Ack! I hope all the extra real-life work doesn't last too long, Cornflakes (and/or that you get a lot more recognition and compensation for it!) - in the meantime, I'll do what I can with the amazing map you've created. (And who knows? Maybe Mardoc will reappear and have a little time to help out!)
Erwin, thanks very much for the analysis with novice's tool! I don't think I'm going to actually move any of the starts anymore except as a last resort, but I'll definitely look at your other suggestions. I actually want to minimize symmetry insofar as that's possible while neither unbalancing things nor making major map changes, so don't worry about that. My next steps for now are going to be completing all the starts (making them match the screenshots apart from some of the corner tiles, adding horses, extending rivers to the coasts, and raising or sinking land so no one is right on top of the coast) but I may try putting a bay ~between K and H to give K's river something to flow into. I'll do the minimum necessary on this pass though, and my next pass will be for strategic resource distribution. (All unless Mardoc or another volunteer shows up and beats me to it.) All of that will affect balance enough that I'll want to see how everything's changed since then before actually attacking imbalances head-on. Seeing the results from Novice's balance checker at each of the steps along the way is really helpful though, as I can see how it's affected by each of the changes!
Also, I see that all the picks are in; I'll try to put together a post in the organizing thread shortly with info on what everybody chose.
- Finished initial river/coast shaping pass for all starts, with the caveat that K and N were way too far inland, so I wound up turning a bunch of their neighbor land into islands which arre going to play havoc with the map balancing tools until I cut them down a bunch more and add islands for other starts.
- Finished initial resource pass for starts A through H. Those eight should now have good access to all strategicss (not counting stone and marble) and hopefully more-nearly-appropriate food access. More tomorrow, to be probably followed by an island-building pass which will also involve further changes to the coastline.
(February 1st, 2018, 10:55)BRickAstley Wrote: Is there a list of specific items left to be done? Making no promises but I might could help out a bit in the next few days.
Yes, please, if you do have time that would be amazing!
No list explicitly created yet, but the easiest thing to describe is the current pass:
- Make sure every start has at least one "back lines" copper reasonably close, but off river and not in the BFC. Turn "forward" copper into later strat resources.
- Make sure every start has at least one each of iron, coal, oil, uranium, and aluminum close by (meaning at least twice as close to them as to any other civ).
I've done [EDIT: A first pass on this] for locations A-H already (as marked with signs on the map) but I haven't gone over any of I through Y yet (also with signs on the map). Everyone already has fourth-ring ~back-line horses though (if I didn't make a mistake). [EDIT: Looking over the mapchecker results, some of the copper/horses/iron in A-H are not well placed. I was working on it too late at night. So going over the whole map would be a good idea actually.] [SECOND EDIT: Missing so many things on that pass annoyed me, so I have a detailed action plan for dealing with starts A-H now that I can execute quickly. I'll fix those tonight.]
My next pass was going to be [EDIT: adding a bunch of small islands; it's okay if they're contested given this setup if we can get decent coastal access for everybody] that won't allow galley access to the existing big islands even with border pops. [EDIT: H and K and their neighbors already kind of have islands nearby but they're artifacts of the river-adding part of the process, not intentionally-designed for this purpose, so I haven't looked at them closely.]
Making a specific list of needed changes is a good idea and I'll try to post one later today.
Also, you're an excellent mapmaker and you don't need permission from me to do stuff you think will help as long as you communicate when you're working on the map and what you've changed!
Also: I just checked the results from Mapcad's balance checker for the map I posted last night, and start position K was under 200 average land tiles and within two standard deviations of the mean!!! [EDIT: In fact, only one start was more than two standard deviations from the mean on average land tiles - position W was way too low at 115.61 - and I think that will be repaired relatively easily.] There will be more changes (partly described in the next post up) that will affect this in one direction or the other, but it's proof we can get that start (and the other outliers) under control without moving their relative positions!
Do you have a screenshot of what you did creating the galley-islands on the inside of the bends? My concern with adding galley islands to the rest of the starts is that it will probably be a solid couple of sessions to add them, check them, adjust them. And it also adds more land to an already large map. How much value would the tiny galley islands add add to the map?
I don’t necessarily have a problem leaving the islands that were created already. I also don’t think it is all that bad if a couple of players have much worse access to the coast early on (e.g. K). By the time they get to Astronomy, borders will be more fluid, players eliminated or on the way out. The game at it’s core is about leveraging the surroundings.
