Airstrip One Palace Court - No Players!

[T-hawk]

Well I did read everything you wrote, just didn't try to think about it in detail. I really like the lakes aspect, that was an inspired choice. A great way to bridge the gap between a typical all-land map and the problems introduced by a continents map, like gatekeeper contact positions.

[Iamjohn]

Yeah, it's great seeing them agonize over what they theorize the map is, and have them all guessing totally wrong...

As for me at least the essay on the theory of how and why you made the map the way you did was pretty interesting and helpful. Thanks!

There seems to be complaints about the lack of food though. Krill is not exactly a happy camper at the moment...

[RefSteel]

I find it intriguing that - thanks to some combination of luck, predictive reasoning, starting location differences, and C&D - out of five(!) teams with Mysticism, the only ones to actually chase early religions are landing them unchallenged. Not only that, but it looks to me like sunrise has got Stonehenge in the clear. Krill is the only other player who starts with Myst and lacks the Creative trait, and he needs to (or has elected to) push early workers/settlers to take advantage of his special-purpose traits instead.

The friendly start between regoarrarr and shadyforce is promising too; if a lovefest develops among new-to-MP players, will that give them a fighting chance (or maybe even more?) against the grizzled MP vets? (If so, the vets will surely blame lack of food at their starts, though as far as I can see, they haven't defogged enough of the map around them to make any rational statements to that effect - though I'm guessing Sullla did at least intend to put the irrigated rice near Imhotep in his capital's BFC rather than several tiles out of range....)

[Sullla]

Both Imhotep and Krill simply need to scout more land around their starting positions. Krill is running around up at the north pole; I even tipped him off that he needs to go south instead, but it looks like he would rather gripe about me than turn in a different direction. (Of course the tundra map edge is going to have less food!) As for Imhotep, he's similarly managed to avoid most of the food bonuses near his start with the beginning warrior. Look at the picture of the start on the first page of this thread, you'll see there's plenty of food resources there: two fish directly north, sheep and crabs to the northwest, clams to the SW, sheep and corn directly east, and rice + cows to the SE. Imhotep can plant good cities in most every direction, and an outstanding second city to the southeast that grabs copper, rice, and a second ivory.

One of the reasons why I like the bigger maps is because you essentially get to choose your own destiny. If you don't like the look of the terrain in one direction, just go the other way! And scouting is also paramount. (To take Krill and Memphus in particular, they were hurt badly in the CivFanatics Demogame because they didn't do enough scouting - they were optimizing the start for maximum growth instead, all settlers and workers. Will the same happen here?)

The biggest mistake I've made so far was not realizing that the lake tile would bring irrigation to sunrise's starting corn. Argh! I deliberately moved the resource off of the river to prevent that from happening, and accidentally moved it next to the lake. As for the other starts, I don't see much in the way of complaining. Some are a little better than others, true, but all of the starting positions are fairly comparable. (Imhotep probably does have the weakest one overall, to his credit.) Krill is full of bull; his problem is that he picked a civ that didn't start with Fishing! It's not my fault that he apparently never considered that his food bonus would be water-based.

[Jabah]

I do wonder if you didn't realise when you moved Imhotep starting position (next to the irrigable rice) that he indeed 'could' complain that is food is not as good in raw food term (grass cow vs all the other). Especially since in your first post describing each starting position you did write that you gave 'good' food (with a list that didn't include cow).

On the other hand, he has his initial position just next to him, so he could probably build one of the strongest 2nd city.

PS - just trying to understand how the map making was done, I think the map looks very great and in no way I am trying to say you should have done better.

[Sullla]

Yes, that probably was a mistake Jabah. Should have swapped the rice tile to Imhotep's current start and put the cows at the other spot (which was Imhotep's planned start, before I realized it was a little too close to Ruff's start). Just hard to get everything right when working with so many players. I do think that Imhotep will be OK in the long run.

Krill is still attacking me in his thread. It's obvious that we're not going to see eye to eye on this one. Although, my belief by now is that any start that doesn't give Krill and Memphus the exact terrain they want will be subject to complaining. They even griped about the SANCTA start, and that one was probably the best in that game...

[Strow]

I would love to see the SANCTA map one day...

I really enjoy your maps and the write ups. Heck I would even play a SP game on these maps.

[Sullla]

I have the same "design" screenshots for the CivFanatics Demogame, and they will be posted when the game concludes. Which will be a looooong time from now, judging by the current pace.

[Sullla]

Well, we've come to the first critical juncture of this game. Dreylin/kalin have a warrior outside sunrise's undefended capital, and there's no way sunrise can get a defender back to his city in time to stop them, should they move in. What will the League of Lin do?

My guess is that they won't attack, although if they do eliminate sunrise on T17, they would have an unfathomable amount of open space in the middle of the map to expand into...

[LiPing]

I agree with what you think, I suspect that kalin is leaning towards it, and Dreylin is strongly against and I think he'd be more likely to convince kalin than the other way around.

Although it's mean to sunrise, I'm kind of hoping we're wrong and they do try though, it'd be interesting to see the activity in all the threads and how diplomacy would be affected afterwards...