Lurking - The Not-So-Silent Service

[Kaiser]

Ok there was quite some feedback and there is a consensus of the map being close/similar to PBEM20, here is the PBEM20 map again: (thanks TBS for being very organized and having the worldbuilder file in the thread)



Red: Japan/England
Yellow: Russia/Australia
Blue: Phoenicia/Norway
Purple: China/Indonesia

And here is the current work state I am at on the map I rolled:



The most obvious differences are in my eyes:
- PBEM22 map has more usable land as it has no ice and cropped poles/few deserts
- PBEM22 map has less ocean more travelling paths before navigation (outside of the ocean line in the N, which could be fixed)
- PBEM22 map has more islands/obstacles and less direct travelling lanes
- PBEM22 map has less open areas for frontal engagements (this is a big point as I think people were enjoying the tactic puzzles in these fights and the PBEM22 map will offer more land chokes meaning likely a defenders advantage)

I think I should precise here my statement with the deliberate changes. I think these above changes make for a more balanced and interesting game, but it is very well possible that this deviating to far from the players expectations.
It definetly is possible to reduce the amount of islands and increase the amount of ocean, this will reduce pre navigation travelling lanes and give Norway more dominance based on it not being reliant on Navigation.

Here are the start areas in detail:









(yellow has already seen some minor changes for the SE city)

Here are my thoughts:
- These are not yet balanced for terrain or ressource, but rough sketches for 6 city starting islands.
- I will revisit to make sure that there are 6 settling options with max 2 water tiles.
- I might revisit that everybody has a lake to hide units in if you think that should be balanced as well.
- Each player pair is close by, with 2-3 islands in between (black S island probably needs to be fractured/partially removed), we could put 1 or 2 CS on these or leave them open for relatively easy defendable expansion sites

What do you guys think about team spacing?
In between Islands?
The PBEM22 differences to this PBEM20?

[Jabah]

Just 2 random comments (not sure how easy it could be to adjust, or even if needed )

1. Seems to be a lot of small islands (and coast around) that make the map very different.
Would it be possible to remove all the 1 and 2 tiles (and possibly 3 tiles) islands and turn some coast around them into deep sea ?

2. Yellow and Black stating areas are probably too close to each other (compare to others).
It probably would be better if Black players were also horizontaly (East-West) same as all other 3 teams.

[suboptimal]

Overall I like the map. I think red & purple having large islands between their home islands makes up for the other large islands being closer to yellow & black. I also think that each of the four teams gets one (or both) of "their" city-states placed on the nearby tundra islands, if only to reduce desireability. I agree about each player getting a lake to hide naval units in.

The number of islands and chokepoints might give a slight bit of a defenders' advantage but OTOH does it open up other strategies regarding attacks?

Breaking up that line of ocean to the NE is probably also a good idea.

I think the black S island being a bit larger makes up for black not having much in the way of large islands between the two start positions and having nothing within easy reach that can support more than one city. If you want to cleave something off that island I think there should be something close by that can support two cities - all other starts have such a land mass within two tiles of their starting island.

[Kaiser]

I think bruindane is right with the position of team black, I changed their home island layout to be horizontal.



Here is the current state of the map, the islands have received the first balance pass, but are not counted in tiles and 2nd city site yields.





Gold in 2 pictures






Please have a look at the islands and look for:
- glaring imbalances
- ressource distribution mistakes (each island should have 2 of each strategical ressource (1 Uranium), Cotton, Incense, Dye and 8-10 bonus ressources on land)
- please double check campus locations (vents and reefs included)
- the capital locations are marked with a star

I did not do any changes on the non-player islands!

I am looking forward to your feedback

@Bruindane:
It would be possible to replace 1 tile islands with ocean, it would actually not be to difficult. I personally like the map and would be more intrigued to play on it than on a more open setup but we can always manipulate the map as well, even though the players requested minimal manipulation outside of balance

[RefSteel]

I've never played Civ6 and followed the games here only sporadically and unsuccessfully, but I'd like to emphasize a few comments here:

I think V2 and V3 are most representative of what the players expect, and both look pretty to someone who has no idea how the map will affect gameplay.

