[Spoilers] Lurker Thread - No Players!

[Lewwyn]

BTW Darrel, most games don't have an admin password because it causes the game to crash between macs. I don't think it'll cause problems here if everyone has a PC (which they must because of the mod), but for future reference it's been known to cause problems.

[Lewwyn]

I'm glad we moved that horse as it seems we were correct in thinking Krill would have settled on it.

[darrelljs]

Thanks I owe you a beer . Also I will not set an admin password.

Darrell

[scooter]

Just an FYI - I will do this in the morning, so I'll have it done in less than 12 hours. Sleep time now.

Question for you guys to give your thoughts on before I finish... I feel sorta bad taking resources away from Yuris and Dazed, as that always kinda sucks. Do you guys think it'd be better to nerf their starts (so they can't get all 3 food in the capital - basically move their extra seafood), or better to boost the other starts so that all can move and land a 3 food capital. I'm leaning somewhat towards the former, but again, it involves Yuris and Dazed knowing they got a food yanked from them, which kinda seems like it'd be a letdown for them. Thoughts?

[novice]

So, I've been toying with the idea for some time of making a simple map viewer and/or editor for worldbuilder saves. So I decided to drum together something real quick. Behold my advanced map viewer:



(In case you can't tell, that is the PBEM20 map).

More usefully, I added a Balance Checker that does a breadth-first traversal from each player's starting position to determine each player's sphere of influence. The program then counts the various resources found within that sphere.



Black tiles are either peaks or islands not reachable by any player without boats.

I think there's some useful information here for improving the balance.
EDIT: The correlation between colors in the text and colors in the map is wrong here. See next page for a corrected balance picture that uses the actual player colors.

[darrelljs]

8-)!

Really, mostly .

Darrell

[darrelljs]

You know, the thing to do would be to find some way to integrate that tool into a mapscript so that it auto-balances.

Darrell

[zakalwe]

That's very cool, Novice.

You know, the thing to do would be to find some way to integrate that tool into a mapscript so that it auto-balances.

Darrell

Based on something I read about Civ5 I was under the impression that the Civ5 mapmaker kind of works like that; by building the land incrementally around the start positions.

You could envision an algorithm like this: randomly position the starts, reasonably spaced out. Then "pour" a certain amount of land onto each starting position and let it flow outwards in a somewhat random pattern, while gradually increasing the maximum allowed distance from the start. If or when the land butts against another player's land, simply flow in another "neutral" direction.

That way, you would end up with equal-sized spheres of influence, and could proceed to place resources in a balanced way within each sphere of influence.

[zakalwe]

Leaning on some theory, here's another way to formalize more or less the same thing:

1. Randomly place a set of N starting positions.

2. Compute the Voronoi diagram for the map based on those N points.

3. For each of the N starting positions, generate an equal-sized random land shape contained within its Voronoi cell, constituting its sphere of influence.

4. Place resources and terrain in a balanced way within each sphere of influence.

If you want swathes of wilderness, you could achieve this by generating some number of "phantom" starting positions, treated in the same way as the others, except that you don't actually place a player there when you're done. That could unbalance things though, since some players could have easier access to the wilderness than others.

[Square Leg]

If you want swathes of wilderness, you could achieve this by generating some number of "phantom" starting positions, treated in the same way as the others, except that you don't actually place a player there when you're done. That could unbalance things though, since some players could have easier access to the wilderness than others.

meh