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RefSteel

Here goes:

Code:
MR  = Map Reference

AS = Actual Start

x = New x coordinate

y = New y coordinate

(x and y are to enter in the blue columns in the spreadsheet you posted)

MR    AS    x     y

E      G     43     29

F      P     112   51

G      X     100   71

H      F     20     46

J       Y     62    48

O      M     29    23

Q      V     29    35

R      N      43    17

S      J      127   16

T      H     100   58

V      O     127   28

W     I      112   63

Y      U     112   33

Cornflakes

Log of edits in the attached base file ...

Incorporated starts D and L at locations B and C, respectively.
Added tiles at D and L to get those starts 5 tiles off of the coast
Extended the rivers at D and L to the coast. I was surprised that it actually wasn't difficult to revers the flow direction on the river.
Deleted tiles to the west of K ... I ended up adding a couple back just north of H

The updated base file is attached along with the updated script file ... since D and L are already incorporated I commented out those lines. I have not yet swapped any starts from the previous arrangement.

Updated files attached, and here is the updated balance table:

Filename: 18.JPG Size: 150.67 KB January 30th, 2018, 21:44

Sinking 30-40 tiles had no affect on the land area of K frown

Still an outlier on the high end. Therefore I have attached two files. One is the file where I sunk the coast in addition to the changes to starts D & L (locations A & B). The other attachment includes the changes to starts D & L but does not include sinking the coast

RefSteel · January 30th, 2018, 23:01

(January 30th, 2018, 21:46)Cornflakes Wrote: Sinking 30-40 tiles had no affect on the land area of K

Wow. I'll have to look more closely tonight and see if I can identify what's actually causing this, but that's definitely a surprising result. So far the only thing that's brought K even slightly into check has been moving it too close to O for comfort. I'm going to look at shifting some food tiles around in that area though; I suspect that one of the problems is that start H can't settle useful cities toward K because of the way the food is distributed. Not the only problem, but fixing this might help.

So, let's see. If no one else gets there before me, my plan for tonight's work on the map is this:

1) Place all the remaining starts according to the list I posted above. Make sure there are no duplicates and that the game still loads correctly.
2) Try redistributing the food near K, especially between K and H, then ask MapCad to balance-check the result. I'll then load and a save from before making these changes while the balance checker is working in the background. If the results look good, they should be easy to restore.
3) Finish the rivers, and add necessary corner tiles, coastward horses, and additional land where needed to establish a 5-tile land area before the sea, moving roughly west to east through the starts. When I hit a mangrove lake start, add that back in too.
4) I don't know if I can finish all 23 remaining starts tonight, but if I do, I'll start looking at copper locations, maybe turning forward copper into iron and adding more back-line copper (and/or horses) too.
5) I'll hopefully at least get to review the balance-check for the modified version of K, and if I get far enough with the starts, I'll also ask Mapcad to run a new balance check following the changes.

RefSteel

I made the final leader/civ rolls on random.org, leaving us with the following:

Updated once again from...

(January 20th, 2018, 09:11)Mardoc Wrote: Current state (will re-edit as I notice more responses)

...way, way above:

Third and final round:

Decision made:
AdrienIer
OT4E + chumchu (by default)
Old Harry + Fintourist + shallow_thought + TheHumanHydra

Still deciding:
Nobody!

First, second, and third round options for players still on the board (to double-check and make sure I didn't repeat anything)

Chosen civs:

Chosen Leaders:

Unrolled or Unwanted:

Krill · January 31st, 2018, 07:31

Well OT4E, you will not be getting an agri civ, but you will have Mining.

JR4 · January 31st, 2018, 08:11

Ouch, that was bad luck for FinHarry. No Spi for you this time. Adrien actually got a grand total of 4 Spi leaders, rejecting them all. I think that FinHarry would have been very happy with any of Adrien`s leaders except Alexander.

RefSteel

Yeah, the problem with random rolls is that they're so random - and in a situation like this one, the variance is very high. (Also, nobody ever rolled India, Dutch, or Portugal. There may be some others too, but those three jumped out at me.) [EDIT: Also, I'm pretty sure Wang Kon is at fault here: FinHarry rejected him and he went into full RNG troll mode.]

On the map: Rolling, checking (turned out I didn't have to reroll; there were again no duplicates) and distributing the starts took longer than I hoped, but I still got through starts A through J, O, and part of K.

(Working on start K gave me a much better idea of why it's an outlier. Messing with its food a bit seemed to help - even just moving about three food tiles closer to H - got it down to 212 land tiles without making anything else worse, and there's more I can do along those lines now that I think I understand its problem.)

I worked on the version of the map with the "sink" land still intact, but we might have to end up sinking it again just to give K coastal access later; in the meantime, the is2 script I used is attached, along with the WBSave with my latest work.

Erwin

I checked your latest version with novice's tool. Unfortunately I think the tool doesn't work optimally with astro islands and that's why I ran novice's tool without islands and coast, which means that my opinions might be somewhat flawed and everything that I say should be questioned.

Starts that I think could be nerfed much:
K (240 usable mainland tiles, i.e. not tundra, snow or desert)
Y (186 usable mainland tiles and only 2 neighbours)

Starts that I think could be nerfed somewhat:
E (203 usable mainland tiles, though 76 tiles jungle)
R (163 usable mainland tiles)
G (175 usable mainland tiles)
P (190 usable mainland tiles)
N (186 usable mainland tiles)

Starts that I think should be improved:
V (117 usable mainland tiles)
X (121 usable mainland tiles)
O (119 usable mainland tiles)
B (129 usable mainland tiles)

I'd make the island to the north of start H much bigger southwards and the island to the south of start Q bigger northwards so that those two players have a better access to islands. Currently the islands are quite far away from them and I think that makes those starts a bit too bad. They have 5 neighbours as well, which I think can be a bit unbalancing when some starts only have 2 neighbours. What could be done is to create a narrow bay, maybe 6-7 tiles deep, between K and H so that start H would only maybe have 4 land neighbours instead of 5. The bay should be pretty close to K's capital (in east to west direction) so that it doesn't cut the number of tiles available to player H and makes start K inferior by limiting the number of tiles it has available. To make the map symmetric and to reduce the number of Q's land neighbours from 5 to 4, we could make a similar bay between starts Q and M. To keep start M balanced, we could move it to the SW and start N slightly to the north, which would make starts N and P worse and start O better. Apart from that, you could move start L some tiles to the SW so that it doesn't suffer from the changes to position of start M, but start K would be the suffering one instead. That would alleviate the balance problems in the center of the map. However, I'm not sure if my idea is the best possible because it would radically distort the number of coastal cities available to different players.

Regarding the western end of the snake, I'd maybe move start D a bit southward to improve start B and to nerf start E. We could also remove some land from start G by just slightly cutting the coast.

In the eastern end, I think that start Y has a very large uncontested area to the south. I'd move start Y a few tiles south to make the uncontested area smaller. I'd give more land to start X by entirely removing the bay 5 tiles to the south of its capital, by adding some land tiles to the western coast to make the "snake tail" thicker and compensate by moving start X a bit southward. That would also give more land tiles to start V.

Cornflakes · January 31st, 2018, 10:44

We had a key person leave unexpectedly at work so I'm taking on extra responsibility in the short term. Not sure how much time I can give to the map in the next few days/weeks while I try to sort through mounds of paperwork and familiarize myself with a dozen projects in various states of completion.

One more change I made last night in the base file was turning a good portion of the jungle on the interior of the pentagons into forest. Just eyeballing, it looks like there is about 10-15% jungle coverage now in the "jungle" regions on the interior, which should give the players enough early tiles to work. was working on the base file without the starts added so I didn't have a perfect grasp on the actual start location so there may be a few more jungles need to get thinned into forests.

darrelljs · January 31st, 2018, 11:27

Sometimes you just have to release imperfect software.

Darrell

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