[NO PLAYERS] WW err CIV6 Game 4

[Alhambram]

I see everyone has decent access to niter, horses, and iron.  Encampments will be required for some players, but I think it's become clear that those are always a good idea anyway.  Are there any other strategics that I haven't noticed by lurking, and hence haven't judged balance about?  In particular are there any naval strategic resources, or maybe late-era resources?

Coal is needed for ironclads (industrial age) and battleships (modern age), so everyone ought have a fairly easy access to coal (maybe except Woden since his Unique Unit is a replacement of battleship and don't need coal and moreover it comes earlier than battleship normally speaking).
Oil is for aircraft carrier.
Uranium is for nuclear submarine (note, it is a upgrade of normal submarine and U-boats, so don't deny Singaboy uranium in this case).

[Mardoc]

Coal is needed for ironclads (industrial age) and battleships (modern age), so everyone ought have a fairly easy access to coal (maybe except Woden since his Unique Unit is a replacement of battleship and don't need coal and moreover it comes earlier than battleship normally speaking).
Oil is for aircraft carrier.
Uranium is for nuclear submarine (note, it is a upgrade of normal submarine and U-boats, so don't deny Singaboy uranium in this case).

I guess these are a little more arguable, since the players should have had more opportunity to expand before they are required, but here's what I noticed:

Missing Coal: Japan has to stretch, might end up losing it. Everyone else is fine.
Missing Oil: Spain, Brazil (only if offshore oil requires deeper tech than land-based), Japan (stretch and lake-based, but maybe reachable), Norway.  Germany probably has the iceball oil by the time they need it.
Missing Uranium: Spain, England, Germany

I'd be inclined to sprinkle in more oil and uranium.  Although those only appear late-game, so might not be relevant and players' "natural" land has probably been conquered somewhat, it's still probably better to avoid the issue.

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If I'm reading the UI right, there's one more (Aluminum, I think - the silvery tubes) which everyone but Norway has good access to. This assumes that the orange-red background on a resource icon denotes strategic.

[Jabah]

Sullla, I'm confused by your philosophy here.  They asked for a map that favors naval combat, but I see three big edits that should push away from that: linking up the Norway and Germany islands to the main continent, and widening the English land bridge.  It seems to me that a player who completely ignores their navy can win this game; you're likely to end up with the Civ4 Terra map problem where the overseas stuff is nice to have but the mainland cores are what determines the game.

I second that and would respectfully suggest changing a few land tiles to sea to at least put everyone on its own smallish island.
You could (probably) leave a bigger island in the middle (if cutting it in a few pieces is too much work to do) that will be the main battlefield

[Ituralde]

I noticed that one Aluminum cluster as well, also it only seems to appear in deserts. Intersting.
Since it is needed for Fighters and Bombers I would recommend to have each player have access to it.

[Trasson]

Alright, sorry for the delay on this.

First, here's what's missing:



See how I've got that tile selected with "Random City State" set as its Start Position? You'll need to put one of those in at every location you want a City State to spawn at. Right now, there are none of these. You'll also want this as the last Worldbuilder step you do, just so it doesn't get messed up with further edits. Once that's done, you can just import Cornflakes' provided .csv files into the saved map file (anything capable of working with SQL Lite files will work. DB Browser is just the first Google result I grabbed). If the program is completely opaque to you, then get the first part done and upload the map file as you did before, and I or any other lurker can just import the .csv file into it for you.

From there, whoever's starting the PBEM game will just have to take the map file, save it over Balanced6.Civ6Map (Balanced4 might even work but why mess with reliability?) and start the PBEM game as they normally would, and it should work from there.

All of that should happen after you take any of the feedback you choose to into account. However, there is one thing I noticed that you only would with actually loading up the map as opposed to just looking at your screenshots.

Continents.



Antarctica is one of the three Continents on the map. It stretches from where you see all the way to the rest of the west half of the map, along with the southern polar regions.



Kernorland is what you see here along with all of the eastern side and islands.



Novopangaea is the northern side of the main landmass, the northern polar regions, and probably some other parts I missed.

