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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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[LURKERS ONLY] Huge Lurkers Hugely Lurking the Huge PBEM
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August 13th, 2016, 20:26
(This post was last modified: August 13th, 2016, 20:26 by GermanJoey.)
Pregame Prediction: This game either becomes a hugely entertaining slugfest, or dies a huge disappointment from a horribly slow turnpace. 50/50 odds for each.
But, one thing's for sure: this game's gonna be HUGE! 
If love to have another crack at a FFH game at some point. Just need some more time to devote to it (like 2 pit bosses worth with my unfamiliarity with the game) if I had been killed a little quicker in 30 then I might have offered to throw a hat in, but I do feel in a game like this I might horribly imbalance it by going on a settling spam and gifting a load of cities and promos to my neighbours...
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August 14th, 2016, 21:30
(This post was last modified: August 14th, 2016, 21:32 by GermanJoey.)
This is 8 players, not 7! I cant even remember seeing a PBEM w/ more than 6 players. I'm really worried this one will die a turnpace death, especially because the map is pretty big.
Regarding the map, it's roughly ~190 tiles per player (some said 180, some said 180-200, some said 200), which is pretty big I think, for a PBEM. The map started as a 72x36 Torusland w/ 44% water, with some hand modification to balance out the geography a bit. After that, an identically mirrored custom-made starting area was riveted on top of 8 equally spaced positions; not a grid, but kinda a snaky diagonal line. As the crow flies, the starting settlers are quite close (9x13 away from each other), but I added some ocean to the NE corner of each start to artifically space them out a bit more. The starting area is roughly a radius-5 circle around the settler surrounded mostly by water. Each starting area connects to the rest of the map via small land passages in the NW, S, and SW edges. Here's an example, Q's start:  The idea here is to allow each player great flexibility in choosing their capital location and civ. Reachable on T0 - as FFH2 starting settlers have 4 moves! - are spots that have good food and calendar access but less long term potential, awesome long-term cottage capital spots, high hammer spots, spots for the elves, the lanun, the malakim, etc. I think I counted something like 15 possibilities? Hopefully there's no "no-brainer" spots that everyone chooses. Well everyone will get something they're pretty happy with, hopefully. There's a heavy bias towards farmable resources inside the starting areas (e.g. even the cows are farmable) while there's a bias towards animals in the rest of the map. I'm hoping that reels people in from wandering too far at the beginning. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone's second or even third cities end up in the starting area too, before thinking of the rest as backfill and spreading out. Some of the areas to spread out to are more crappy while others are very lush, so hopefully landgrabbing causes a lot of tension. Let's see, what else... there's 2.5 mana nodes per player as requested in game setup (1 in the starting area, one just outside, and one in between each pair of players) but no lairs or unique mana dungeons. However, I did fit some of the less imbalancing unique features (i.e. no Yggdrasil or Remnants of Patria) on the map just for flavor. We've got The Pool of Tears, Odio's Prison, The Dragon Bones, and one VERY special, *UNIQUE* tile that honors EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE Realms Beyond FFH2 expert.  I'm really looking forward to seeing how this game shakes out... a lot of the FFH2 games here end up being pretty clowny, with goofy settings, some sort of disaster befalling half the civs before T50, and very high skill ranges within a single game, but this one has 8 players that all seem to have a good idea of what they're doing and a more hard-knuckle setup. So, it should be pretty fun! (if it finishes within 4 years...)
The starting area looks really good, lots of options for lots of civs.
 I know you said you didn't think any bans would be necessary, but I do worry that the Lanun will snowball out of control, and Cultists will dominate the military game. It all depends on how much land is coast-adjacent, which can be quite a lot even on 44% water if landforms are snaky. I haven't played (single-player) EitB in years, but from what I remember Lanun get +1 food on coast/ocean (so they're food neutral right away, and 3 food with a Lighthouse) and can create Pirate Ports a minimum of 3 tiles from each other (which are uber-resource tiles, something like 5/2/7). And Cultists are available reasonably early, walk on water, and can cast a spell every turn doing ~30% collateral damage to units on adjacent coast or coastal land tiles. Both options seem pretty hard to beat. 
I think it's fine. If Lanun is overpowered here, Lanun is always overpowered and needs to be changed. The land is very good, it's not as the Lanun water tiles are imbalanced tiles when you have a lot of resources and grassland to work. Besides, Lanun are made to have a strong economy, since they don't have special units to give them power. Different civs have different strenghts and I'm sure the players will find a way to make other picks shine. There's land access to each player, is not like Lanun can turtle up and tech to victory without being called on it.
About cultists, no doubt they can cause trouble. But what exactly can you do with them? Conquer some coastal cities? That hardly seems like a good investment in an 8 player game, where you aren't facing a zero-sum situation. They aren't an overpowered strategic unit, even if they can be a powerful tactical one. And I think such units are fair game. If there's one thing that can be changed to make cultists slightly worse is to take away every ocean tile in each of the seas, by adding isles. This way, they can't hide from galleys and trirremes in ocean spots. I think that's a change worth making. I think banning Lanun would make the game less fun for everyone involved. But that's just my opinion and I can see the argument that banning them would give a more level playing field. If that's the case, though, they need to be changed for the next version of the mod, IMO, because they are either useless or too good. By the way, what are Falamar traits in version 12.1? If he's still CHA/EXP (ADA), perhaps banning him would suffice. I really don't understand the reason behind making Falamar ADA, when he was already a very strong leader.
Did they really give Falamar Adaptive? If so, I agree that's unnecessary. Skimming the spoiler threads, it seems that the Lanun won't be a big problem. Many players are picking civs based on flavour/personal sentiment, so won't mind if they can't be as strong as the Lanun economically.
Cultists are different. It's not so much how much damage they can do, but whether they are the One Right Choice for military in the mid-game, on both offense and defense. Do we really want a map where ever player is compelled to adopt OO? |