Cornflakes: I didn't create galley islands on the inside of the bends: I sank land near (~northwestish of) starts N and K which were both landlocked, but I sank only a ~one tile path, leaving the original map's land intact beyond that, so that land now constitutes galley islands instead of being part of the mainland. Unless we give islands to everyone though, these islands will need to be sunk: Domestic Intercontinental trade routes are a powerful economic bonus, especially with OB at Alphabet. Also, if we do sink these islands instead of giving islands to everybody, early commerce is going to be even tighter than it already is on Huge/Monarch, again because Domestic ICTRs won't be available. [EDIT: I don't have any screenshots; sorry! It will be hours at least before I can create and post some.]
(I added a billion edits to the post I made too quickly above, but it's probably safe to ignore them; they're mainly there so I know where I'm at.)
Here's my list of Stuff That Still Needs Doing:
The first three or even four can be combined in any way you want. Or we can separate them more, and just e.g. make sure of one strategic resource at a time. The main thing is just to post here when you're taking the save and working on it (I think I failed to do this at least last night; I don't think it messed anyone up this time, but I'll make sure to do so going forward; sorry!) and post the save afterward with at least a brief word about what you did with it. So:
1) Strat Resource Check: Make sure everybody has access to all the strategic resources. Make sure that neither copper nor horses are in the capital BFC, nor "in between" teams where a Pink Dot city planted in a neighbor's face would be able to grab one of them as well. It's fine for other resources to be "in between" of course, as long as everyone has "their own" source of the important military ones.
2) Island-Building: **IF WE ARE DOING THIS! See above!** Create smallish galley-reachable islands that won't themselves allow galley access to the big astro islands, and make sure that all players have reasonable access to the islands. These can have additional copper or horses even "in between" players, and can even have a player's only accessible copy of marble, stone, or a late game strategic resource as long as access is appropriate.
3) Luxury Check: Make sure everyone has access to similar numbers of similarly-valuable ancient luxuries (e.g. lots of tundra furs are not as good as lots of grassland gems) and luxuries in general.
4) Overall aesthetics and Global Warming pass: When all of the above is done, and/or in the process of doing the above, I want to make things look as natural as possible while adding more kelp forests, mangroves, and mountain taiga (i.e. forests on water and peak tiles) to help keep global warming in check for the late game.
5) Final balance pass: After everything else is done, use Mapcad's balance checker and/or novice's tool (hopefully Erwin will continue posting the results from that and/or link to a working copy of the tool itself) to identify too-weak or too-strong starting positions, especially weak starts with many neighbors or strong starts with few, and adjust accordingly. I think this will mostly involve things like switching jungles to forests and vice-versa, moving food tiles and maybe peaks, and making adjustments to the coastline. I'd be inclined to add a mountain range and a bay to ensure that nobody has five neighbors, but I think I'm the only one of the main mapmakers who wanted that, so I'll make do with less-extreme measures.
6) Final sanity check: After all of the above has been done, I figure we'll post images here for any and all lurkers to look over and make sure we haven't missed anything important. If nobody catches anything, we'll declare it done.
Also: I'm taking the save now. If BRick (or anyone else) has time to play with it in the meantime, let me know! I'll be balancing the strat resources; I won't mess with islands unless I have time after that, and I'll probably combine it with looking at luxuries if I do anything with it tonight.
Also also: Cornflakes, here's an image with the two islands created by the straits I drew for starts K and N. The islands in question are near the top right and bottom left of the image. Part of one of the Astro islands is also visible in the top left, of course. There's no chance that those two galley islands will still look quite like this when the map is ready; this is just what happened when I drew in the straits.
Here's the latest WBSave. Since the last one, I renamed all the leaders with their map reference letters (the ones that appear on the signs; note these letters are NOT the letters assigned to the BFC screenshots!) to make it easier to see which start is which on the balance reports. And I continued the strategic resource pass, which is taking me a lot longer than I hoped because there's so much to look at and deal with. I've now gotten through start O, so that's theoretically 60% finished (with this pass). Whether we end up with any galley islands on the map might just come down to timing - but I really want to include them if I can, and I think I know of a quick way to do it. We'll see.
I'm curious about what Mapcad's balance checker will say now, particularly about the westmost civs (the ones that I've updated with strat resources and whose neighbors have likewise been updated) but that'll have to wait for the morning.
![[Image: artifacts.JPG]](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vrLcdNykeZQ/WnQavZ6Z8nI/AAAAAAAAElM/bmGnZK4zuPYzPsRAaqikm5BdGo9FOkzOACLcBGAs/s1600/artifacts.JPG)