Okay, I think having waited a week for additional reports it's now time to officially list the result. It would be kind of hypocritical for me to keep delaying anyway, after I whined in the closing thread about people taking too long to report 
As always late reports are accepted and encouraged- if there's a lot of them and people actually keep track of their scoring, I might add them to this post in a separate shadow games section.
So without further ado, I present the new Champion, the very best, like no one ever was:
[Music plays]
[SIZE="4"]Ranamar[/SIZE] [SIZE="5"]*[/SIZE] [SIZE="5"]*[/SIZE]
[SIZE="3"]Pokedex:[/SIZE] 56 captured!
[SIZE="3"]Bobchillingworth's rating:[/SIZE] Outstanding!
Well done, Ranamar! Great showing =)
________________________________________
Map Comments:
I'm not going to type up *quite* as much as I usually do about the maps, mostly because I didn't have to put a lot of thought into this one
Yeah, for anyone who hasn't played but doesn't mind being spoiled, the map was my attempt to recreate the world (Kanto) from the 1st Gen Pokemon games (Red / Blue / Yellow in the US & PAL) on a standard size highlands script. I used a few different maps for reference:
This one for the general shape:
![[Image: Kanto-Full-Map.jpg]](http://images.wikia.com/pokemon/images/b/b2/Kanto-Full-Map.jpg)
This map for the locations:
![[Image: kanto.jpg]](http://www.psypokes.com/rby/walkthrough/kanto.jpg)
And a map too large to copy here which was in-game pictures of every route stitched together, so that I could find out where to place certain terrain types.
In the map I had dungeons represent important buildings, plains were roads, and jungles represented the famous "tall grass". Much of the map was simply forested hills- I wanted to restrict player exploration at least initially to the in-game routes both to avoid people getting lost and to retain as much of the feel for the games as I could. Having lots of forests also meant more barb animal spawns, with trees spawning several useful types and hindering player vision which would otherwise block more barbs from appearing. Deserts were added along some of the coastlines for a little bit of visual diversity, to make the minimap look more appealing, and to encourage lion spawns. The purpose of the lack of resources outside of the pre-settled AI capitals was twofold- first, I wanted to keep the player from wandering around with their starting units looking for a better site, and second I wanted to keep the barbs from spawning cities all over the map. In my test games (I ran three) the barbs did eventually spam cities anyway, but it did take them a lot longer (until they had Longbows and the game was mostly finished).
Originally the map was going to be a much more detailed and faithful recreation of the games, to the point where it might have been borderline disturbing I wanted to have portals in areas like the entrances to Mount Moon and Rock Tunnel which would transport you to sealed-off "cave zones" in a separate area of the map, to represent the insides of the cave and tunnels and what-have-you. Think of Limbo from Adventure 3, except smaller but a lot more of them 
I also wanted to make the map much larger so that I could cram in more details. And then I had the idea of walking in jungles causing events which led to "wild encounters", represented by rare capturable barbs spawning. Yeah. Thankfully for mine and likely everybody else's sanity, I didn't have the time to put that much effort into the Adventure, plus I'm still not sure how to do stuff like code events or make portals behave properly. And since the AI wouldn't have been able to use those the portals, the player would have been left with an oddly non-interactive world to explore. Not what I wanted.
One thing which was an issue I never could resolve right were the AI personalities. For some reason they always acted like schizophrenics in my test games, dog-piling on the player without warning even when pleased or friendly & being half the world away. I tried to resolve this in two ways- first I boosted everyone's happiness with the player in the WB to stratospheric levels- this didn't seem to stop the war decs, but at least they didn't occur as early (plus the AI would occasionally randomly give out "we think you could use this" free techs- often right before declaring). I also gave players "Trust" on Red- it seemed thematic enough, and should have been sufficient to keep "Giovanni" from immediately stomping on the player.
About the Gym Leaders and Champion- I knew that I made Giovanni and Blue very difficult to kill. There were a couple outs, even if you went for all of the STARS; Domination, super-strength Flesh Golems, highly promoted Beasts of Agares, Yvain with tons of nature mana, any of the named Super Beasts, and comparable stuff. Shadow spells from Red would be a great assistance as well. The point of Giovanni being so much tougher than all of the other leaders, despite being so close to the player's start, was so that I could railroad players into defeating the leaders in roughly the same order as they had to in the original games. Golems being so obviously critical for scoring also made Brock the clear first target.
Concerning the scoring, I admit that I may have messed up some here. The scoring system itself was okay I think, but I should have rethought the STARS. Going for the full set would have meant a possible but very difficult game, especially if you played for scoring as well. I meant for them to be strictly optional challenges which players would be free to say "screw this" and abandon without any penalty any time they wanted to, or play for if they weren't being challenged enough by the basic scenario, but I think I underestimated how competitive this community is. In retrospect it probably should have been obvious that any additional challenge I added would be taken up by many of the players as if it were a mandatory part of the game. Well, if anyone found it too frustrating trying to play for scoring or STARS, but is still interested in the map I suggest you give it a try just playing for fun. Go level up your thunder ratman killing random animals, turn Red into a Stygian Guard and terrorize Kanto, whatever makes you happy
So those are my comments! A great thank you to Ranamar for his incredible report, and to everyone who gave it a look!
