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As a French person I feel like it's my duty to explain strikes to you. - AdrienIer |
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[No players] Big epic lurking - PB74
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(August 22nd, 2023, 16:08)Qgqqqqq Wrote: Nah, I'll post them tonight in threads. We haven't made that many changes since the last round. If anyone (cough Krill cough) has thoughts speak now or forever hold your peace. Fuck it I don't care. Let the clusterfuck commence.
And for posterity I think the starting version of this map is more playable than PB71 (not fairer though).
Today is Wednesday in New Zealand time - the only time zone anyone should use
Erebus in the Balance - a FFH Modmod based around balancing and polishing FFH for streamlined competitive play.
9 gives a different challenge, less food but a lot of other things. If played perfectly it's probably the best start but its flaws make it very hard to get there. Maybe take away a forest or two ? Like the ones 2N and 1S of the starting location ?
I think some people are going to get burned throwing away "close enough" civs. Again, close enough starts, don't necessarily make for easy techs especially with getting limited civ choices. Greenline throwing back a farming civ is basically hoping for either a farming / wheel civ or a wheel / mining civ in order to keep a first worker busy (as seems to be his goal). And he only gets two more chances at it. Persia isn't a bad civ, but ya ironically the forest on the river is detrimental because otherwise could have double farmed.
If I was Scooter I would probably keep Japan. Again its a mid level civ and techs aren't perfect but they aren't bad, and it scales pretty well into the late game. I talked a bit about this in PB59 but your odds go down pretty fast.
FWIW, all starts that lack capital freshwater and have peaks are obvious fakes.
Looking at the starts through the players eyes, scooter and Commodore have been absolutely shafted compared to the likes of Pindicator and Dreylin because of the tech constraints and you will not change player behaviour. It's a problem inherent with AH giving pastures in any gametype that gives players contol over civ choice. 
I mean I don't like carthage UU and ya he started with fishing without seafood, but maybe UB was still worth it with this many players? I'm not normally a carthage fan in any case.
I will say I wish the starts had been posted one more time for another round of review. Making Scooters rice dry instead of wet for start 1 makes his already tech constrained start much worse. I didn't notice this one late last night when posted, but there were a couple other changes done that Q and I discussed over discord last night that for the most part we decided to just leave as is (7, 8, and 15 for record).
It's hard to see the wood for the trees, I get that and I've made the same mistakes when trying to balance this number of starts.
I think scooters start deserves commenting on though, for posterity. To be clear, it's a start that I think is hurt more than usual by the need for three food techs, but some of that pain is caused by the mod keeping pastures at AH. But then some of the starts require three food techs and some don't, and the ones that don't generally look both faster and have a higher yield (ie more land tiles for late game, but also higher yield food tiles). For example GKC needs agriculture and AH, but Hunting gives him access to two grassland ivory tiles, one of which is forested. It has a 6, 5 and 4 yield food tiles and +9fpt scooters start needs agri, fishing and AH, and the difference is +1fpt, -2hpt and +1cpt with all three tiles improved...but he needs to build a workboat and will not make the extra 30 hammers compared to the GKC start. And then it loses to the ivory. And it has fewer land tiles. Then there is start 9 (gold, 6 yield food*2, 2 flood plains), and start 11 (Dreylin). Now I am not, and cannot comment on the difference from a geopolitical point in terms of neighbours. I am not saying that overall it is unbalanced. But that is a pretty big difference in early game output. I must admit to being biased. I want to see Lizzie played by a competant player who will report, and I don't want to see scooter unduly hampered. |
