[SPOILERS - NO PLAYERS] The Final Clusterfuck: The PB38 Map and Lurker Thread

[Cornflakes]

At this point I don't think I have anything more that I can contribute to improving balance.

[BRickAstley]

I would say go ahead and release, it is looking good to me and I'm sure it will be great for the players.

[darrelljs]

I would say go ahead and release, it is looking good to me and I'm sure it will be great for the players.

Its a great map and you guys put a lot of time, effort and energy into it .  That said, I'm setting the over/under on number of players that complain about something map related in the first ten turns at 7.

Darrell

[RefSteel]

I would say go ahead and release, it is looking good to me and I'm sure it will be great for the players.

Brilliant! I imagine you're the one who needs to set up the game, what with Xenu and Old Harry both playing, right? Final save (with the right civs, without the labeled signs) is attached!

Its a great map and you guys put a lot of time, effort and energy into it :thumbsup:.  That said, I'm setting the over/under on number of players that complain about something map related in the first ten turns at 7.

Darrell

Ha - thanks! And I'll take the over.

[Cornflakes]

I PM'ed the map to Xenu

[RefSteel]

Thanks, Cornflakes!

Also, some images, as promised, even though it's already shipped and nobody especially asked, starting with an F5-style map overview:

Looking at this map makes me happy. More pictures in posts to follow.

[RefSteel]

So, some pictures of the neighborhoods of everybody's starting areas: I got these by loading the scenario, choosing the last player in the list (GJ's Mongolia), settling my city in place (as all the other AIs did) and then entering Worldbuilder.

Start A turns out to be Shallow Old Human Tourist, I think? I also notice belatedly that their copper is third ring to their capital. I'm pretty sure this isn't the end of the world.

Start B is ... I think WilliamLP, based on the color. You're getting top-notch commentary to go with these images here!

Start C, which I think is OT4E and Chumchu:

Start D, and I really shouldn't have turned bare map on. I went ahead and looked it up, and this turns out to be Elkad of Korea! You can also see the south end of the galley island also visible from B, and part of an Astro island that can't be reached even with massive culture because of the border-pops-over-water rule.

Start E, which has to be GermanJoey. There's a lot of jungle in some of the tropical areas:

Start F must be Dark Savant. My eye is immediately drawn to the island off to the east where I think I have the wrong color forest, because that's the way I am. I'm not kidding: If we didn't have twenty-five players waiting impatiently for the map, I'd have gone on making little changes indefinitely.

Start G is Donovan Zoi, our second restricted leader, both in the west but on opposite ends of the continent's "leg."

Start H is 2metraninja. I guess we'll find out what he thinks of the broken-up mountain range and the whole five-neighbor thing if he reports on stuff. If he doesn't report much, I'll assume he's delighted with our balance choices by default!

Start I looks like AdrienIer, and it looks to me like feeding his horses will be an interesting little puzzle*. There are a handful of possibilities, but the answer will probably end up depending mostly on where - and if - he settles for Copper early. (As Mali, he doesn't need strategic resources for a long time, as long as he can fit Archery research in.)

* - This was not planned to be a puzzle. I am noticing that it's a puzzle just now for the first time. Seems like there are multiple viable solutions though, even if there aren't any terrific ones, so that's good.

Start J is Xenu, whose Phalanxes would be another reason for Mali not to worry too much about connecting Horses early if not for the fact that he has at least two other neighbors.

More in a bit.

[RefSteel]

Moving on with start K, the bugaboo of our early balancing work. After many changes, it's more or less in line with other starts I think, but GJ's tool does seem to think Mr. Cairo here is going to cross the desert to his southeast, plant one or more coastal cities on the other side, and then take over (most of?) the big island southeast of that in spite of competition from I and L. GJ's tool also thinks that G is going to have a big coastal empire extending way off to its northeast with hardly any inland cities. If either of these things happen in the game, I'll be fascinated to see why and how!

Start L is naufrager, and you can tell he's playing as Germany because it's nigh impossible to see his borders in this image! I think this is the only start where I left a resource on a corner tile, and I still think that was the right move given the terrain. Looking at it again, I think there are some really intriguing dotmap choices here, and I'm curious to see how naufrager plays it.

Start M belongs to Rusten, who already planned to move downriver and share the corn with his second city and hasn't even seen the horses, clams, and silver. The question is though, where down the river? If he has neither BW nor AH by the time he settles, he might take that bay position, clearing the grass forest and making both early strategic resources a bit trickier to feed. Also, once he's done some scouting, he might have second thoughts about settling what amount to his back lines first.

Start N turns out to be Aretas, driving Ragnar of Holy Rome. I really like this start: Lots of good options for different ways to play. I think most or all of the starts are like that though, which is a really good thing.

That brings us to start O, which ... ... oh. So it turns out this is mackoti. The start is cool and looks fun to play, and ... I mean, the thing is, hopefully naufrager and Aretas turn out to be really strong new players, because they're bordering the sharkiest shark in the sea. TBS is a match for him or more in a game, but I doubt if anybody has a more infallible killer instinct than mackoti.

Start P is Boldly of Khmer, who might be competing with Rusten and mac for Holy Roman land if Aretas turns out to be a snackfood type of green player. (Rusten, who knows the game backwards and forwards and has been on CFC forever, isn't the kind I'd really call green.)

