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

[RefSteel]

Okay, I'll leave the first 15 alone after this until somebody actually says something. Here goes:

Start A:

Start B:

Start C:

Start D:

Start E:

Start F:

Start G:

Start H:

Start I:

Start J:

Start K:

Start L:

Start M:

Start N:

Start O:

[Erwin]

I checked all your starts, didn't find anything alarming. The only thing that I'd like to ask is that do you think wine vs incense is balanced? One comes at monarchy, the other at calendar. I'm not good enough at Civ 4 to be able to determine that.

[RefSteel]

Thanks, Erwin! I'll probably still make some small changes to P through U regardless, and I'll hope for feedback from more-veteran lurkers on the rest, but it's definitely good to have positive feedback. As for wine vs. Spices/Incense, good question! I don't feel qualified to answer it either, so I'm glad you brought it up. My argument in favor of wine would go along these lines:

In order for luxury placement to be "fair," either 1) every player must have ~equal access to wine and equal access to the same number of Calendar luxuries, OR 2) one must assume the necessary tech paths are balanced enough that wine is ~equivalent in value to a Calendar luxury and players need only have access to equal numbers of any Classical luxuries. In case 1, we would need to make sure everyone without a wine start can get access to another wine tile early (among other things) but would have to do that anyway unless we made wine unavailable on the starting landmass (as in PB37). In case 2, there is essentially no problem.

Dunno if this argument is sound though. My entire MP experience of late has been bouncing ideas back and forth with JR4 in his PB37 thread, which has been tremendously fun and enlightening for me, but not the same thing as actually playing.

[JR4]

Okay, so I`ve had a look at the starts. They seem pretty balanced to me.

All starts have 8 choppable forests and starts F,G and H have another forested lake. I`m not sure how to value that forest lake at 2/1/2. More health is good obviously and it`s a fairly good tile early on. 
All starts have 5 hills.
All starts have 14 river tiles if you count the forest lakes as rivers (added commerce).
All starts require 11 Worker turns to get the first two food improvements built. Only one tech is required to get those 2 first improvements built for every start.

It seems that you have let the starts have either 11 food/0 hammers/2 commerce or 10 food/2 hammers/2 commerce for the first two food sources.

Starts F and G have a commerce less than the rest. Maybe that forest lake is supposed to compensate for that but then start H has a 10/2/2 start which sounds better than a 11/0/1 start (F and G).
Starts D, E, I, N, O get 2 "free" Worker turns on flood plains. Start L gets 1. Is that a problem? The civs still need Agriculture..

That`s all I could think of for now.

[RefSteel]

Thanks for the feedback, JR4!

Starts F and G have a commerce less than the rest. Maybe that forest lake is supposed to compensate for that but then start H has a 10/2/2 start which sounds better than a 11/0/1 start (F and G).

Good catch. I was mostly not paying close attention to +/-1 commerce past the first improved tile (for instance, I think River Pigs + River Sheep is actually 11/0/3) and typing that out, I feel like that's not crazy, but I may be wrong there.

Starts D, E, I, N, O get 2 "free" Worker turns on flood plains. Start L gets 1. Is that a problem? The civs still need Agriculture..

Another good point. I again think this should be okay because I don't think anyone's going to want to actually spend 6 more worker turns to farm those fps with all the food already around (I was assuming they'd get cottaged) but a Churchill taking notes from GJ's PB37 strategy might want to farm everything in sight.

Can I get some other opinions? (Whether about the mangrove lakes, Wine vs. Incense vs. Spices, seconding JR4's points, noticing other problems, or telling me to leave things as they stand?)

[RefSteel]

Starts 16-25. I won't mess with these anymore unless/until I get comments here. Sorry it took me this long to get them all posted; I hope they look good!

Start P:

Start Q:

Start R:

Start S:

Start T:

Start U:

Start V:

Start W:

Start X:

Start Y:

[Mardoc]

First, sorry for disappearing on you guys like that.  Work's been crazy this week.  Looking likely crazy next week too but I have a deadline of the 19th so I can at least see a light at the end of the tunnel now.

General comments on the starts:

Ref, any chance you can take some of the least important tiles (maybe 3 per start?) and designate them for turning into [plains/tundra/desert/jungle] in order to make the BFC theme match the surroundings?  They all look pretty green to me.

All in all I do think they're well-balanced, though, and that's more important than thematic.

You're a little stingy with hills, but you're stingy to everyone so it's ok .

My comments on specifics pretty much come down to two themes
- A 6 food, 0 hammer tile is generally considered more valuable than a 5-1 tile or a 4-2 tile, especially for a capital. Using the judiciously generally lets you convert 1 food into more than 1 hammer, at least post-Granary - and your capital is the city that usually does most of the whipping. I would try to modify underlying terrain (hills, plains, etc) to make sure each player has at least one 6 food tile, even though that makes the starts a little more boring.
- A couple of the starts allow players to get all their resources if they move. We can make that fail, but I'd rather make that obviously a bad idea by rearranging resources.

4) One possibility is to make the areas around the grey lines much, much less attractive than the rest of the map:  No (decent) coastal islands, few or no food and luxury resources, few and scattered floodplains in the desert, no forests mixed into the jungle, a bunch of hills and peaks and unlighthousable lakes, and no early strategic resources.  Then they could be stuffed with late-game resources:  Lots of extra coal, oil, uranium and aluminum.  Sites that would never pay for themselves in the early game can become much more attractive with Bio farms and a host of previously-invisible resource tiles, especially after hitting the conqueror's plateau.  The trouble with this is that some civs (especially with Fin and/or India and/or running Serfdom) may go for the jungle version of this relatively early.

