Always glad to see you playing and writing, even if it's a predictable comp stomp domination. I watched some of the streaming, helpless as you ignored most of my beautiful trees.
Spain was meant to go island hopping off the mainland, yes. I'll talk more on the map in a sponsor comments thread later tonight or tomorrow.
Right, it was pretty clear that Spain was meant to settle the islands to make up for the low amount of land on the mainland. I'm not especially unhappy at that, it made for an interesting game, but I do think that this was the weakest position to play out of by a good margin. I ran this map through novice's map balancing trait out of curiosity, here's what it returned:
Total map unfairness (standard deviation in weighted land quality): 7195
Player 0
Asoka of India
71 land tiles.
(51 grass, 17 plains, 3 deserts, 0 tundra, 0 snow. 17 forests, 21 jungles, 0 flood plains, 0 oasis. 22 hills.)
6441.5 total land quality.
47.02 average land quality.
373.5 total food potential.
2.73 food per non-ocean tile.
98.0 total hammer potential.
0.72 hammers per non-ocean tile.
300.0 total commerce potential.
66 coastal tiles.
87 ocean tiles.
Player 4
Mansa_musa of Mali
115 land tiles.
(45 grass, 38 plains, 24 deserts, 0 tundra, 8 snow. 36 forests, 4 jungles, 2 flood plains, 0 oasis. 29 hills.)
8724.7 total land quality.
52.56 average land quality.
367.0 total food potential.
2.21 food per non-ocean tile.
135.0 total hammer potential.
0.81 hammers per non-ocean tile.
317.0 total commerce potential.
51 coastal tiles.
83 ocean tiles.
Spain grades out as the second-worst, below India largely because India is assumed to have the least land by far, half or less compared to everyone else. And that was with all of the islands included, mind you. Without them, Spain grades out as the weakest by a wide margin. I particularly liked the "Average Land Quality" stat here:
Which version of Novice's tool did you use? The most recent release seems to have some bugs in quality checking unless he has revised since I checked last. Version 1.08 I think is the most recent version with a known good balance checking output.
Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon
Does novices' tool include the great lighthouse? I agree on your 'dream scenario' comment, wonder how many points in land quality you'd rate it as for the Spain peninsula-and-island setup. Surprised it seemed to last so long with all 5 starts on the coast I think - 700BC for you, and 350BC (Asoka) in my game.
So we only had one other player report a Spain start (TheHumanHydra), and that game was left incomplete on Turn 61. There's not much to compare with other players for this start, which is disappointing. I wish I could have seen some more approaches to this position. Ah well.
There were only 6 Isabella players, and one-third of them playing is about expected value. I'm not sure what you want to compare to, though, you played it about as well as one possibly could.
Great report, and obviously a really well-played game!
As you probably know by now, India's start was even better than it looked: Those cows were forested, so Delhi had a 3/1/0 tile to work even before its first fworker came into play! I loved the fact that you obsoleted your UB before you had the tech needed to build it in the first place.
Like you, I was expecting a better showing from the Emperor AIs, but when I discovered just how far behind they really were, I inferred the reason immediately: For Potluck purposes, all the starts had their starting techs and units (almost; your Hunting tech was an accidental exception apparently) normalized, so in spite of their turn-to-turn bonuses, the AI lacked its most important early advantages, and took a long time to dig out of the "hole" of starting with the same stuff we did.
Really hope we get some more Spain reports.