There's two things of note here: Redcoats and the Foreign Trade civic. Brazil and Japan are both near the dividing lines for the three continents, while Germany and Norway are on different continents from England entirely, whereas Spain is not.


How to take Redcoats into account for continent balance? I have no idea. Foreign Trade is a bit easier to understand, though: Brazil and Japan are definitely getting that inspiration, while the others may or may not depending on where/what they scout with and if I've forgotten where some of the dividing lines are. That said, since the center map section is a bit disadvantaged due to being in the middle of it all, maybe this works out fine.

[Sullla]

Yeah, see this is turning into what I didn't want it to be, which is doing significant map edits in the Editor. Until you guys start rolling maps yourselves, you have no idea how bad the random stuff is for purposes of balance. I took the best map that I could find in an hour of working on this and then made some minor edits to smooth it out from a playability standpoint. That's what I volunteered to do, make small edits to a random map, not hand-craft a full map in that crummy Civ6 map editor. I agree that there are problems with this map, but I'm not spending hours working on this.

I'm very willing to hand this off to someone else at this point. Now that Trasson has outlined the process, why don't one of you volunteer to create the map? You guys sound like you know what should be in there more than I do. Good luck.

[Sullla]

Thank you Trasson. Those additional tidbits are extremely helpful in terms of changing the Worldbuilder into a finished product.

As far as the rest of this thread... pretty much what I thought. Everyone's willing to be a critic, but no one's willing to invest time and energy into solving the problem. Well, it looks like we have no takers on my request for someone else to create their own map, so once again the organizing work falls to me. I will incorporate Trasson's suggestions and do a bit more work on the map tonight, probably converting the main continent into three separate islands since that's what the commenters seem to want.

Don't expect me to create any more maps; this has already turned into a process that I didn't want to take part in.

[Cornflakes]

Thank you Trasson. Those additional tidbits are extremely helpful in terms of changing the Worldbuilder into a finished product.

As far as the rest of this thread... pretty much what I thought. Everyone's willing to be a critic, but no one's willing to invest time and energy into solving the problem. Well, it looks like we have no takers on my request for someone else to create their own map, so once again the organizing work falls to me. I will incorporate Trasson's suggestions and do a bit more work on the map tonight, probably converting the main continent into three separate islands since that's what the commenters seem to want.

Don't expect me to create any more maps; this has already turned into a process that I didn't want to take part in.

Sullla,
Thanks for the effort you put into this. Having rolled dozens of maps trying to figure out how to make World Builder work I can appreciate the difficulty both of rolling a halfway decent map to start with, and the cumbersomeness of the World Builder.

I also have to agree with the comments about a single starting landmass not being what the players were looking for. I'm willing to take a shot at this tonight.

[Mardoc]

Sullla, that's ridiculous.  I assumed you were asking for input, and would take some of my suggestions and ignore or disagree with the rest, because that's how every other map thread at RB has worked.  Your comments on the worldbuilder's usability issues were a large part of why I put my suggestions in different categories, ranging from small changes (adding strategic resources) to large ones (philosophy of the map), so that you could perform triage based on your available time.  Perhaps if you change your mind, next time you can start the lurker thread with a disclaimer that you're posting for information only, not feedback.

It's true that I didn't volunteer to improve the map myself.  I wasn't at all convinced your offer was serious, and it would be rude to try to take your project from you, let alone to claim any credit for the work you've already done.  Plus, honestly, the map is playable as is, even though I think it may not give the players the exact experience they think they're getting, and I don't think I know Civ6 well enough to be the final call on a map at this point anyway.  Maybe I will be able to do more for a future game, if I can find the time and budget to jump into the game myself rather than continue to lurk.

Finally, why post the rant here, where the people who care most (OleDavy, Archduke, etc) can't see it?  There is nothing spoilerish in the information that (some) lurkers think there's room to improve the map.  That is as much of a universal as lurkers wanting to see blood.

[Cornflakes]

On my lunch break I made a quick script to roll and save maps, also saving a screenshot of each. Let it do it's thing in the background for a few hours and then I browsed quickly through the folder full of screenshots (looking only at the mini maps) until I found one with geography that looked promising. I think I've got one that will work. I'll make a few tweaks and post screenshots in a bit.