And in position Q we have ... superdeath. So ... he talks so much about being a newb and not knowing how to sandbox and so on that - with a name like that to boot - he's either really, really, really new and expecting to lose, or a smurf who's trolling everybody. In the former case, that's another early snack for Rusten and Boldly to share between them, this time with up to three other players I haven't looked at yet instead of with mackoti. I'm honestly not sure whether Q is an easier or harder position for a new player to play out of than say A or Y - I think it depends on the player - but if superdeath is (as he implies) the weakest player in the field, I think I'm glad he's surrounded by the maximum possible number of players, just because an early, easy exit can seriously swing a game - but hopefully less so if there are more vultures among whom to divide the spoils. I hope that's not the scenario that ends up playing out though; hopefully he puts the rich, lush land around him to good use and has a good showing in spite of his oft-expressed doubts. I mean, or he's like Speaker or Lord Parkin or somebody smurfing up the place. I dunno.

So apparently Start R, superdeath's northern neighbor, is dtay, playing Genghis Khan of the Celts. ... I'm so, so sorry, superdeath. I promise we didn't do this on purpose. Uh. Who's next?

Start S is Dreylin, and his coastal access isn't bad at all in case he wants to GLH ASAP. On a related note, when I created that northern delta (with a sea cliff overlooking it that I left in place) I wasn't setting out to create a complicated settling decision for this start's back lines; it just kind of happened that way.

Start T (and superdeath's final neighbor) is ... The Black Sword. One good thing for superdeath: I don't think any of his neighbors are actually bloodthirsty. But they all know what they're doing, and few if any will hesitate to take advantage of weakness. As for the start itself, when I look at this area, I see an enormous amount of jungle, but GJ's balance tool thinks it's fine, and I'm pretty sure when TBS looks at it, he'll just see a bunch of opportunities - especially with Pericles giving him better settling options than another leader would have, and Impis who laugh heartily at rough terrain.

Final five players - the home stretch - to follow.

[RefSteel]

Start U, with pindicator in charge, is kind of the poster child for our jungle/forest mix in the tropical zones. Spread around like this, I think it looks quite nice, and if you have a good feel for the game, jungle with this density doesn't get in the way of your dotmapping at all (though the value of settling on jungle adds another small variable) - when sparse enough, it's just grassland that takes a few extra worker turns to improve by the time you'd actually think about working the tile. China's a pretty fun civ too, and I hope pindicator has a good time with them here.

Start V is Commodore, whose relationship with Pindicator is ... complicated. (Also with many others on this site, but he's not neighbors with e.g. GJ, and Noble's not in the game.) I'm hoping he gets and likes what I did with both altitude and latitude affecting forest type; I hope he lives long enough to explore the sea ice; and I hope he's moved to wax poetic (with other poets' work and/or his own hand-drawn maps and stories) about his civ and its explorations. I'm not a fan of the way he tries to play against players' psychology though, or even the way he characterizes it in his thread, and it makes me sad that his reporting has been growing lax of late. (Though apparently for pretty fun reasons!) There's also a reasonably good chance that he'll call the map names because of things like the 1-tile patches of e.g. plains or desert or what have you; as I said way back on page two or three or something, you can't please everybody. He'd have loved my rift lakes, I think, but that wouldn't have been a good reason to put them in. (It's also possible he'll be delighted by the map and say lovely things about it, especially knowing Krill didn't make the map; you never know!)

And start W, whose inexplicably low balance score I was working to correct right up until the wire last night turns out to be ... Gavagai? That's hilarious; I'm not sure if I hope he moves his capital or comes to his senses and settles in place. (There are some fairly good sites for him to move to, which isn't a problem really; moving your starting settler is no more unbalancing a gambit on a well-designed map than - say - teching Buddhism before Food. But intentionally moving off of a 2/2/2 plant and away from an unimproved 2/2 in the BFC to save one worker turn - of the ~4 you lose in this case, not to mention the lost commerce - is frankly crazy.) Amusingly, depending on the extent of his exploration, as a result of the luck of his neighbor draw, Gav may labor under the false impression that everyone had double Hunting resource starts throughout the entire game. (Depends on stuff like how much he bothers with early C&D.) If so, it will be fun to not respond to any rants he might write about it in his thread. (I do think I should have turned about three of the hunting starts to agri ones - I would have, had I been thinking about the mix of starting techs in RtR, but I was really just thinking about the mix of resources.)

Start X features plako in a corner next to Commodore, and a possible likely-narrow border with Gav. Needing Hunting for his pigs and having Terraces for culture means he probably won't pursue a religion at least until the first two have fallen. We may never know though, as he never reports much of anything. One day, I want to see plako play with a dedlurker who can log into the game and try to describe what's being done in his thread.

And finally, right between Gav and plako, we have ... B4ndit. Looking at his start and surroundings, I regret not knocking the snow off of some of those flatland trees around him, especially further north. Ah well. Also I think the elephant trees are deciduous; yeesh. I thought I looked at this! Anyway, "between Gav and plako" is not a good place for a player to start, because Gavagai tends to play just a little too aggressively for his own good, and nobody wants to neighbor that, because it's generally also way too aggressive for his target's good - and plako is likely to seize any opportunity this creates. All that said, if I can get over the look of the trees, this is another neat starting region (I do like them all) thanks in part to stuff you can't see here: The back-lines to the south, and the island to the southwest. Zara in particular makes all of this really interesting - and looking at this again, what would happen if he Krilled his starting settler right up to the grassland hill northwest of iron? (My best guess is that plako would eliminate him before he finished his next settler, but I guess you never know!)

I'd have tried to add more pictures if we were still evaluating the map, but we're done! So if you want to see more of this thing, you'll have to let me know, download the save yourself, or wait for the players' explorations! In the meantime, I'll go do Other Things and finally be quiet here for a little while.

[Erwin]

A more geopolitical look:

It's hard to look past mackoti and Rusten with those neighbours. There are really many veterans in the east, I'd really hate to have Commodores or Pindicators starting positions, plako and Gav have at least one neighbour who isn't a veteran. It's interesting as well that OH + Fintourist who have been aiming for culture got one of those corner positions, let's see how it plays out.