[SPOILERS] PBEM 10 Lurker THREAD

[Emperor K]

Also I hand placed the city states, so they can be moved as well.

I think with either iron or horses near aztec capital would make the map worthy.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I agree, I think if the Aztecs have some strategics then the rest of the map balances out and it's good to go.

[Cornflakes]

For locating city states, my personal philosophy evolved to include the following in addition to the above considerations for equal access ... the goal being to prevent capture being the 1 right choice.

• Non-fresh water location, but add a mountain/lake/river providing at least 1 and preferably 2 valid aqueduct sites (in case the AI puts their district in the only aqueduct site). Even a completely dry CS city will build a granary and improvements and grow up to about size 4-5 in a reasonable time-frame, but a city on fresh water can easily hit size 7 early. And rather than trying to provide everyone equal access to cities on fresh water, I found it easier to give all CS coastal/dry starts. Allow the player to build that aqueduct if they decide to capture. Plus it leaves the freshwater locations to be settled by players.
  
• Try to leave as many freshwater options for players to settle as possible [as an example from this map, CS #1, #2 invalidate many options along the rivers]
  

Looking at your city state locations I would recommend the following:

1. Move north between the wheat, 2nd ring freshwater from oasis (provide more options for players along the river)
   
2. Move 3 SE, add mountain on horse tile, and shift the horse 2E
   
3. Move 1NW off of fresh water
   
4. Move 1SE off of fresh water
   
5. Add mountain to NE
   
6. Add mountain to SW
   
7. Move east onto hill (best tile I see that provides maximum room for Greece to locate cities in between)
   
8. With the movement of 7 further ease, Greece is more likely to get shafted. I'd shift 8 further west into a slightly-less terrible iceball location that at least has a 2 seafood adjacency harbor and Truffles. River location is fine since the terrain is so poor.
   

Illustrated:

   

   

   

   

[Cornflakes]

Looking at later-era strategics:

Greece could add Niter + Oil
Aztec could add Niter + Aluminium
Egypt could add Oil
Kongo could add Oil

[Emperor K]

OK after cornflakes changes

Greece

Kongo

Aztec

Egypt

[Cornflakes]

Some food for thought, not 100% sure these changes are the right ones so take them or leave them (or improve upon them) as you see fit.

Looking at Aztec and I personally would be pretty disappointed with their start compared to Greece and Egypt. Even Kongo feels a little weaker, but I think for Kongo just moving the flat forest NE onto the hill W to give a first ring 4-yield tile will be sufficient.

Egypt start specifically feels like it is a tier above the others. A quick suggestion is to delete the wheat from the floodplain, possibly swapping it with a rice on one of the grassland further north along the river so that Egypt can still get the Irrigation inspiration easily at a 2nd/3rd city.

Aztec I really would like a 3-food tile available and a 2/2 tile first ring. Here's a thought, replace the plains wheat SE with marsh rice, but otherwise leave the start alone. The higher initial food yield will balance out the overall poor food yield on the surrounding tiles. The 2nd ring PFH's give some nice production tiles and I think it will be strong enough without bringing one of those tiles 1st ring. ... I would swap out the SE wheat and not the E wheat, so that the tradeoff for them settling 1E and getting 1st ring PFH is more desert and mountains.

[Emperor K]

I think with the changes made the map is ready.

Aztec

They will basically get a free cs. That one to the left will show red borders on turn 2. So I gave the aztec player a choice, settle in place for extra production, or move onto the stone to get the horses closer. I think with all of the luxuries a cs and good expansion to the northwest they are not in that bad of a position.

Kongo

The hilled forest should be all they need. Stone and cows in tier 2, not to mention excellent spots for more cities.

Egypt

Trying to get egypt some floodplains. There start is very good, but second cities are a bit production poor. They can settler towards Aztec and get another floodplain city but that is about it. They do have the wonder but fresh water is lacking in there backfill area. Moving the wheat to tier 3 for capital, or can be used for one of there backfill positions.

[Emperor K]

Also after renaming the map to earth and putting in the assets folder it loaded with no issue. Is that all that needs to be done?

[Cornflakes]

Also after renaming the map to earth and putting in the assets folder it loaded with no issue. Is that all that needs to be done?

My experience a re-named world builder generated map would not load city states without some additional SQLite editing of data tables first (thus the drag-and-drop tool I made). However if you are getting the city states to load in game now after just renaming it's possible that a patch corrected that issue. If you want to upload the starting save here I can double-check that it works.

[Emperor K]

OK the only way I have gotten it to work is using the User Made Maps mode to start the hot seat. After the game is started it can be disabled and all turns were able to be played. Is that acceptable, if not I would need some help with my sql I think. One of my earlier versions worked fine but the newest will not and I can't seem to be able to find the difference. And now even just the raw export from world builder is messing up.

Like I mentioned the attached map works just fine with the mod enabled to start the game. All players I do not think would even need it. Just suboptimal to start the game.