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

[Cornflakes]

1) Are we talking 5-9 rows of ocean on each of the top and bottom? Or combined total?
2) Strats will be increased, specifically weighted towards those resources
3) Ok, I'll double the food. With a purely random distribution that I'm using there are bound to be clumps, but like you said it will be easier to delete some from clumps
4) Forgot to address the forests

*I noticed that there are no horses on the map. It seems that GJ's program does not seem to have horses as a defined type that I can assign. Horses will need to be manually added throughout the map. Putting this here so we don't overlook and give everyone a map without horses

TL;DR I'll get an updated set of a couple maps with the above, might be a couple days.

[RefSteel]

Water rows are the combined total - they can be split ~half in the north and ~half in the south.  Also the 5-9 figure includes the rows that include of land-adjacent coast.

On missing horses, heh - no wonder the strategics looked so sparse.  I'm planning (among other things) to go through all the starting areas once we know where they'll be on the map to make sure they have at least one each of Copper, Horse, Iron, Coal, Oil, Uranium, and Aluminum at least twice as close to their start as to any neighbor's, but that's something to do manually and later in the process.

[RefSteel]

Three more BFCs, completing the ones in this savefile:

Start M:

Start N:

Start O:

And the WB save file I've been using, now updated with these three, is attached. If I get a chance to build any more starts, I'll put them on a separate map.

[EDIT: Slightly modified starts F, G, and H, just swapping the positions of a grassland forest with a plains forest in each. Updated file attached, though the pictures upthread don't reflect the changes.]

[RefSteel]

Trying to wrap my head around the start positions for this; explanation when I have a chance....

[Cornflakes]

My thoughts were something similar. I like the groups of 5 with mountain range buffering the center. I had slightly different positions penciled in:

   

The middle grouping was the one that I kept having issues with whenever I looked at the start positions. My layout stretched the southern group with 4 along the outside coast and just one towards the inside coast to allow a little more room in the center. The one I put the "X" on currently lands in the sea and I hadn't considered adding some land. But looking at your sketch I do think it would be better to bulge that middle section out a bit more and keep the more pentagon-shaped groupings. I already have a function build that expands just a specific region of the coastline so at this point it's not that big a deal to add a little more land to the center when I go back to make the other tweaks discussed.

[Krill]

Just be wary of you leave gaps between the groups of 5, with that layout one person in each group is significantly more.cramped.than anyone else.

[RefSteel]

Trying to think this through out loud:

Just be wary of you leave gaps between the groups of 5, with that layout one person in each group is significantly more.cramped.than anyone else.

Good point. Alternate suggestions are welcome, as are additional warnings and criticism, and I do think that there should be less space between "pentagons" than shown on my mock-up. Also, though the circle Cornflakes crossed off is the one most obviously in the ocean, several of the circles I drew on the map are less than five tiles from the coast. So:

1) If it's easy to bulge out specific sections, that's great! It might actually be best to bulge out all of the starting "pentagon" areas to allow the civs to start further apart (and therefore closer to the next "pentagon") without squeezing the "pentagons" out of shape or pushing a civ into the sea. Squeezing them out of shape is bad because it changes the yellow distance (distance to each next-nearest neighbor) relative to the green distance (to the nearest neighbors) - which could be unbalancing if we don't cut off the center of each "pentagon" with mountains. Speaking of which:

2) Although I drew them in peak color, I don't think it's actually necessary or even preferable to make the centers of the "pentagons" impassible if you're able to make #1 work. (If we do go with impassable centers, that makes it easier to balance having groups of 4 or 6 in some regions instead of 5 in each, because everyone has only two early neighbors regardless of the size of their "group.") In fact, I think it might be preferable to have a "central" zone of general conflict for each group to allow more complex interactions between players. My point with the brick-red and especially grey lines was that lakes and/or peaks could be added in those regions to compensate for the extra land I wanted to add to make room for civs that would otherwise be too close to the coast, while keeping the total number of usable land tiles relatively unchanged.

3) Distance alone won't do it, but I feel like each "pentagon" should be a strategically separate entity at least through the early-mid game. By the time Mackoti has overrun two neighbors with HAs and Knigs, the remaining neighbor distances will be more fluid anyway, but at least until Astro, I think everybody should be facing basically the same number of "real" neighbors. A Pindicooter-moves-to-CFCland type of invasion could cross by land and/or galley to the "wrong" pentagon, but that should be a weird and unusual case.

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.

5) Another version would be to split the continent into separate landmasses around some or all of the grey lines, with galley connections possible via one- to two-tile islands without any resources - not even seafood. Even Darius with the Colossus would be hard pressed to justify planting a city on that, even when it isn't a peak or an oasis. It doesn't work with "normal" islands though because then you end up with certain civs being cramped and/or certain other civs needing to compete with more different neighbors for islands than the rest. (Relatedly, unless we do just break the whole thing up into five landmasses, I think the Galley-accessible islands should be few and relatively uncontested in general on this map, with the big islands and some surrounding ones unavailable until Astro/Carracks.)

6) Some of these changes would be fairly simple to do by hand; others less so. Regardless, please point out ways in which my thinking on this is insane!

[Cornflakes]

My preference would be to keep it a single landmass. I will be easier to make the connecting land more barren than figure out how to break it up with canals ... plus I remember the sign-up thread specifically discouraging narrow channels on the map. In combination with expanding the pentagon areas I can pinch in the connecting areas to compensate on the land area (at least on the sides, the middle connecting areas will be difficult to pinch in just because of the logistics around the bends).

It will be easy enough to make the big islands astro-only. In fact, I'll do that and if we want to add in a couple of strategically located tiny islands to make them galley-accessible we can add them by hand. I will keep the big islands on the inside of the bends separate and galley-accessible to each other, but astro-accessible from the mainland.

By the way, how does one start a game with more than 18 players? I tried last weekend but even in with the mod loaded the largest game I could start was 18 players.

[RefSteel]

All of that sounds good to me!

If nothing else, it's possible to turn an RtR WBSave file into a >18 player game just by using a text editor to add the player information (and starting units on the relevant tiles) for Players 18 - 24. There may be a way to do it from in the game and/or GJ's tool too, but I haven't explored those yet. (I'm also having trouble getting my copy of GJ's Mapcad to load the mod, so I've just been working with images and the game's World Builder so far.)

[RefSteel]

Okay, it took me until this morning. Nevertheless:

Start P:

Start Q:

Start R:

Start S:

Start T:

Start U:

All are included in the "6 more starts" WBfile, along with unmodified placeholder starts for the 4 I haven't build yet. [EDIT: I'll also post a slightly-updated-from-the-one-lately-posted-here second draft of the first set of 15 civs below, now with updated images! Because without outside feedback, I keep going back and criticizing my own work!]