PLAYERS GET LOST!
:waratt:
As promised, here's the map overview, with the correct civs edited in to my copy of the world builder file.
![[Image: pbem2.jpg]](http://www.dos486.com/civ4/pbem2.jpg)
I had rolled about 10 archipelago maps, until this one came up that had most of the islands connected by coastal contact. Coastal contact doesn't link in a complete circle, there's a gap between Paris and Constantinople, but it's bridgeable by culture expansions.
The key point is that every civ shares an island with one neighbor. The map originally rolled two pairs of roommates, with Byzantium and Native America on their own islands. The Native America start was crazy cramped, that island holds three cities - and several of his "Balanced" resources were actually on neighboring islands. I created a new starting position where you see it, adding food and luxuries and forest and all the balanced resources, and raised land at those four squares of desert to connect it to Byzantium's start.
I'm really curious to see how this develops. Will any pairs of civs be able to cooperate and work together, or is everybody going to plunge the dagger at the first opportunity? There should be enough room on each island for peaceful coexistence (actually I didn't realize until now how close the Persia and Japan starts are, thought they were farther apart.)
There's also quite a lot of goodies on most of the islands, and every civ has a couple nearby to explore and settle. Byzantium and Native America can't quite reach theirs right away but culture expansion will do the trick (100 from Constantinople, and 10 at the natural city site east of Cahokia.) Native America's start is still a bit cramped, but he'll have exclusive access to the island south of it until Astronomy (or till somebody conquers their way to a culture bridge.)
I took a minimal pass at balancing start positions. Every capital has three food resources. America's food is two half-resources (sugars) and two normal ones, which I left unchanged. But that's all I did, I didn't adjust fresh water or any surrounding resources. I did not realize that Byzantium could move one square to get a fourth food resource.
There is no ivory on any of the homelands. There are three on the sprawling island north of Kyoto, so that's up for grabs between four civs. This happened naturally, I didn't change it.
