I've been mucking about, unwinding after IMP-42, having fun re-playing Ianus last turnset from OSG-28 to understand how he won, and trying a "One Planet Empire" challenge (Meklar, Small, Simple - surprisingly easy). While doing this, I noticed an AI behaviour that surprised me. In both games, my defences were heavily reliant on Repulsor ships, and the AI had a number of designs stacked with missiles that could (notionally) harm me.
However, if I engaged the AI in the right-most few columns of the screen, they would not fire their missiles. This happened both if I were defending a planet or if we were in "neutral" space. Some of the time (particularly in the OPE game) I could have outrun the missiles anyway, but watching an AI huge packed with Merculites just sit there in a corner trying to get closer to my (undefended) planet, while constantly being pushed back by my single, shield3 repulsor was kind of wierd.
If I let ships get a few columns into the screen then they would fire. Anyone else seen this?
We'll spoiler initial thoughts in case of mistaken clicks:
Initial Map Concept: colors are intended areas each player will be encouraged to settle initially
Some ideas I'm running with right now:
Since it's a game of Commodore's prompting and I've seen no orders otherwise requesting the map, I am trying to strike a balance between "hand crafted naturalism" and "mirrored balance", leaning towards naturalism. As the players move away from the middle the map will get less symmetrical.
Idea is to have the original island split by lakes and peaks with the neighbor encouraged to settle towards the neighboring island's back half.
Room for 3ish cities on the starting portion of the island before galleys are needed. Perhaps this is too low? Right now we're looking at ~30 tiles for the main part of the starting island and another ~15 tiles blocked off that their neighbor is encouraged to settle towards.
I think I want to encourage settling the capital off of coast to slow game down / prevent boating of capitals.
Leaning towards leaving the middle empty, maybe a couple 1-tile spots for people to use as forward bases post-Astronomy.
Beyond the starting circle, branches of islands with ocean between to open up additional avenues of conflict after Astronomy. Leaning towards not having additional large islands besides the initial 5.
Pre-Optics Magellan will be obtainable only by using a settler on some far-flung barren rock to pop borders across otherwise impassable tiles.
I tried running what I've done so far through GermanJoey's balancing tool but ran into Perl errors. What recommendations do past mapmakers have for balancing tools? I'd like to see if the concepts I'm working off of are playing out in theory
