RBPBEM6 Map Design Thread (Spoilers)

[Tatan]

Hey all, anyone know how to make a custom size map? I'm going to do all of the tiles by hand, but I need a map 50t wide by 34t tall. Is that possible without crazy mods?

I am pretty sure that you can generate a map, save it as a WB file, and then edit that to be the tile size you want.

[sunrise089]

Ok, so Ruff told me I can only have map dimensions that are multiples of 4, so my map is 60x36 tiles. Each player will get 12x34, and about 1/3 of that will be water.

So the theme of my map was discussed above (the "hand" shape) but the inspiration comes for the three pitboss maps. Basically IMHO:

*RBP1 - Natural looking and interesting, but not balanced.
*RBP2 - Balanced and interesting, but not natural looking.
*RBP3 - Natural looking and balanced, but not interesting.

My own preference leans towards RBP2 sort of by default. I think a map needs to be balanced in a game thing long (though the unbalanced RB MP maps are fun in a different way), and if the map isn't interesting than we might as well use a mirror script. My goal was to make a map that is VERY balanced, but that remains, and I hope to do so by making each land tile a mystery. Specifically no one will be able to predict someone else's capital has a silver + corn, or the like. But at the same time no one will even be able to make the RBP2 map criticisms (the RBP2 map was great, but some people still had slightly better or worse land). While I'm not guaranteeing everyone's land here will be [perfectly equal, I am guaranteeing 100% identical tiles as a whole. In other words one player might have a pigs/gold cap and another a cow/iron/gems cap, but every player will have the exact same amount of grassland, coast, floodplain, corn, etc tiles. The only exceptions are the luxury resource, which I've attempted to pair (Apolyton demogame style) without being nearly so poorly balanced. The pairings, which are probably the weakest part of this map, are planned to be:

*Gold+Silk
*Silver+Spices
*Gems+Incense
*Wines+Dyes
*Furs+Sugar

Of course I'm not letting the tiles these resources appear on be random - the tiles will get better or worse, but still within the normal civ rules. In other words I'm using desert hill gold, and my gems will have jungle on them, but no Apolyton-style grassland gold, etc.

Here's what I'm working with for this game:

Sketch of each player area:



Detail of a player area, with resources (NOTE: the math of the left was from before I had to expand the border land area, the border land area is now weaker and therefore there is a little bit less food per possible city, though again only on the edges of each map section):



The math used to pair the resources:



Note the ivory is merely to provide an extra happiness in the far south. War Elephants are banned in this game (by me, using the reasoning that otherwise I'd have removed the resource entirely).

Here's a pic of what things look right now, showing the detail of the northern passage between peninsulas. Yes, this is galley accessible, but it also forces a real trade off, since you have to sail up and back down, RBP2 Rome style.



Anyways, I'm going to get some dinner now, and later I'll explain the method for making all of the tiles, resources, and even rivers random.

[Krill]

Wines and dyes is seriously not balanced. Is ivory not an option for a peninsula, and wines for the deep south? As WE are disabled, you could use ivory as a pure lux res.

[sunrise089]

Hey Krill, darrell and I had a similar discussion, and yes, I can absolutely swap any other luxury for wines.

That said, are you saying Wines are much worse than the other happy resources? That's because of availability, right? I admit my simple rating system doesn't factor in availability.

[Krill]

Tile output and availability. Truth be told, you can't give one player gold or gems, and another furs/ivory.

[sunrise089]

Ok, lets place my seafood. Each player is going to get 2 clams, 2 crabs, 2 fish, and 1 whale on a coast tile (this is a food heavy map). There are 38 coast tile per player, so I roll up a Random.org generation of 45 integers (7 resources x 5 players, plus extras) from 1-38 inclusive. That returns:

[oops...it returned some numbers, which I then deleted in this window as I marked them off ]

So starting from the bottom-left water tile, I count up and around, and player 1's first clam goes on tile 6. Second clam on t31, First fish on t38...

I have more numbers than I need because I can have only 1 resource per tile. Player 1 has 2 resources assigned to t31, so the 2nd 31 gets skipped. And, if a food resource is placed right next to another food resource, I skip the tile...

Here's a sample are of "equal random" seafood:



The oil is my way of keeping the landmasses straight - 5 oils for landmass 5.

[sunrise089]

Ok, now lets place the land type (grassland, tundra, etc) in the north. I thought about letting thing be equal-random for opportunity of each terrain type, but decided against it. The way equal opportunity would work would be a list of integers 1-100, and if the first number is less than 51 then I place a grassland on the first tile. The problem here is I could have all grassland for one player and none for another, even though they had the same initial probability. I also thought about using the same system but marking off tallies for each tile placed, so once X grasslands were placed I skipped those numbers. Not only is that tedious however, it's also likely to give me several tiles of the same type for the last few, as others end early. Instead, since I pre-determined my percentage of tile types (50% grassland, 30% plains, 10% desert, 10% tundra) I'm going to created a sequence list of integers 1-90 (90 tiles total) not allowing repeats.

The key is 1-45 grassland, 46-72 plains, 73-81 tundra, and 82-90 desert.

Plugging everything into a spreadsheet, sorting by tile type number and color coding, then re-sorting by tile order number makes this (I've only re-sorted the first column):



Anyways, I plug in the above to one landmass, and I get this:



Note the rivers on both visible landmasses. The rivers start on a random coastal tile, and they all make an L shape, bending towards the middle of the landmass if possible. The size of the river clusters and the relatively small amount of tiles means the random variation is small, and all five central regions can have a cap with a river with only about 3-5 tiles vertical difference in placement.

[T-hawk]

Ok, that's some seriously compulsive map design. Almost wish I was playing it, except then I wouldn't know about it. And it almost sounds easier to write a map script to do it than to place all the tiles manually like this.

*Gold+Silk
*Silver+Spices
*Gems+Incense
*Wines+Dyes
*Furs+Sugar

No way of balancing happy resources like that is going to be perfect. Wines+Dyes aren't so bad from a tile yield standpoint (dyes are only 1H 1C behind gems and have the cheapest doubler building), the problem is that they both come late while everybody else gets an early one at Mining or Hunting. If the players have decided to ban elephants, then ivory could level that out.

Another concern is the building for extra happy. Gold/silver/gems are good in part because Forges are already good everywhere, while incense might as well not have a doubler, and wines and sugar and spices don't have any at all (Grocer health instead.)

And fur and ivory go obsolete late game. So the bottom line is, this isn't going to come out perfectly balanced. Just get close and then ignore Krill.

[novice]

You can do stuff like desert gold, desert hill gems, grassland incense and flood plains dyes to make the luxuries more balanced.

[Ilios]

You can do stuff like desert gold, desert hill gems, grassland incense and flood plains dyes to make the luxuries more balanced.

That's a pretty good idea actually.