[No Players] Lurker thread, to lurk and chirp

[Krill]

It's stuff like Sumeria, the team in the top left of the map, have desert for most of their core. And Zulu are on their own island (which, TBH, is something I find quite funny but still). Yeah, TBH, carve out some of the jungle from I think it's Russia (middle left) so they can expand north, turn the Sumerian core into something less like a desolate hellhole that reminds me of my PB5 start, and put city ruins on the food that is adjacent to jungle tiles so jungle doesn't grow onto them and wreck things IMO.

[Bobchillingworth]

I looked at the map, played around for a bit on it against some AI. I... am not convined it is particularly well-balanced :P As Krill pointed out, Mack has an amazing start and exactly one neighbor, England (who he should be able to easily out-tech and overrun). The Vikings have their own, enormous island for some reason. A huge chunk of Sumeria's land is terrible. Carthage is oddly cramped compared with most everyone else and has to expand through jungle. Whoever is west of England (Egypt, I think?) has an insane amount of land they can expand into- at which point they'll also only have one neighor (England, again). Gavangai def. seems completely screwed on this map.

[The Black Sword]

Ok, regarding mack's land; I didn't want to remove nice natural formations like the gold deposits, that is too strong a second city though, I think I'll just move most of the food out of the area. I originally thought that civ had too little land and reclaimed some from the tundra and made the island access a bit easier. I would expect the player south of him to get the peninsula with a second access point to the island though. I'll try reducing the resource density in the land just north of that peninsula, to increase the chances of that and remove the mountain island to make access to the island harder. Do you think I need to move the tundra back up too?

I was considering giving a third access point from Gawdzak's island, but I'm afraid he has too much land already, with little competition.

has all strat resources and 2 metal happy,

Everybody should have all strat resources and 2 early happy.

Sumeria: These had the most land in the game, so I was pretty happy to leave desert in there. Still, I have buffed a lot of the others since. I want to leave the south west desert, to give the team south of them better chances of holding the cape but I can buff the other parts.

Russia(actually Comm's Dutch): Yeah, decreasing some of the jungle would be good, I'm a little worried that these guys have a difficult position.

The Vikings have their own, enormous island for some reason. A huge chunk of Sumeria's land is terrible. Carthage is oddly cramped compared with most everyone else and has to expand through jungle.

Not sure if you see the same Carthage I do, if they get all the way up to the jungle they'd be pretty happy IMO. I expect them to take part of that Viking island.

West of England: The jungle should slow their expansion south, allowing the southern team to claim much of the south of that continent for a second neighbour, and 2 more by sea.

Gavagai's civ is the one I've been most worried, he's just got too much competition. I think I'll increase the size of the island to his SW, that's the only place that could really be backfill for him.

Thanks for all the feedback.

[Krill]

The problem with Carthage is that you are assuming they will colonise that land. They should do, but will they? Basically, if you guess wrong then that's going to have a huge impact on the game.

RE: happy, 2 pre-Calendar happy per civ is fine, and Whales count as happy, however it does make expansion much less of an issue.

Ultimately I don't think this is much better or worse than PB5 excepting those few problems, but then a lot of people were not particular happy with that level of balance.

[The Black Sword]

New file attached with the above changes made. I also added a little extra island for Carthage to give them a bit more land and took away a stray Ivory that I missed.

Honestly, I'm afraid the changes to Mack's land have gone too far, and I'm very wary of making the land too weak just because it's Mack playing it. Gavagai needs a city 5 tiles from his capital to seal off that peninsula, Mack needs one ten tiles away. Then the access to the island from the peninsula is now a lot nicer than from the icecaps.

I'm afraid PB5 was before my time so I'm not too familiar with it, I thought someone was completely lacking in happy resources though?

[Krill]

...It would have been better to take away the gold resources than the food from mack...

[The Black Sword]

I agree that's better balanced but I don't want to remove the character of the map by removing natural formations like the gold or the gems by Commodore that it's thrown up. And I believe it should be possible to balance the map despite that.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Do the players realize how vast this map is? Interaction between will be low for quite some time so this will be a buildfest, mostly.














Brief comments in the pics:

• orphaned fish at Mack's start assuming SIP. Either delete or mvoe the fish, that's just frustrating/unfun to a player.
  

I don't have time for much right now except for this: I'm not sure what the players are looking for, precisely, but this doesn't look like enough player interaction to be a fun game to me. I'd try to trim down the distance between continents, allow for fewer non-flanking starts, add more avenues for player interaction. The map is too big to be able to do much with this number of players. If this were a toroid that problem would be largely solved. Zulu all alone and not having to do more than build a couple of Impis to wage war against the barbs is going to be a problem for balance, but even if they do well it won't be much of a contest because you can sandbox or SP to play so much time alone.

In principle, I think players should have more or less the same access to the same quality and quantity of land and similar access to a similar number of neighbors. This seems to be missing here. I see this map turning into whichever game Serdoa/NH played where there wasn't all that much interaction until one war and they were already far ahead due to player skill. I don't think the player skill gap is all that great (aside from mack) as in this other game (PB12 maybe? I can't recall) but this will be decided by city management IMO before anyone has to go to war.

I could be wrong, but I think the map needs more balance for this to be a good game.

[Gaspar]

This is one of those map rolls where Commodore proposed the game because he was feeling nostalgic and the rest of the players just wanted a game and went along with whatever. You might be following the letter of the instruction but nobody's going to be having fun in 100t when they realize what they've got.

I mean that's fine - we did the exact same thing in 19 and despite the fact that the map is a joke for 7 players I get the impression at least 4 of us had a decent time but I also spent 90% of my posts yelling at Xenu. So you have to decide how much you're willing to get screamed at, TBS.

[Bobchillingworth]

I agree 100% with Boldly's post. In my SP run, Carthage ended up losing a ton of land to England and Korea, but with humans it's likely Korea which will be completely shafted. I hadn't realized how indefensible or jungle-choked the Dutch land is either.



I don't know, maybe the players will all be cool with this. It certainly was a fun map to play SP on, at least until I realized it would take a lifetime to conquer everyone. I think you're going to get a ton of bitching tho, and a lot of it might be justified.