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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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[NO PLAYERS]Map Thread[SPOILERS]
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scooter Wrote:Or the winner of every NTT game we've ever had here Obviously neither of you guys have followed many of the last 15 or so games, the majority of which have been won by SEs rather than cottage spammers. 
I've got some dirt on my shoulder, can you brush it off for me?
Agreed with T-Hawk on the Stone/Marble. But for the same reason, I'm nervous about opening the land passages in their current direct form:
PBEM31 spoiler: For expert players, such a map would be an entertaining design: Open land passages change the dynamics of the game. Tactically, such close starts and narrow chokes play much faster - they make the game feel alive during the early turns, when often PBEMs are nothing more than moving a scout and Worker and ending the turn. But I'm not sure such a design is appropriate to a greens game, since one somewhat capable player could trash a weaker opponent all too easily. One option may be to block with water, rather than mountains, which naturally introduces the need for ports, since boating one's invasion force becomes a valid tactic. Maybe have small neutral islands in the middle of the blocking water, with Stone/Marble. The idea is to subtly introduce players to the need for a naval presence, without having to spell it out.
Ok, I can some stuff as described in the last post. Stone + Marble are on one big lake now. Iron was moved to make that location 3S of the capital not extremely strong (it still is strong though). The mountains have been deleted and another hill 3N of the cap was added, just so that when you have your 2nd border pop you get again more vision on possible invaders. Still not completely sold on the idea of opening them. I probably would love it in my own games, making sure nobody can easily play a total farmers gambit. But in a greens game I agree with timski that I fear someone will get eliminated quickly. Though I also wouldn't want to make those tiles part of the lakes. That would make the water N of the capital boatable as well and then the capitals are even less defensible then with the land passage. So either land passage or mountains imo.
Apart from those changes, I also added a desert tile and one short river. Didn't work on one tile though (it just didn't take the order to draw a river). Also as can be seen on the screenshot there are some graphical oddities in the SE (the big lake there has 6 tiles which are green and blurry). I can't find a way to get rid of that and according to the WB-file everything is normal. I'll therefore put the WB-file on my dropbox-acc, maybe someone can tell me why those tiles are looking like that - and more importantly how to get rid of it. And yes, I already restarted the game (the whole computer even) but that didn't help. And if not, you guys can still look at it and even try a play session if you have half an hour or so  . Btw: Can someone tell me if I have anything to do to get that setup in PBEM? I guess it is enough to send the WB-file and let the first one start a PBEM custom scenario. But is it possible to set that up completely so that I send an actual savefile out?Link to the WB-file: PBEM33 Map
Briefly - If you do remove the mountains, players need more anti-choke options on the SE side of their capitals. At the moment, they have plenty on the NW side, the most obvious of which (hill with Fish, Clam, Gold and Horse) would make it all but impossible for the player to their NW to secure as much as a hill on the connecting peninsula.
Note that parts of the map have been pre-revealed - including the blurry area - not sure why.
The only true NTT game I played was PBEM17, and we all know what happened there...
Quote:But that's how Civ 4 always works. Just ask Sullla or Krill. PBEM 2 I never built a single cottage...and PB3 worked vaguely well.
Hey timski, thanks for the input. I agree with you and have changed several things near the cap. I have moved the crabs 1W and the horses 1SW, destroying that great hill spot. I also removed the hill there completely, changed the hill north of the capital to be on a tile which will actually be in the cultural radius of the city after 2 border pops and also added another hill to the E of the caps which will also be in ranger after 2 border pops, effectively giving some more warning of incoming threats. While at it I also added a land tile E of the caps so that a boat-invasion force cannot land next to the cap from out of the fog.
I also changed the visible tiles at the start. Apart from that, everything stayed as it was and if I don't hear any objection from anyone till the evening I will send it out to catwalk. Thanks for your help guys Latest version: Final WB-save
I took a stab at figuring out that problem with the blurry tiles.
It's not the tiles itself, it's some kind of graphic overlay sitting on top of them. With flying camera mode, you can zoom way in underneath that green layer and see the underlying water tiles. Also, it's not just a 6 tile area, it's a 3x3=9 region. It also affects the three tiles to the left of the blurriness, but goes unseen there since the problematic overlay sits at lower altitude than the land. Change those three plots to water and they get the weird green blurry overlay too. The problem emanates from the tile 2W of Timbuktu. Change this tile and the nature of the blurry overlay changes. If you want, you could change this tile to water and at least the problem is less noticeable. The tile in question is the (0,0) origin coordinate of the map, which is surely not a coincidence. Gotta be related to wrapping. The problem remains if the map is changed for X-wrapping only and goes away if the X axis does not wrap. I played around with a few other knobs in the worldbuilder file, but couldn't fix it. Very weird. |
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