. I haven't seen that often before but it was flagging up my attention somehow. Then i remembered, i once played a hotseat game with a good friend of mine and i remember thinking back then how crap the land was and why was there desert/hills everywhere.
I present you:



Go run a random custom game and leave everything the same EXCEPT choose the map script 'team battleground'. Tell me that isn't striking any chords. No seas- just very small lakes dotted around. Random patches of desert, plenty of hills/peaks. Capital was also starting on a river. There are dry rice/wheat all over the place. This is a map deisgned for multiplayer action.
What was Sullla's brief? Design a map for multi-player action.

Now, we all now Sullla and Speaker are tight. This leads me to point number 2:

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3745

So, here's my conclusion:

*drumroll*

This is a team battleground script with a twist. I expect the central desert to be edited out and the same goes for the tundra north and south. I also would bet a penny to a pound that it's at least wrapped north to south. Possibly toroidal. The size will likely also be enhanced to fit this many players."


The land that we've found so far is fairly harsh, but hopefully there are nice spots somewhere.

Yours,

Kyan
Kysit's Periwinkles

[dsplaisted]

I did some analysis of the max population and max land area components of the score in RBP1. I was completely wrong in my conclusions there, but the point remains that the ratio between these two numbers can give you a sense of how much coast there is on the map. Here's what I wrote in my thread there:

We currently have 1 point from population and 0 from land. The score for each category is calculated by (actual / max) * FACTOR. The factor comes from GlobalDefines.xml and is 5000 for population and 2000 for land. But the important bit of information is that the game shows us what the max value is. The value of 2774 for land indicates that there are 2774 total land tiles on the map. The value for population is based on an approximation of the amount of food on the map, calculated by adding up the unimproved food production of all land tiles and all water tiles adjacent to land, which is then divided by 2 (because each population consumes 2 food).

Together, these numbers form somewhat of a fingerprint for the map. Since the average food for a land tile is pretty much constant, the ratio of the max population to the max land score is related to the ratio of coast to land. On a continents map, the max land will generally be significantly higher than the max population. On an archipelago map, the max population will probably be higher.

Reading it now it seems like my math may have been wrong, but this could be a starting point to figuring out what the map looks like.