January 19th, 2019, 01:27
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I've started working on the inner sea map. I layed out the player positions. As you can see I've already painted in some landbridges and the plains strip will become island chains later.
Right now I'm wondering if the distances between the players are equal and fair. I've counted the distance between close neighbors and it's 14 tiles (28 tiles for neighbors across island chains). But I feel that the neighbors across straight lines are closer then those across diagonal lines. What's your opinion?
January 21st, 2019, 13:19
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I think the issue here is that the middle player on each spoke is at a disadvantage: it has less of a sphere of influence than the people on the corners. With this set up, I'd expect the players on the corners to win: they've much less practical distance to defend because they can move across the landbridge via canals.
January 21st, 2019, 15:09
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I've adjusted my initial concept. Note that I will adjust this further, so that the island lines across the wrap are equal in distance to the inner sea island chains. I also will give every player a pocket of backline land.
January 26th, 2019, 11:10
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The problem with the last design was that I was not able to make all the distances via island chain the same length. With this new design every island chain has the same distance +/-1 tile.
January 26th, 2019, 11:24
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A small thing you have to be wary of if you want it to be super super balanced : 13 tiles in diagonal and 13 tiles straight are not exactly the same gameplay wise. In the first case, if your opponent is say 13 tiles directly to your NE, you can plant a city 4N of your cap, and it will still be 13 tiles from your enemy. Same for 4E. Only if you settle 4 tiles NE are you 9 tiles away from your enemy's capital. If your enemy is 13 tiles N of your cap, and you plant a city 4NE of your cap, that city is 9 tiles away from the enemy cap. Same with a city 4 tiles N and 4 tiles NW of your cap. Which means that you'll expand towards your enemy more rapidly.
In the case of your current map design the difference between the diagonal and the horizontal or vertical lines is mitigated by the narrowness of the land (you can basically only expand towards your enemy in a straight line, for example in the case of the two capitals in the SE of your map), but it's worth considering.
January 26th, 2019, 16:41
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Thanks for all the feedback so far.
I'm done with the basic landform and would do the BFCs next. Right now every player has around 154 tiles, but this number will likely go down a bit when I add mountains and lakes. I also plan to add some astro islands in the 4 bigger ocean areas, but I will leave them more or less for last. My reasoning is this: No balancing tool can accurately predict, who will own these islands, as ownership of these islands is not determined by distance to the players, but rather who gets to astronomy first.
January 27th, 2019, 16:31
(This post was last modified: January 27th, 2019, 16:31 by Charriu.)
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I started working on BFCs and I came up with the following two variants. 4 players will get the pig variant and 4 the agriculture variant.
Note that I gave the agriculture start one more health ressource then the pig start. I plan to eliminate this disadvantage by giving the agriculture start another dry plain wheat in their 5x5 and the pig start another sheep so that they both end up with the same amount of health resources.
January 28th, 2019, 06:30
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You could consider worker turns for your BFCs - pig and wheat both take five turns due to the hill, but then the agri start takes another 7 turns to improve corn while the second pig only takes 5 turns. You can equalise this by moving the forest S of the cap on the agri start somewhere else and swapping the floodplain on the pig start with a forest tile.
I wouldn't worry too much about evening up health resources - they aren't normally an early-game issue.
On distances to neighbours: The way the game treats distances is a little counter-intuitive. I *think* that a site 14 tiles N of your capital and 7W + 7S of an opponents won't say "Liberate" for either of you - ie the game considers that to be in the middle even though it looks a little odd to our eyes.
For most of the other purposes in the game diagonal border pops give the best example of how distance should be calculated, so for a distance of 4 tiles east the equivalent diagonal is 3Ex3N.
For 5 tiles east the equivalent is also 3Ex3N, but with a slightly different pattern.
So I'd use the border pops version when figuring out diagonal distances - is it Pythagoras' theorem? I can't remember. Good luck!
Completed: RB Demogame - Gillette, PBEM46, Pitboss 13, Pitboss 18, Pitboss 30, Pitboss 31, Pitboss 38, Pitboss 42, Pitboss 46, Pitboss 52 (Pindicator's game), Pitboss 57
In progress: Rimworld
January 28th, 2019, 08:05
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I guess it is Pythagoras. 3t NE would be sqrt(18) which is between 4 and 5 in distance, so it would make sense that both 4 and 5 tiles E would be characterized as 3 tiles NE (4 tiles NE is sqrt(32) which is higher than 5, 2 tiles NE is sqrt(8) which is lower than 3)
January 29th, 2019, 05:37
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(January 28th, 2019, 06:30)Old Harry Wrote: You could consider worker turns for your BFCs - pig and wheat both take five turns due to the hill, but then the agri start takes another 7 turns to improve corn while the second pig only takes 5 turns. You can equalise this by moving the forest S of the cap on the agri start somewhere else and swapping the floodplain on the pig start with a forest tile.
I wouldn't worry too much about evening up health resources - they aren't normally an early-game issue.
That's great feedback. Thanks.
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