I don't think it's necessary to go this far.  If the pentagons are even simply noticeably richer, then everyone will tend to settle inward first.  They'll have older, more productive cities, on better land, at the inner frontier than the outer frontier.  Equally importantly - when considering conflict, one direction they have to travel further from their core, in order to contend over less valuable land with newer cities.  They'll tend to focus on their own pentagon first.  Once conflict starts, that becomes self-reinforcing - maybe someone would rather use their army on the far frontier but all their neighbors have armies in the middle.

Second...you don't want to constrain their choices too much.  A nudge in the direction of a more interesting game is one thing, but ultimately we want the story of the game to be the story of the players, not the reveal of the mapmakers' cleverness.  The main idea is to avoid overwhelming the players with too many threats early, but I feel like you're pushing for a definition of early that extends well into the medieval era.  Also - it seems to be much less fun for the other players if they can't affect mackoti while he swallows up his pentagon, then if they can affect him but he holds them off while swallowing up his pentagon.  Even if they realistically can't do much due to distance, the illusion of agency adds a lot of satisfaction.

Third - well, what exactly is the problem with letting someone get a reward for picking India or Serfdom?  Particularly Serfdom - that's a legitimate strategic choice open to everyone.

Can I get some other opinions? (Whether about the mangrove lakes, Wine vs. Incense vs. Spices, seconding JR4's points, noticing other problems, or telling me to leave things as they stand?)

Wine vs. Incense vs. Spices - there's probably some imbalance there, but it'll be lost in the noise of everything else.  Less significant than luck in the leader lottery, less significant than neighbors, less significant than the asymmetries required to make the map look semi-natural.  I do like the idea of giving the players another reason to settle in place.

Mangrove lakes:  I like them...but I would try to make sure they are second ring only.  It's a really good yield pre-worker, but only mediocre compared to improved tiles, so I want to minimize the period they're the best tile.

Then again, it's a Fishing start compensator, with an otherwise landlocked start, in a game big enough that it will be hard to avoid Fishing if unlucky.  So I think I'm talking myself out of that initial reaction, in the other direction - can you maybe add more of these?

I missed whether you put any strategic resources at the initial BFC; can't tell because you posted in-game screenshots instead of WB screenshots.  Which, granted, is more useful for the moment, since that's what the players will need and resources can be edited later.  I generally think that copper and horses should not be available at the capital but most/all of the other resources should be.  By the time coal/oil/etc are unlocked, every contender should have access to them.  We can do that outside the BFC, but it's easier to guarantee if we put them in the BFC's.

Other possible problems:

Start E, J:  Cows aren't generally considered as good as pigs or sheep.  Can we give these players a minor boost to make up for it?  Maybe turn a grassland into a floodplains, or give them an extra hill or mangrove lake?  Or a non-forested deer?
Start L isn't as good at pinning the player in place as others - player could move north without giving up anything but the plains hill.  Maybe move the corn south by a tile or two?
Start M:  Can you flatten one of the pigs?  Generally a 6/0/1 tile is considered stronger than 5/1/1, especially in an early city that will be doing a lot of   - and some of the starts have 2 x 6 food tiles.  6 + 5 isn't quite as nice as 6 + 6 but some variation is good anyway.
Start P, R, S:  I would turn a plains food into a grass food.  Similar reasoning as M

W: Moving northeast is tempting; maybe move the cows SW across the river?
X: Flatten a pig
Y: Tempting to move north. Maybe shove the rice 1 SW, and add a mangrove lake to irrigate it?

[Krill]

Some players have a 6 and 5 yield resource tiles as opposed to two 6 yield tiles.

I suggest those players get a forest on their ivory to make up the imbalance.

Also putting a forest on the lake is irrelevant really, flavour it thing that is fine if you want to do it.

[Cornflakes]

Here's an update on the map ... I believe I have addressed all the comments to date. To summarize the changes:

1. Added in seafood.
   
2. Increased food and strategic resource quantities, including a better distribution method to try and reduce bare spots
   
3. I have mildly bulged out the starting areas. Not sure how much we want to go before we get too many land tiles.
   
4. Fixed the tree graphics
   
5. Eliminated tiny galley-accessible islands [may be a couple random ones], consolidating all the islands into astro-accessible only
   
6. Added a few rows of water at the top and bottom
   

Maybe some other tweaks that I can't remember.

The attached zip file contains the following:

1. GJ's Debug for HTML view
   
2. Worldbuilder map file (for loading as a custom scenario)
   
3. Game save where I edited in a city in the rough layout. Didn't put much thought into it, but observed the "5 tiles from coast" and "minimum 12 tiles separation" and "5 rough pentagons layout". A couple of tiles need to be added at some of the starts to maintain 5 tiles from the coast but that's not too big a deal.
   

Some observations:

• The bends look a little cramped. Might be good to add another two rows to the outside coastline only around the bends. 
  
• The two ends don't feel quite as cramped, but the pentagons collapsed in from the sides and stretched out towards the top and bottom
  
• The middle seems to be about the right size now after the adjustment there.
  
• After accounting for the 12-tile spacing, the pentagon groups aren't all that far apart.
  

I'm hoping that one more round of edits on my end to the base map will be sufficient, and then I'll roll 3 or so, we pick the best of the 3 and start the final stage of hand-editing. Screenshots will be posted in the next couple of posts.

[Cornflakes]

Screenshots of the pentagon areas that I quickly WB'ed in to get a better feel of the layout: