Map Making Thread (SPOILERS!)

[chumchu]

In which I try to make a balanced natural looking map with some goodies for the players to find.

The set up of the map is 2 relatively tight continents (each with 3 players) and 6 larger islands. The 6 islands can be reached easily pre astronomy with broad lanes of coast to avoid the worst clutter of manouvering settlers and ships through chokepoints. 3 of them have unique luxuries and a natural wonder, three have rare luxuries and a city state. I hope that this will make naval matters important from early on. Later on in the game there are two polar continents that will have 4 more city states, some unique and rare luxuries and strategics as well. I wonder if I should place all oil/aluminum/uranium off the two main continents or if that skews it too much towards naval. Hopefully the map makes both the peaceful option of building a naval empire and the military option of conquering your continent equally viable. The current state of the map:



The idea behind the starts is to provide a number of start options. By the river and coastal, in the hills coastal, inland by the forest for chops or further inland with more jungle.

[picklepikkl]

I've only played a small amount of 5, so I don't have a lot of experience from a game balance/playability perspective. However:

1) The two main continents don't look that natural to me; I interpret "natural-looking" as "irregular and asymmetrical." Maybe this design reads better when you're exploring, as opposed to when you have the mapmaker's-eye view.

2) I'm confused about the starting locations; the climate banding makes it seem like whoever starts on the "narrow" part of the continent has a large advantage in filling out their region (though I gather this is less of a concern in 5?)

3) I really like the offshore island/polar setup. I support creating rewards for exploration and ways for different continents to come into conflict.

[GermanJoey]

Looks like a nice setup, IMHO. I can't really comment on balance because I've never played Civ5 MP, and haven't played SP in some years. I also don't have a very good feel how well civs interact across water in Civ5... but I would say that if this was a Civ4 Map, it would be better if there was less coast between the small islands and the big continents, as I couldn't see them interacting much pre-astro given this distance.

The artic/antartic strips look to be a bit iffy. It looks like your setup will have two players on the north part of the continent, and one in the south/middle; the guy on the south has unopposed access to his southern island strip, while the northern two have to fight with each other for it. That's a big advantage for the southern player, because that gives him safe backfill that he doesn't need to guard. It's also land that takes him away from interacting with the other players. I think that either splitting up the northern strip or perhaps even removing them entirely would be better for balance.

Then again, I'm not sure what the Civ5 meta game is... I seem to remember that BNW encouraged players to settle no more than 4-5 cities, so perhaps a lot of this land will be simply ignored.

Sorry, this probably isn't very helpful. =/

[chumchu]

Thanks for the comments and keep them coming. Having to explain my decisions sharpens my thought process. Even if you have not played as much civ V as I have you have more map-making experience in civ IV. I will link the map if anyone want a closer look.

PP
1) I have the same interpretation on natural-looking as you do. I used the symmetric shapes to as frame to mold around. We will see how much asymmetry I end up with in the end.

2) The starting positions in the narrow is for city states. There are 3 city states per continent.

3) Thank you!

GJ

Distance) I was planning to expand the continents outward to get the irregular shape discussed above, I should probably do it towards the islands to make them more important. I will definatley fill in some of the coast with smaller islands.

Arctic) The western continent has 2 players south of the equator and the eastern has 2 of them north so it should be roughly balanced. The idea with the polar continents being circumglobal was to allow some limited land battles there.

Meta) Safe backfill is much less of a thing in Civ V. Since cities increase your tech and culture costs cities take a very long time to pay themselves back in tech and culture. A rule of thumb is 100 turns normal speed. For teching, the optimal realistically is 4-6 cities. (With liberty/freedom you can get good times out of 8-10 cities by abusing specialist science but I doubt any of the players will use that unusual strategy). However, more cities are useful for military production which is decisive most of the high skill 6 player FFAs I have seen. That shifts the meta from 4-6 cities up towards 6-8 (more if you can conquer developed cities form other players or have high happiness).

