PB57 Lurker Thread

[NobleHelium]

Yes.

[chumchu]

No.

[NobleHelium]

Cornflakes: I want a super tight map so that I don't have to manage too many cities.

Also Cornflakes: I want to play an advanced start game where everyone has a designated area to start with several cities.

[Tarkeel]

Give them a snowflake-shaped map where every capital is close together in the center, with vast backlines to settle?

[Bobchillingworth]

Actually, a snowflake-shaped map would be kind of brilliant and should be very much playable.

[NobleHelium]

Yes, I'm already doing that. I had an alternate concept for six players that might have worked out better, but that could be for a future game.

[Brian Shanahan]

Maybe.

Poll allowed me vote both ways.

[NobleHelium]

556

[NobleHelium]

All right well, one thing is for sure - I am most certainly never making an advanced start map for Cornflakes again.  It is impossible to balance advanced start with this small a map.  Players can place their starting cities in all sorts of directions and basically anything can happen because of that. A larger map would mitigate this because you can have a bigger area that you're sure can't be intruded on by another player.

The base map is a 32x32 Torusland (one of Seven's mapscripts) with the inland seas (44% water) option.  Land tiles are slightly over 600 with a number of peaks.  I used novice's MapTuner to move the starting positions slightly (Torusland has innate starting position balancing) before removing all the luxuries and manually replacing them after I couldn't get things to work adequately by just adjusting them.  I checked and added/moved strategic resources as necessary before this.

There is no wine on the map.  There is also no marble or stone, because I could not think of good locations to place them.  Let's not forget that Cornflakes also demanded "no super lush areas between players" to fight over.

Here are the current starts and an example way that I would place three cities.  Players may choose to place more or fewer than three cities, but I would say three cities is the most normal and usually best opening.  Perhaps when I am less tired I will crop them so that they look nicer. I had a big dilemma over the luxuries because I didn't want to cram everything into the starting area but it's also entirely possible that some players will discover the off-screen luxuries and others will not. And that could make a huge difference. I'm resigned to it and this is why I think advanced start is a bad idea. Way too easy to lose the game on turn 0.

The starting 1-tile islands are the only islands on the map.

And the current map.

[Erwin]

In general, I like the layout of the map. I think that start 2 is missing copper, coal and land oil. There is a jungle right next to the rice resource for the player with the last picture (start 3 in WB file). Has jungle growth on resources been prevented?