PBEM 18 Map thread

[xenin]

Alright, I decided to ignore Bob's instructions and make a zero resource ice ball! I think it will be hilarious watching the players struggle to muster the enthusiasm to press enter for the next 2.5 years

[xenin]

Ahem. The instructions I'm working from:

The map requested is one which has been randomly rolled and very minimally edited, with the only changes made in the interest of playability and to the starting units. Players will start with two settlers each (with the starting settler promotions), two archers, and two scouts. The map itself should be Large sized (or Huge if using a small script), with plenty of room to explore & for barbs to found cities in, and with lots of space between players. The players should start on a pangaea, but some side islands / a small continent or two would be appreciate as well.

I rolled a bunch of fractals but wasn't really liking anything I was getting. In particular the chance of islands being useful I thought was fairly small, as you need to get lucky and get a barb city to spawn right on the ocean in a useful place etc. Admittedly barb city placement is going to play a huge part in the outcome of this game, but there's no need to make it even worse. So my next idea was to roll a highlands with large lakes. I'm reasonably pleased with the basic layout of the terrain, and I think it still qualifies as varied terrain that's interesting to explore. I've done pretty minimal editing - essentially I tried to make the starts playable, and generally added some resources to the map to try and encourage the barbs to make some viable cities. Hopefully a lush map will do a bit to offset the tech costs that come from the large, deity settings.

Anyway I knocked out this first draft fairly quickly, and it's the first map I've done for a PBEM so I'd appreciate any feedback, particularly on the starting areas - if you think someone has the chance to scout and settle something super imbalanced or if they have no way to get a decent second city etc.

I'm also considering changing most of the snow/tundra in the north to sea. I think the map is big enough without it and as far as I can see currently it just spawns lots of bears that don't move out as they're too far away. For now I've left all the goblin archers stacking up in forts; for my sanity's sake I think going through and deleting them will be the last thing I do before I send the map.

[Mist]

Do you want them to settle in place, wander a little bit or wander a lot before settling down?

[xenin]

I'm assuming that that their first city will go within a couple of tiles of the starting point, but I'm not really sure what they're going to do with the spare settler. For the non-creative civs it's actually really hard to pop borders on the second city early on, so I suspect they won't want to march off too far into the wilds. Ideally I'd like to not railroad them into settling here and here, and I tried to make all the obvious moves lead to an at least ok second city site, but I'm not sure how much tolerance they'll have for wandering.

[Mist]

Well, at the moment immediate starting areas rank as follows

Sidar - floodplains, river oasis, marble, pigs, clam and copper for a monster capital on turn 0 ( and that's all Sidar need, see Iskender and ffhV ). Few rather average spots for second city.

Small gap, would be larger if not for elven isolation.

Elves - Good city settled in place, good city by the floodplains

Huge gap

Vampires - Have to travel to wheat/wine to settle a decent capital, no good prospect for city number two

Vast pit of emptiness

Hippus - hardly any food, nowhere decent to move, no good city spots.

*****

I would really, really hate to play Hippus with this start.

If you don't want the players to travel far, and don't want to give them a lot of vision of the neighborhood, move both hippus and vampires somewhere with more food.

[xenin]

Thanks for the comments, Mist. I think I'll separate the Sidar resources a bit so they can't stack them all in the capital, increase vamp food at capital and increase hippus second city sites. But I think in general you are evaluating the starts in the context of a normal game rather than one with no settlers. In particular I don't think the hippus SIP (fresh water rice, grass sheep, river plains incense, unrevealed copper) is nearly as bad as you make out, because food is going to be worth a lot less than normal here - you can't turn it into settlers, you aren't going to need nearly as many workers, and the limited cities means happy cap will be relatively low. In fact I suspect a decent portion of the game will involve people sitting at their happy cap with avoid growth turned on, so as a consequence commerce is worth more than normal and food is worth less. I'd welcome arguments against this as I haven't actually played out a full no settler game, but that was my rationale in leaving the capitals that spawned with higher commerce stuck with less food.

[xenin]

Side note: on the vision of the starting area, do you think revealing, say a 10x10 square around the start is a good thing to help people decide to settle or bad for making early exploration meaningless etc?

[Mist]

Food with conquest = hammers. Conquest comes at education. High food site = much bigger army than low food site.

[xenin]

Blah. Shows how familiar I am with the eitb changes. Right, I'll probably get another draft done tonight.

[xenin]

Changes:

General: Given everyone vision in a square around them + whatever vision they can get past forests/hills from the super settlers. I want to give everyone at least 3 viable city sites on turn 1 so there's some decision making to do, and this will hopefully also minimize the chance of someone moving into the fog and screwing themselves.

Moved peoples' copper so they are less likely to be stranded with it miles out of range.

If I want to just cut the top of the map off instead of making it ocean, is it enough to simply edit the grid height setting in the wb file or will this break something like the total tile count not agreeing or whatever?

Elves: deer moved slightly so that likely capital gets it as a strategic resource in a couple of border pops rather than a workable tile.

Sidar: spread out resources so they can't stack everything to make one supercity.

Vamps: Moved starting location slightly so they have more choice. More food at the N/NW site. South site slightly better.

Hippus: Changed rice to a corn. Added viable sites to NW and NE.