We'll spoiler initial thoughts in case of mistaken clicks:
Initial Map Concept: colors are intended areas each player will be encouraged to settle initially
Some ideas I'm running with right now:
Since it's a game of Commodore's prompting and I've seen no orders otherwise requesting the map, I am trying to strike a balance between "hand crafted naturalism" and "mirrored balance", leaning towards naturalism. As the players move away from the middle the map will get less symmetrical.
Idea is to have the original island split by lakes and peaks with the neighbor encouraged to settle towards the neighboring island's back half.
Room for 3ish cities on the starting portion of the island before galleys are needed. Perhaps this is too low? Right now we're looking at ~30 tiles for the main part of the starting island and another ~15 tiles blocked off that their neighbor is encouraged to settle towards.
I think I want to encourage settling the capital off of coast to slow game down / prevent boating of capitals.
Leaning towards leaving the middle empty, maybe a couple 1-tile spots for people to use as forward bases post-Astronomy.
Beyond the starting circle, branches of islands with ocean between to open up additional avenues of conflict after Astronomy. Leaning towards not having additional large islands besides the initial 5.
Pre-Optics Magellan will be obtainable only by using a settler on some far-flung barren rock to pop borders across otherwise impassable tiles.
I tried running what I've done so far through GermanJoey's balancing tool but ran into Perl errors. What recommendations do past mapmakers have for balancing tools? I'd like to see if the concepts I'm working off of are playing out in theory
Looks interesting (but note I tried something similar with overseas cores for PB25 and that didn't turn out well) - how do you plan to make sure players get "their" bit of the other continents? Blocking with sea ice would stop all interaction pre-astro, so do you
- put the capital on the edge of the continent?
- make the middle of each continent less lush, pushing players onto the more attractive island chains?
- make long island chains around sea ice?
- or some simpler method I haven't thought of?
Will there be opportunities for canals to sail through the central lakes and cause havoc?
I'd suggest more space for cities on the initial continent, but I suppose if everyone has to get sailing early that could help prevent early boating incidents.
I haven't used Joey's tool - does it cope okay with island maps?
Joey's tool doesn't care what kind of map it is, but there are some lines of code that you may have to change a bit to get it working correctly, depending on your machine's configuration (I think?). It should all/mostly be in the tutorial to which he posted links in the thread where he introduced the tool, although I had to do a bit of inference to get a couple of things working right when I tried it out on the PB36 map. If all else fails, if you post the WB file, I should be able to run the tool on it myself and post the results here. (Or, well, I think GJ said he'd look over things too. He surely has more facility with his tool than I do!)
Blocking off the "back end" of each island completely with lakes and peaks seems gimmicky and far from a "natural" look. Also ... is there realistically any difference between that and separating the starting area from the neighbor's natural expansion target with, you know, seawater?
[EDIT: To be clear, that last question is not meant to be rhetorical; I'm just having trouble envisioning what you're going for - perhaps because it's 3AM here....]
Yeah, part of the reasoning with small continents was to make it so people were pushed sooner towards galleys. But even then the starting continents probably need room for 5-6 cities. Otherwise it's going to be very slow out of the gate with people not having anything to build while they wait for the right technologies to finish (depends on starting resources also). But I have to imagine everyone who goes into a tiny islands script has to mentally be thinking that sailing is a higher priority than normal.
As for partitioning the starting islands, today I'm thinking that's too gimmicky. The idea was to lead players to conflict against each other more than thinking they had to settle certain areas. Also, trying to place 5 people in a circle in the "middle" of a 64×40 map is a bit of a pain in the ass. Probably too many fundamental difficulties to overcome.
In fact, with this being my first endeavor and all I'm strongly considering evenly spacing everything out like it was in pbem26. Just put everyone 8 up and 13 over on a toroid. Not very natural but easier to give people options and less worries about someone being boxed out because their neighbors both happened to settle towards them.
As for Joey's tool, I was getting an error that I needed to install XML::SAX, of which I only spent about 15 minutes trying to solve. I'll either sort it out or get a map up here
I think you're overthinking this. With a tiny islands script in mind, there's no particular need to make sure everyone has a 'fair share' - mobility will be high as soon as they get galleys out, and everyone should be able to claim a fair portion anyway due to simple logistics. The main thing I'd focus on is keeping oceanic barriers to a minimum (although have a few for making tactics interesting) so that people tend to spread out in blobs instead of being forced to a particular direction, and making sure to provide strategic resources on islands that are close to the starts. Hammers may be a little constrained, so be extra generous with hills and forests and hammer-resources. Also, maybe focus the starting island food on Fishing resources so that people naturally want to be close to Sailing research with ports built.
I think there will be plenty of war. If you can cut off a border island from reinforcements or hit it by surprise, you can have a successful limited war a lot more easily than if everything is overlapping city culture with a catapult stack wandering around on roads.
A trick I've found lately is to be extra-generous with strategics, in order to let yourself be stingy with happy and health resources. After the first copper, any additional sources are just yield boosts. If something is going to be rare and worth fighting over, it's better to be the sole source of gold than restricted copper: you can lose that battle without becoming instantly crippled. You've got the extra challenge of making sure that all boat-related strategics are easy to get with blind settling (including land-based oil).
