Archipelago Pitboss

[Ginger*]

Hey RB, I'd like to propose a new pitboss, with a premade map based of a Medium&Small or archipelago script.
Navy Navy Navy
There are several active pitbosses so I don't expect this to take off immediately, maybe in late May or early June

Settings:
Monarch or Emperor
No barbs
No Events/Spies/TechTrading etc.

Mapmaker Guidance:
Room for ~13-15 decent cities per player with an even landgrab
Everyone can establish contact and trade pre astro
Some astro exclusive land, maybe 5-10% of total land tiles and resources? 

Bans:
FIN, ORG, Vikings, GLH, Colossus

Org could possibly be unbanned if the difficulty is lower, but it just feels like too much with the LH bonus. 
About civ bans maybe the Dutch, Portuguese and Chinese deserve attention, but they don't seem oppressive like Vikings and maybe deserve some time in the sun. Also their bonuses take longer to bloom

[superdeath]

Id agree to play if Dutch/portuguese/China was banned as well.

Would probably still play... but would rather it be a far more even playing field.

[scooter]

Somewhat interested in this actually given that the bans look pretty sensible, and the number of true Archipelago games we've played is very small. FWIW I would probably not ban Dutch/Portugal. They take so long to really come online that I'm not particularly convinced they're a must-pick. Plus I'm not sure we've ever really seen one of them dominate before? The original ban list looks right to me. I could maybe see a case for China.



Sequential would be my strong preference. If you'd like to speed up the early game, Classical start does the job nicely and prevents Civ picks from behind held hostage by starting techs.

[civac2]

Dutch are late to come online in a normal game. On archipelago, galleons/EIM are the first reasonable point for aggression.

[Tarkeel]

How large to do you see the starting island? More as in city count than tile count.

Classical start sounds good, as galleys will be needed pretty early as well.

[scooter]

Dutch are late to come online in a normal game. On archipelago, galleons/EIM are the first reasonable point for aggression.

Yeah this is fair. It might warp the game a bit much.

[Commodore]

Ooo, very cool. I'd be willing to mapmake this. I'd even compromise my ethics and make mirrored capitals/toroidal if you guys wanted.

[BING_XI_LAO]

Sign me up!
However, couldn't you mod some things instead of banning them?
ie. increase Financial's threshold but make it +2
ORG remove lighthouse bonus but give it some other building

[Ginger*]

Forgot to specify but we should use the latest CtH balance mod unless there’s a big vote for RtR

Thanks Commodore that sounds great! Idk about Toroidal that should probably be a player vote or mapmaker fiat if you feel one way or another that it’d be important for fairness. Capitals with mirrored potential, not necessarily mirrored resources, is a strong preference of mine so I appreciate that.

SD you’re probably right that we should extend the ban list to Portugal, Dutch, China, but I suspect we will see wars with galleys earlier than those Civ’s powerspikes.

Well Bing the problem with FIN is sea commerce. Also it’s just simpler to ban those leaders from the snake draft than to code a new mod, but if someone volunteers their time to edit a version of CtH I’d have no opposition to ORG just losing LH bonus. They could revert FIN to BtS and just strip it’s sea commerce component. Although I doubt anyone would pick it like that

[Ginger*]

How large to do you see the starting island? More as in city count than tile count.

Classical start sounds good, as galleys will be needed pretty early as well.

I’d suggest that Islands should be big enough that the dotmap isnt quite stricture but other than that, map maker choice?

I’d put classical start to a vote. Personally I think ancient is usually fine as the first 50 turns often take less than 3weeks game time