New Fall from Heaven II PBEM

[Sciz]

I'm a really indecisive person so i'm okay with what the majority decides.

I'm slightly leaning towards unrestricted leaders, since we haven't seen much of it on RB yet, but i'm totally fine with restricted as well.

I also think that less water = better. I mean it doesn't have to be a complete land map at all, but at least pangaea imo.

other than that i'm okay with whatever

[Maksim]

Alright - I've started work on the map, taking into account your preferences.

Could someone organize a forum, so that I can have a mapmaker's thread for comments from the peanut gallery?

Also, how do you want to choose your civilizations?

[Sciz]

well if we're going with unrestricted then it's a snake pick. if not we can do it like the other ffh2 pbems, where we send in our top 3 requests or something

[Ichabod]

Are we going to restrict the picks? Trying to get some less popular picks in play?

Maybe restricting some civs like Illians/Calabim...

What do you think about it?

[Irgy]

I think restricted leaders won narrowly 3.5 to 2.5? I agree with Sciz said about how to pick in either case.

As far as available civ choices go, I don't feel the need to remove any options, but since my own picks are unlikely to be the ones given the boot I can't bring myself to really care all that much either way. Maybe we could at least ban having both the Clan and the Illians again? Easy enough to do, just treat them as one group for whether or not there is a clash in people's choices - no different to how two leaders of the same civ are treated.

I like the sound of you having started on the map before we've picked our civs Maksim*. In fact everything you've said so far has raised my confidence in the job you'll do.


* By the way, I'm not having some sort of indirect shot at SquareLeg here, I think he did a very good job on the map as a whole, despite any issues I might have raised. I don't think the mapmaker was the problem in that game at all, although maybe some of what was and wasn't in the map specification contributed a little.

[Ichabod]

I agree with Sciz suggestions about picking, too.

And if we are not going to play with barb world + raging barbs I don't think Illians + Clan would be that bad.

[Maksim]

Alright, restricted leaders it is; ignoring PBEM 4, where players did not get a chance to showcase their civilizations, across other games no civilization has been overplayed, so everything's in, looks like.

Send me a private message here with your top three picks. The picking algorithm is:

- If your first choice is available and not contested, you get it
- All contested picks drop through to the second choice, and third, if necessary
- If all else fails, I'll flip a coin

So, e.g. if your first pick was Sidar, and then you end up getting your second pick of Elohim, with no Sidar in the game, that means that someone else also had Sidar as their first choice, and both of you got your seconds.

Meanwhile, I'll setup the mapmakers' thread to get some feedback.

...I don't think the mapmaker was the problem in that game at all, although maybe some of what was and wasn't in the map specification contributed a little.

Reading through the various threads, the common problem is that players ask for a natural map, and then express amazement at its imbalance. The other thing is that there is an implicit assumption that civilizations are balanced taking into account their lore-based preferred starting spots, which is not the case.

"Erebus Continents" mapscript is particularly bad for this, with its starting spot locator, which horribly undervalues resources in favor of flavour (e.g. for Doviello having two tundra tiles is as good as having a grassland pig). That's also why you often see the AI's move from their starting spot, and end up squashed next to each other on smaller maps.

Finally, could you confirm the desired play order?

[Selrahc]

So, e.g. if your first pick was Sidar, and then you end up getting your second pick of Elohim, with no Sidar in the game, that means that someone else also had Sidar as their first choice, and both of you got your seconds.

This seems silly.

Can we not just flip a coin and see who gets it? I honestly don't understand what you are trying to accomplish through this.

"Erebus Continents" mapscript is particularly bad for this, with its starting spot locator, which horribly undervalues resources in favor of flavour (e.g. for Doviello having two tundra tiles is as good as having a grassland pig). That's also why you often see the AI's move from their starting spot, and end up squashed next to each other on smaller maps.

On Erebus continent, you can turn off flavour starts.


Erebus continent is nowhere near as bad as Erebus. I've seen Illian starts which consisted of 18 Ice hills and a few tundra forests.

[Maksim]

This seems silly.

Can we not just flip a coin and see who gets it? I honestly don't understand what you are trying to accomplish through this.

Mostly, trying to avoid accusations of being bad\unfair at coin flips.

But, seeing as you trust my coin-flipping ability, I'm perfectly happy to elevate its importance in the selection algorithm as you require.

[Irgy]

It feels suboptimal, but I kind of liked it in a way. With the normal way, to metagame your picks you should choose:
1. Awesome civ
2. Counter to awesome civ
3. Civ that works well in a game with both (1) and (2).

With the method you pick
1. Awesome civ.
2. Civ that's awesome except when (1) is around.
3. Civ that takes advantage of the absence of (1) and (2)

What's particularly amusing would be a set of picks like so:
P1: A, B, D
P2: A, D, C
P3: C, D, B
P4: C, B, A

Everyone finishes up with their third pick, even though two people put it earlier in each case and it could have been two 1st and two 2nd picks.

Anyway, I'm happy to go with coin flip. Actually I'm most in favour of randomly choosing between all equally optimal assignments, but that usually works out the same as the coin flip approach anyway. Especially with so many options.

I'll stop blabbing and actually make my picks some time soon I'm sure...