As always late reports are accepted and encouraged- if there's a lot of them and people actually keep track of their scoring, I might add them to this post in a separate shadow games section.
So without further ado, I present the new Champion, the very best, like no one ever was:
[Music plays]
[SIZE="4"]Ranamar[/SIZE] [SIZE="5"]*[/SIZE] [SIZE="5"]*[/SIZE]
[SIZE="3"]Pokedex:[/SIZE] 56 captured!
[SIZE="3"]Bobchillingworth's rating:[/SIZE] Outstanding!
Well done, Ranamar! Great showing =)
________________________________________
Map Comments:
I'm not going to type up *quite* as much as I usually do about the maps, mostly because I didn't have to put a lot of thought into this one
Yeah, for anyone who hasn't played but doesn't mind being spoiled, the map was my attempt to recreate the world (Kanto) from the 1st Gen Pokemon games (Red / Blue / Yellow in the US & PAL) on a standard size highlands script. I used a few different maps for reference:
This one for the general shape:
This map for the locations:
And a map too large to copy here which was in-game pictures of every route stitched together, so that I could find out where to place certain terrain types.
In the map I had dungeons represent important buildings, plains were roads, and jungles represented the famous "tall grass". Much of the map was simply forested hills- I wanted to restrict player exploration at least initially to the in-game routes both to avoid people getting lost and to retain as much of the feel for the games as I could. Having lots of forests also meant more barb animal spawns, with trees spawning several useful types and hindering player vision which would otherwise block more barbs from appearing. Deserts were added along some of the coastlines for a little bit of visual diversity, to make the minimap look more appealing, and to encourage lion spawns. The purpose of the lack of resources outside of the pre-settled AI capitals was twofold- first, I wanted to keep the player from wandering around with their starting units looking for a better site, and second I wanted to keep the barbs from spawning cities all over the map. In my test games (I ran three) the barbs did eventually spam cities anyway, but it did take them a lot longer (until they had Longbows and the game was mostly finished).
Originally the map was going to be a much more detailed and faithful recreation of the games, to the point where it might have been borderline disturbing
I wanted to have portals in areas like the entrances to Mount Moon and Rock Tunnel which would transport you to sealed-off "cave zones" in a separate area of the map, to represent the insides of the cave and tunnels and what-have-you. Think of Limbo from Adventure 3, except smaller but a lot more of them I also wanted to make the map much larger so that I could cram in more details. And then I had the idea of walking in jungles causing events which led to "wild encounters", represented by rare capturable barbs spawning. Yeah. Thankfully for mine and likely everybody else's sanity, I didn't have the time to put that much effort into the Adventure, plus I'm still not sure how to do stuff like code events or make portals behave properly. And since the AI wouldn't have been able to use those the portals, the player would have been left with an oddly non-interactive world to explore. Not what I wanted. One thing which was an issue I never could resolve right were the AI personalities. For some reason they always acted like schizophrenics in my test games, dog-piling on the player without warning even when pleased or friendly & being half the world away. I tried to resolve this in two ways- first I boosted everyone's happiness with the player in the WB to stratospheric levels- this didn't seem to stop the war decs, but at least they didn't occur as early (plus the AI would occasionally randomly give out "we think you could use this" free techs- often right before declaring
). I also gave players "Trust" on Red- it seemed thematic enough, and should have been sufficient to keep "Giovanni" from immediately stomping on the player. About the Gym Leaders and Champion- I knew that I made Giovanni and Blue very difficult to kill. There were a couple outs, even if you went for all of the STARS; Domination, super-strength Flesh Golems, highly promoted Beasts of Agares, Yvain with tons of nature mana, any of the named Super Beasts, and comparable stuff. Shadow spells from Red would be a great assistance as well. The point of Giovanni being so much tougher than all of the other leaders, despite being so close to the player's start, was so that I could railroad players into defeating the leaders in roughly the same order as they had to in the original games. Golems being so obviously critical for scoring also made Brock the clear first target.
Concerning the scoring, I admit that I may have messed up some here. The scoring system itself was okay I think, but I should have rethought the STARS. Going for the full set would have meant a possible but very difficult game, especially if you played for scoring as well. I meant for them to be strictly optional challenges which players would be free to say "screw this" and abandon without any penalty any time they wanted to, or play for if they weren't being challenged enough by the basic scenario, but I think I underestimated how competitive this community is. In retrospect it probably should have been obvious that any additional challenge I added would be taken up by many of the players as if it were a mandatory part of the game. Well, if anyone found it too frustrating trying to play for scoring or STARS, but is still interested in the map I suggest you give it a try just playing for fun. Go level up your thunder ratman killing random animals, turn Red into a Stygian Guard and terrorize Kanto, whatever makes you happy
So those are my comments! A great thank you to Ranamar for his incredible report, and to everyone who gave it a look!