[SPOILERS] PBEM 11 Lurker Thread

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I'll say all this with the caveat that I can't read inside your minds and only have the conversation in this thread as insight into what the thought process was: so if I have misunderstood then I'm certainly open to hearing what the idea behind the map design were. But my initial read through lead me to believe that 1) the map was specifically made in it's shape to limit Aztec's rushing of city states, and 2) that no other considerations towards the strengths of other civs were given, at least to such a degree as to change the map for them. Again, perhaps there were considerations not written about and I'd be happy to hear them.

Why is this upsetting? Apart from learning that you were deliberately set against from the start of the game, this is also just bad process for making maps. Picking favorites or trying to adjust difficulty of civs is really outside the scope of what a map should be designed for. Civ 6 is an inherently unbalanced game with different civs having strengths and weaknesses (some more than others), and it isn't the map maker's job to try to smooth out those differences. That has always fallen on the players in the dorm of drafts or other pick selection methods. And while it was not specifically stated it has always been custom that a map should be made independent of the knowledge of which civs or would be participating. Balancing a map to account for multiple possibilities is good;  but specifically designing a map to keep just one player in check is not. This is also why it is practice to randomly allot players to starting positions. Choosing to move them around after to set up a map makers desired confrontation is just over the line and heavy handed.

Second, the map making process didn't even mention the strongest civ in the game: Rome. If we are going to cut off one civ's strategy why leave the strongest civ untouched? Why not move Rome's iron far away so the unbalanced legions don't just roll over a continent and then tech into space - this seemed to be a concern that Aztecs would do so, but no thought of Rome doing so when Rome's path is much easier! Ironically, that is likely going to be the outcome of this game now.

Third, this all was done without much thought given to other consequences of these decisions. Again, maybe there was but the only talk in the thread was about how this affected one civ in particular. Rome was deliberately switched with Germany after the random allotment - that decision in itself warrants the appalling adjective I used earlier - but there was no consideration to how this impacted other teams. How do you think Rowain is going to feel when he learns that he had to border 2 neighbors with ancient era UUs because Greece was deemed a warmongering civ? Was it considered that hoplites are weak to melee units and that Rowain would be at a disadvantage for much of the game? Or what about moving Germany away from civs likely to rush it early on when that civ's middle and late game production strengths are offset by early game weakness? Going back to Rowain, was there any consideration to how putting all the city states in the middle would effect a civ that has unique abilities tied to gaining suzerainity over city states? Or was every decision made just to "keep pind in check"?

For the most part, your criticisms are fair, pin, but at least for my part I wasn't motivated by balancing around civs or trying to keep you in check - instead I was trying to correct for some distressing tendencies in the games. There's two larger meta-design decisions here, so let me talk about each in turn. 

The less-defensible one first:

1)I didn't think hard enough about the consequences of swapping Rome & Germany. My main thinking here is that these games have a (to me boring) tendency to devolve into who can successfully rush their neighbor first. Putting one warmonger with two builder civs seemed like it was an open invitation for Rome to run away with the other continent, and swapping (I thought) would make for an interesting contrast - an island of civs oriented around war, and an island of builders. Who would emerge on top? It seemed like an interesting dynamic - like I commented at the time, it most resembled PBEM2, which had a similar split, and that I think was the most varied and interesting game played on the site to date, with lots of twists and turns. That's what I was hoping for, and beyond that I didn't give it enough thought. This decision I regret. It was a mistake. 

2)The city-state placements. Here, I don't think we were unfair. One thing that I think really makes for interesting gameplay is tough decisions between trade-offs. As the meta has evolved, the practice of eating your closest city-state has become standard. In fact, anyone who DOESN'T conquer a city-state as soon as they can quickly falls behind. The complicated suzerainity competition almost never happens. So, as I envisioned it, there could have been two things that happened - either we gave each player a "safe" city-state to eat, which is balanced but not especially compelling. What I thought might make for more variety and challenge would be to make the city-states edible - but risky. Take a bunch to snowball your growth, but you also expose yourself to your neighbors more. I viewed it as a sort of rubber-band mechanic, in that anyone who aggressively moved in on their city-states in the center would in turn leave themselves vulnerable to two hostile neighbors, and I thought it might put a brake on that sort of gameplay (or at least make it more thoughtful). Probably not appropriate for a mapmaker to be doing, but in fairness I was just offering criticisms to Emperor K's design, and I probably wouldn't have ahd the courage to make such choices on my own. 