[chumchu]

Tested opening the map today after working some more on it only to find the jungle tiles being base yield 3 food. After googling a bit I find that this was due to a bug in the game that only allows jungle to be placed on grassland tiles in world builder while it is always on plains in the original game. To fix it I had to manually change 2 lines of xml as no one from Firaxis has been bothered to fix that known bug for 5 years. Then I had to redo all the jungle tiles I had placed. This is so sloppy by Firaxis.

The starting areas are a bit bigger and extend a bit further into the sea so that the islands are closer. I put everyone's start 14 tiles away from their 2 neighbors, this should allow at least one decent city from each player between the two caps. This means that I had to move on player further from the equator on each continent, but it should be ok. With food caravans, plains instead of grass is not very important limit in BNW, the deciding factor is access to high yields from resources and civil service farms.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Filthy Robot's Tier ranks with possible picks and inane commentary:

Ichabod - Persia / Japan / Iroquois 1/5/6 (Hard choice )
oledavy - Assyria / Russia / Ottomans 4/2/5 (He won't pick the good one! Do research! )
yuris125 - Songhai / Carthage / India 3/5/3 (He explained why he didn't like India so he has to pick Songhai after that.)
HitAnyKey - Inca / Germany / England 1/3/1 (This is hard choice. He's not going to pick Germany and that's good enough.)
Nicolae Carpathia - Morocco / Celts / Ethiopia 4/3/1 (He's going to blow Ethiopia. I feel like I'm in Groundhog's Day...)
AdrienIer - Polynesia / Rome / France 4/3/5 (Polynesia is trash for Filthy because of only playing Pangea but I've bumped them up one because of the map. AdrienIer has explained he doesn't like them like yuris so he has to pick Rome.)

Edit: England is probably better than Inca because of map issues. England is tier 1 on Pangea and this is better than that and Inca doesn't get a hills bias. It's not a good idea to pick a civ you don't like. So the best picks, considering everything, are just Persia, Russia, Songhai, England, Ethiopia and finally Rome.

[Quagma Blast]

I halfway want to see the Ottomans going up against England and watch as oledavy realizes just how badly his naval game outclassed, but I don't think I'd have the heart for it.

[Bobchillingworth]

Having no practical experience with Civ V, I'm curious why Ethiopia is supposedly a higher tier than the Celts. Ethiopia's unit and unique bonus sound like they only matter if you're already losing (which is to say, they don't matter much at all), while the Celtic faith forests seem superior to the Steele, unless the Civ V meta demands players improve their forests early.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Having no practical experience with Civ V, I'm curious why Ethiopia is supposedly a higher tier than the Celts. Ethiopia's unit and unique bonus sound like they only matter if you're already losing (which is to say, they don't matter much at all), while the Celtic faith forests seem superior to the Steele, unless the Civ V meta demands players improve their forests early.

The Steele is just dumb. Filthy Robot has seen Ethiopia beat civs that got Uluru to first religion.

[Quagma Blast]

As you said, Ethiopia's UA and UU don't matter much. It's not so much that they only matter if you're already losing, it's quite easy for a civ with few cities to keep up in Civ V. It's that the UU is on an inconvenient place on the tech tree, and the UB strongly incentivizes settling wide. That said, if you do bother building Mehal Sefari, the important part is less the Capital bonus and more the free Drill 1, which gives you a headstart on useful promotions like Cover, Medic, or March.

Similarly, the Celtic UB is pretty inconsequential. +3 Happy is very good, but the Opera House they replace is only good for the National Wonder they enable, and Amphitheatres which are a prerequisite for it are not a priority. The UU is reasonable on offense and they're good for cleaning up barbarians, but they're not positioned well for offensive timing and they have pretty much nothing on defense.

So it comes down mostly to the Stele vs. Druidic Lore. Monuments get built everywhere, and can easily be picked up for free in a majority of your cities by going Tradition which you probably want to do anyhow. It's frequently not possible to get the +2 faith from Druidic Lore, and sometimes the nearby terrain even makes the +1 unavailable. Druidic Lore has a bit of a headstart, but the Stele is generally stronger in the long run, which means that head-to-head Celts typically get first pantheon and Ethiopia gets first religion. First pantheon is nice, but because of the general disparity in belief strengths first religion is probably stronger.