[LURKERS] Setting Up Tents for a Ren Faire

[Mardoc]

So I wanted to lurk this super-badly, and therefore volunteered to make their map. I'm a bit nervous, though, given the field. If I leave in a major imbalance, they're all talented enough to take advantage.

Plus, honestly, cylindrical natural-looking but balanced is a high bar to clear even in an ancient game, let alone advanced start that hasn't been played here before.

So...anyone have any advice for me?

Here's my current thinking:

Size and script
Map needs to be a bit bigger than usual, because of the turbo-boosted start. Maybe 200 land tiles/person. I also want to aim for the smaller end of relevant water, so that there's a chance land units stay relevant. Maybe 20% water. I can't decide how dense hills should be in general. More hills shifts the balance away from knights and toward 1-movers.

I'm not sure what script will produce that result. Probably something like Lakes or Fractal?

Initial Starting Area
Starts absolutely must have hills available to found on, to keep rushes from being realistic. Need those longbow bonuses. Also must provide Iron and possibly horses? Do I want to make Knights easy to get? Is it more of an imbalance for knights to be easy, or for them to be hard and therefore non-universal?

Should I go for mirrored 7x7 starts? I tend to think yes, because I don't want the game to be determined on T0. The main downside is that is about a quarter of the total available tiles. Tricky to manage both that much mirroring and leave the overall map natural-looking.

Overall Land Shape
I think it's got to be a 3x2 offset grid. Lakes style is requested, so I don't have to do anything in particular except make sure the lakes connect/isolate everyone equally.

Resources
Most resources are already unlocked in this era. Free Forges make metals particularly valuable. I lean toward giving them mostly Calendar resources at the starts and making gold/silver/gems require more work. Maybe those will even be on islands?

I do need to make sure that all the strategics are common. Losing due to 'I didn't know I needed to settle there until it was too late' is infuriating, while the advantage of sparse strategics is mostly that they can be a target at the start of a war.

I
Lushness
Probably going to end up on the lusher side of things. I feel like people have more fun racing for the prizes than trying to eke out a civ from a weak map, even if it does shift the relative value of traits and civs.

Other
Given that everyone starts with Iron Working, I'm tempted to include a lot of jungle, especially on borders, maybe also on a bunch of the happy resources. Delay interaction and growth curves a bit.

[Krill]

Ring map with central islands. But that works best on Flat.

[Krill]

Or reuse the pbem7 concept.

[GermanJoey]

I had actually been thinking of throwing my hat in the ring before you volunteered, Mardoc, heh. I don't really have time to make and balance a whole map though, so the least I can do is show you what my idea had been:

http://media.rhizzone.net/civ/pb35_idea.html



So, it's a little smaller than what you say you wanted, but it could easily be expanded in size. The total size right now is 42x36, FYI, although I hadn't really put too much thought into the size yet, TBH. It's cell-based, w/ 6 cells for 6 players, 122 grass + 10 ice + 4 desert + 6 peaks = 142 land tiles per cell. My plan woulda been to make and balance one cell by hand, duplicate it to each section, and then go through and add some small asymmetries by hand once the map was otherwise done, just to make it a little more interesting. ICTR are available N/S but not E/W.

But, the crux of it was 1 area per player that would be smallish yet pretty lush, with some sea to help alleviate the crampedness. I wanted to go with something cell-based because with 6 players it's really feasible to design the map to force each player to have to interact with the other 5, and, counter-wise, I feel like any asymmetrical neighbor-situations would be really amplified on a 6 player, non-toroid map. (goddamn Commdoore...) I also think it wouldn't be too hard to give the map a "naturalish" feel by trying to make biospheres w/ tile choices, e.g. snow/tundra on the bottom (which can still be lushed up with lots of deer and rivers), forest/plains above that, then grassland, and finally jungle, floodplains, and desert near the center of the map.

What really motivated me was the idea that each cell would have two major locations per-cell that would be entirely foodless, decent-tileless, and resource-less (although maybe would have some nearby trees) but would hold immense strategic importance. Those are 1.) the 4-tile square desert hill islands (although maybe this should be a 1 tile deserthill island w/ some 1-tile island peaks to increase vision) around the equator that would be important naval bases, both to invade from north/south and defend against a surprise invasion from the other direction, and 2.) the "ice tunnels" along the bottom and top edges, a key feature of which is the peaks that prevent the player on the opposite side from looking in over the sea. The land outside the tunnels should be flat for ~3 rings of tiles to prevent the player that doesn't secure the tunnel from planting an easy defensive fort... the tunnel should be a source of fear if it is not claimed. Anyways, there's 12 total strategic points and yet you need 4 to be "totally safe" from surprises, saying nothing about a more direct invasion from the east or west, so players will have to make some hard choices which ones they want to pursue.

