[No Players] Where the Lurkers Take Their Holidays

[pindicator]

Way past time for a lurker thread for this.

Any expectations or predictions pre-map?

Speaking of the map, I've been rolling some different types and shaking my head no a lot.  But I think I finally have a concept I like.  More to come after I roll a few and get some screenshots together.

[Miguelito]

Any expectations or predictions pre-map?

naufragar/Rusten pick Nebu, Mjmd defaults to Vicky of India.

[Tarkeel]

Any expectations or predictions pre-map?

Overall higly subjective tier-ranking:

The Greats
Ginger+civac
Nauf + Rusten
Gavagai

The Competent
Mjmd
SD
Dreylin the Fish Lord

The Food
Greenline
GT
ljubljana

The Unknown
Ricketyclik - dedlurker Mackoti

[Commodore]

I'd put SD into "The Unknown", ironically. Despite all his games you never know what kind of performance he's going to turn in.

[Qgqqqqq]

I feel MJ is a step above SD and Dreylin, though I'm basing that on limited appearances by Dreylin.

[pindicator]

I've been messing around with map scripts, and I think I've found what I want for the map concept but I'm having a hard time actually generating a map that works with that and the parameters the players want (navy not an important part of the game, starts at least 14 tiles apart).

My concept, loosely, is "Australia".  Players on the outskirts of an arid landmass where the outer edge is fertile and the inside is largely arid.  There will be rivers and oasis of good spots within the desert, and there will be key resources in places without good food so there are tradeoffs in grabbing these as cities.  I'm looking for wide and spread out and picking your city locations.

However, I'm having trouble getting that in a map generation.  So far my best bet has been Tectonics set to Arid and Pangaea, and oddly enough at smaller map sizes.  Here are a few small sized maps I've run:







Obviously the starts in the middle would need to be moved to the edge or otherwise balanced, and there is some other balancing to do, but I generally like how these maps look and feel.  The issue is that players are too close together; everyone here is 10 tiles apart.

When I move up to Large sized maps the spacing is better...




But now the map is way too stretched out.  Those 2 parallel desert bands are painfully obvious here - and all the features seem to be stretched a bit too far for my own taste.  And the game still places people in the middle.

I have a possible solution, but it's labor intensive:  roll a pair of tiny pangaea and then stitch them together, one on top of the other.  Tiny pangaeas with 5 players space well enough, and though this a weird example it shows the spacing is solved while the base map doesn't look so horrid:




I'd roll 2 of these that I like and then stack them on top of each other so it turns the map into a tilted axis cylander.  Nobody really is on the coast but instead in the fertile bands between desert.  It would probably be 3..2..3..2 stacked north-south.

Thoughts?  I'm open to other ideas - especially ones that involve less manual work...

[Tarkeel]

I've been messing around with map scripts, and I think I've found what I want for the map concept but I'm having a hard time actually generating a map that works with that and the parameters the players want (navy not an important part of the game, starts at least 14 tiles apart).

My concept, loosely, is "Australia".  Players on the outskirts of an arid landmass where the outer edge is fertile and the inside is largely arid.  There will be rivers and oasis of good spots within the desert, and there will be key resources in places without good food so there are tradeoffs in grabbing these as cities.  I'm looking for wide and spread out and picking your city locations.

I like that concept. It fits with what they've asked for conceptually, but is different from what everyone envisions (a rerun of PB65 or larger B72). Good thing they haven't given you a tiles per player to match, as this is likely to be a high tile-count map, but with large amount of "wasted space". The issue though is how to space 10 players around a a continent.

It will play havoc on trait evaluation, it should push CRE way up and probably IMP down, but that's not a problem.

But now the map is way too stretched out.  Those 2 parallel desert bands are painfully obvious here - and all the features seem to be stretched a bit too far for my own taste.  And the game still places people in the middle.

I have a possible solution, but it's labor intensive:  roll a pair of tiny pangaea and then stitch them together, one on top of the other.  Tiny pangaeas with 5 players space well enough, and though this a weird example it shows the spacing is solved while the base map doesn't look so horrid:

I actually really like that one, and with some editing might be made to work. I think it's workable to have two players start in the middle, but have them seperated from each other by a vertical mountain range.

Are you planning on hand-crafting starts, or editing what the map gives you?

[T-hawk]

There's a Donut map script that can do what you're talking about, fertile on the outside and desert on the inside.

[Krill]

Throw them to the wolves. I like the same map as Tarkeel, give them that with no editing or balancing. I think it actually looks OK.

[RefSteel]

I hacked together a mapscript to do what I think you might want and posted it over at civfanatics. (I called the script "Tiltless," imagining it as a world with no axial tilt.) It's literally just the Tectonics script with one line changed so it stretches latitudes 15-90 over the full 0-90 range for purposes of terrain generation. Let me know if this helps!