(This is especially important because it was posted before players started making post-pick map directives.)  The main difference between this map and those two (and the main difference between this map and PbeM20's) in my eyes is the number of landmasses:  Those maps had a lot - it looks to me like somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 - but this map has hundreds!

My biggest comment after looking at the samples that you posted are that those maps appear to be polka-dotted with tiny 1-3 tile islands and the "main" starting islands are snaky. Whereas PBEM20 had blob starting islands with small-but-not-tiny islands between. Maybe PM TBS and see if he remembers what script was used for that map? Also Civ6 map scripts are relatively simple to hijack and manipulate the landform generator suit what you are looking for (as I did for PBEM 7) while still keeping it mostly random. In fact I think I even developed a "teamer islands" script. That was 5 years ago though (:yikes:) so it may take a couple days to dig that back up refresh my memory on what I did.

If you want a map that's minimally-edited and similar to PbeM 20, I think these suggestions from Cornflakes are the way to go.  There are alternate solutions that could presumably be done "naturally"/procedurally, like Jabah's suggestion:

1. Seems to be a lot of small islands (and coast around) that make the map very different.
Would it be possible to remove all the 1 and 2 tiles (and possibly 3 tiles) islands and turn some coast around them into deep sea ?

(I would start by changing all islands with less than 3 tiles, and all coast adjacent to such islands if not also adjacent to another landmass, to ocean...)  The problem though is that this doesn't solve the problem of having so little inland space.  If I were writing a script for it, I'd actually want to do this to something like 90% of the one-tile islands, 80% of the two-tile islands, 70% of the three-tile islands, 60% of the four-tile islands and so on ... and then add all the lost land back to the map by connecting it to the largest islands, expanding the coast as needed.  That feels like it would be a lot of work though, especially with shifting and redistribution of seafood resources, and much harder to script than just sinking the islands.

Right now, although there are ocean tiles and land tiles, it feels like there are almost no ocean or land areas - which I think is very much unlike what the players were expecting.

All that said ... I recognize that a significant amount of work has already gone into this map, and time is limited ... and then if the game is going to die before it starts (or after a small number of turns) regardless of the map (Thrawn's recent posts don't sound to me like fear that the map will be bad, but ~~unrelated loss of interest and/or regretting making the time commitment in the first place...) then putting more work into a new map doesn't sound very appealing. And of course I may be all wet here: A zillion tiny islands sound to me like they'd make the game more of a chore, but it's possible I'm missing something, having never played Civ6....

[Cornflakes]

I found my islands map script but unfortunately was unable to get Civ6 to launch in order to check it out again. I'm getting a "Display Device Has Failed" error. It's been at least 4 years since I played around with map scripts and I did make a couple tweaks just now so that it makes 8 starting areas before realizing that Civ6 wouldn't load so I can't guarantee anything. But I attached it if you want to play around.

(The file also has my doughnut script as well, just disabled so that the islands script is active)

[Sullla]

My god, this kerfuffle in the player thread is an embarrassment. The founding principle behind Realms Beyond was "play the hand that you are dealt", to seek challenge and fun rather than obsess over high score or "the most elite stuff". The notion that players would be asking to change their civ choice or outright quit the game because the map doesn't meet their EXACT specifications is ridiculous. Grow up and stop acting like spoiled kids, sheesh.

Kaiser, you put a lot of time into putting the map together and it seems fine to me, nothing's ever going to be perfect. I would stop trying to cater to these whiny crybabies and tell them to shut up and play the darn game.

[civac2]

It would carry more weight if you posted this in the game thread instead of asking Kaiser to do it.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I've re-read threads and only 1 out of 3 thought Sumer was banned. I assume CMF will do nothing

[suboptimal]

The starts look good to me. I think that RefSteel does make a good point about tiles vs. areas. Looking at the map from that context there is an "area" between yellow and black, another one that's sort of between red, yellow and black but none anywhere near purple. It might be worth editing in something to merge the larger islands N of red and SW of purple into a third land area. Likewise I think that deleting any islands with 3 or fewer tiles might also be the way to go. It'll open things up a little bit but not too much. Just my $0.02.