Anyways, I thought that would be fun, and maybe this gives you some ideas or whatever. Feel free to use this as a base btw, and if you want it to be bigger that would be easy to do too.

[picklepikkl]

Speaking as a complete outsider: map design seems to me like black magic, but that's a pretty cool idea!

[GermanJoey]

By the way, Mardoc, responding a bit more directly to your original post, now that I have a bit of time... (Mother-In-Law is visiting )

I think the "must haves" resources should be Iron, Horses, Marble, Coal, Aluminium, and land-based Oil. Definitely don't make people struggle for their basic resources, as that will just cause frustration. Nobody is going to thank you for providng Interesting Strategic Decisions if they get choked from their iron at their 4th city after their opponent rushed Knights. Instead, it'll just ruin the game: the rushed player might stop trying or even ragequit, or at the very least be crippled early, which in turn will just piss off the other 4 players too. Better to set a level playing field and let each player's own choices cause their ruin. OTOH, Stone and Copper aren't so important that they need special care, or even need to be there at all, and Uranium probably shouldn't even be on the map since this is BTS. (Copper is just used for the SoL and one of the space race parts, while Stone is West Point, UoS, and SM, with those last two probably not ever being built with the AP being banned).

As far as gold/silver/gems vs calendar stuff, I don't think it would be a big deal to just eliminate all the former, if you wanted, or put them in hard to reach places. Every city starts with a forge so there's not a big worry about screwing Ind over, and this isn't RtR so there's no worry about trying to balance markets vs forges for Exp and Ind. Also, nobody is ever gonna pick Cha so there's no worry about balancing for that. Whatever is probably fine... Interestingly, if you include wine, then there's exactly 6 plantation happys, so you could just give each person like 5 or 6 copies of a single one. (try to consider tile yields tho, as e.g. 6 grass incense vs 6 plains wine would is really unfair for the wines guy; but, that said, you could make the incense plains and the wines grass, put river around the grapes, etc, to balance that a bit).

If you go with a mapscript, definitely go with Full of Resources Lakes; Fractal tends to produce a lot of island starts, isolated starts, and snaky pangaeas. Probably have to move the starts around though as by default the mapscript will put a 2-3 of the starts in the middle jungle area.

[Krill]

CHA works for a knight rush, Vas+Theo = 2 promo knights. Still a rare pick though.

Speaking as a complete outsider: map design seems to me like black magic, but that's a pretty cool idea!

It really is...

[Old Harry]

Hey, this is a natural looking map if you want to use it...

[GermanJoey]

CHA works for a knight rush, Vas+Theo = 2 promo knights. Still a rare pick though.

Yeah it does, but... honestly, in BTS, would you ever actually pick it? Be honest! Gotta pair it with Mongols or Vikings or something to make "give up Bureaucracy so that you don't have to build a few stables" really be worth anything special.

Speaking as a complete outsider: map design seems to me like black magic, but that's a pretty cool idea!

It really is...

Yeah kinda... I think it's just like, you gotta play (and/or watch) a bunch of games before you get a good feel for it. Things you liked about this map and want to see again, things you hated about this other map and want to avoid.

[Krill]

CHA works for a knight rush, Vas+Theo = 2 promo knights. Still a rare pick though.

Yeah it does, but... honestly, in BTS, would you ever actually pick it? Be honest! Gotta pair it with Mongols or Vikings or something to make "give up Bureaucracy so that you don't have to build a few stables" really be worth anything special.

Yeah, I'd never pick it. More commenting that back in my ladder days it got used a bit in teamers.

Speaking as a complete outsider: map design seems to me like black magic, but that's a pretty cool idea!

It really is...

Yeah kinda... I think it's just like, you gotta play (and/or watch) a bunch of games before you get a good feel for it. Things you liked about this map and want to see again, things you hated about this other map and want to avoid.

Yeah, it's especially worth reading the games that have been run on lower food maps, any games run on more extreme maps are good to understand the consequences of those designs, rather than games run along more generic lines.