I don't think toroid is necessary, since it's relatively easy for everyone to affect each other. No real way to block trade, only need at most one Open Border to reach anyone you want to smack down.
I've used Joey's tool quite successfully; I think novice made one too. But in terms of balance, nothing beats eyeballs.
(July 3rd, 2017, 09:17)Mardoc Wrote: I think you're overthinking this. With a tiny islands script in mind, there's no particular need to make sure everyone has a 'fair share' - mobility will be high as soon as they get galleys out, and everyone should be able to claim a fair portion anyway due to simple logistics.
Surely not: Maintenance costs are still a thing, and longer seaborne supply lines are an even bigger factor than land-based ones because everything has to travel by galley - meaning players with more awkward supply lines will need more ships, will be limited to fewer units (including workers and settlers) for longer on new islands, or both. Mobility is also higher only in special circumstances: When the number of galleys available is small and the distance to the newest settlements is long, everything has to crawl forward at two spaces per turn - half the speed of a settler or horse unit on a road.
Quote:The main thing I'd focus on is keeping oceanic barriers to a minimum (although have a few for making tactics interesting) so that people tend to spread out in blobs instead of being forced to a particular direction, and making sure to provide strategic resources on islands that are close to the starts. Hammers may be a little constrained, so be extra generous with hills and forests and hammer-resources. Also, maybe focus the starting island food on Fishing resources so that people naturally want to be close to Sailing research with ports built.
I completely agree with all of this. In particular, with regard to "oceanic barriers," if a pair of islands with coastal connections to each other e.g. east to west but with open ocean to (in this case) the north and south between them, those islands control or span a "choke point," kind of like a narrow isthmus on a land map. Also, I'd emphasize Mardoc's point that it's best not to force (or push) players in a particular direction intentionally.
Also note a coastal capital can't be boated out of the fog if its coast is the middle of a long, narrow strait (as long as the strait is long enough and narrow enough toward the ends) or a gulf.
Quote:I think there will be plenty of war. If you can cut off a border island from reinforcements or hit it by surprise, you can have a successful limited war a lot more easily than if everything is overlapping city culture with a catapult stack wandering around on roads.
Also very true. With no roads in the water, all boats have Commando.
Quote:A trick I've found lately is to be extra-generous with strategics, in order to let yourself be stingy with happy and health resources. After the first copper, any additional sources are just yield boosts. If something is going to be rare and worth fighting over, it's better to be the sole source of gold than restricted copper: you can lose that battle without becoming instantly crippled. You've got the extra challenge of making sure that all boat-related strategics are easy to get with blind settling (including land-based oil).
The only problem with this is that all these strategics are invisible until you get the relevant tech. This means your map is pretty bare for initial settling options, it's too easy to accidentally settle in what turns out to be a lousy spot - and if players don't know to expect this in advance, arbitrarily rewards players for taking a particular already-trite tech path (Bronze Working in particular doesn't need any more of an incentive) with a lot more information and options on the map. On the other hand, spamming ivory everywhere would be a great idea. In particular, in a game where Wellies aren't banned, no matter which mod (if any) is being used, I think ivory should exist either at the capitals, in vast abundance, both, or nowhere (pre-Astro) at all.
Quote:I don't think toroid is necessary, since it's relatively easy for everyone to affect each other. No real way to block trade, only need at most one Open Border to reach anyone you want to smack down.
Plus, if you make it a Toroid, Commodore will instantly regret organizing the game. If I were making the map, I'd be inclined to have a lot of one-tile straits, small and large, between densely packed islands around the players' starts. I would try to arrange the five players around the center of a cyllindrical map though, with Caravels needed to circumnavigate. Magellan's is just too powerful on an island map to let someone land it in the era when it increases all their boats' speed by 50%.
Quote:I've used Joey's tool quite successfully; I think novice made one too. But in terms of balance, nothing beats eyeballs.
(July 4th, 2017, 10:16)Krill Wrote: Commodore made the PB18 map right?
Put everyone on on one continent except Com, then shove him in an island chain somewhere.
Ah, Realms Beyond: a model of what a truly civilised Internet could be, given intelligence and goodwill. Except for map-making. There the gloves come off...
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Sorry, I have been my own worst enemy at points with this by trying to make a map that does everything. I've attached a preview build that has the main areas built, has most of the areas between players built.
In the end I cut back on the naturalism in favor of not wanting to screw over a player awfully. And even ended mirroring starts down to most of the starting island. I liked the idea of abundant strategic resources and fighting over luxuries so I've gone for that philosophy (and I'll be adding more strategic than what I've already done). As I got farther away from the players I got more comfortable in branching out a bit more, but I still ended up keeping a pattern over a natural design.
Some things I'm wondering about:
Marble and Stone? I'm leaning towards yes on stone, no on marble, simply because of Moai. Or I could put marble on an Astronomy-only island
Do I have enough connections between players?
Downside of this choice of map design is that I can't stop Magellan. I did my best to frustrate efforts. If I could start again with the same design I'd make each player's capital a choke-point so at least people would have the opportunity to snipe other players' work boats.
Not a fan of what I've done with metal happiness so far. Expect those to be changed, so if you have ideas please share