However, neither time did I set out to deliberately throttle Aztec gameplay in particular. I thought I was giving ALL rush civs a bit of a harder choice to make regarding city-states. I don't think that this one worked out especially poorly, though - on both continents we've seen one player overextend slightly and then get hit with an attack from a new direction. That's sort of the dynamic I envisioned, but I didn't anticipate how successful rho would be (remember i predicted a bloody stalemate - I am a really poor Civ tactician), nor how behind Rowain would be. 

Yes, I made mistakes in my advice, but they were well-intentioned ones, and certainly were not made with a desire to nerf any civ in particular.

[Emperor K]

I am sorry for those who did not like my map making decisions. I had the map in the lurker thread for several days to allow for more eyes to judge my choices. In the end the map was mostly looked at by Chev and myself and that inevitable leads to there being some issues. 

At no point did I want a player to feel like the odds were stacked against them. 

Even now looking back on the map I am happy with how it turned out.

Pin,

I'll add some light on my thoughts.

The only reason I wanted to give them direction towards CS is due to the Aztecs being in the game. If each player has knowledge of the middle They can keep pind in check. My worst case scenarios is Pind takes out two of the CS and neither player notices. 

All players have some back fill and 3 routes they can take (1 being hostile actions towards cs) and it is a dice roll to see where every one scout. 

I do agree that specific instructions are a bit much how about a tip in the general thread like "it is in all players advantage to scout there immediate area first"?

EDIT sorry this was to be a quote of Japper, however it did not work, so this pertains to the general message for players.

The first statement while aimed at you as the Aztecs, applies to everyone as well. 
With the requested Map settings taken into account I was forced to either - 

• give each player a back line CS
  
• place all cs in between the players leaving the middle open for settling
  
• or place them where I did. 
  

Of those 3 choices I went with the third. You did have a CS to the north that would be able to be defended all while not expanding towards Rome. I am not sure If you feel that you should have had 2-3 easy CS available to you. As with the CS limits I took a different route. My choice's were not only for lurker enjoyment, I was asked to build a fair map and that was what all decisions were based on.

The goal of city state placement was to present a choice to players. Take a CS and get the extra city, however you will be closer to your enemies.

- All CS starting locations do not follow standard map generation rules, so the count and locations where all placed by the map maker

I made it more than clear that this map was going to be a bit different than all other maps. I would think with that information an emphasis would be placed on scouting. 

I am sorry that you are unhappy with the map. Many hours went into its creation. Chev was the only one that really chimed in on its balance. My brother and I spent a long time looking over each starting location, playing the first 30 or so turns and making changes to the map before I even posted it. 

Again the map was up for lurkers for several days. All feedback was good so we went with it. 

I would also like to mention that a PM to me to discuss this would have been a little more respectful. 

I do not wish to make enemies, as it looks to me now you got out played and now it is my fault. This is very discouraging as I truly enjoyed making this map, and was very excited to see how the game played out. Now it seems you guys would rather just have random maps.

[Emperor K]

The choice to change Rome and Germany was a hard one. Looking back changing the terrain may have been a better idea. However any one that has attempted making a map will understand that making changes is not only difficult because of the editor, but also because it can cause all of the resources to go out of wack and then be completely replaced.

The Aztec player was given a defensible mountain range, 4 luxuries (gypsum, tobacco, furs, ivory), and 1 CS, all within a corner of the map that would not be contested. With Greece having the entire north the swap did not seem so bad from a map making perspective.

In my testing Germany was at a severe disadvantage, the Aztec player could do exactly what Pin wanted to do in his thread. Take Mohenjo-di jonaro then on towards Germany. Even with complete map knowledge when playing as the German player my bro was easily able to put me in a bad position.

So in the end the swap while I did not want to do it, seemed to cover several area's of concern, the most important of which was not having to redo the German lands to accommodate some sort of defensive terrain.

My map making process was as follows
- Make the base map, adding all of the land and spreading resources about
- Randomly put each player down.
- Edit the map so each player can utilize a bit of the civ all while keeping the map's 'randomness' and checking for starting city balance.
- add in CS
- Iterate through the starts and adjust accordingly.

In the end the swap of Germany and Rome was done as that was the easiest way to finish the map as it was with only minor tweaks. Again not something I really wanted to do but did not think would cause that big of an issue.

I learned a lot from this and will apply it to the next map I make.

So Pin the reason you see the Aztecs singled out is they were the only team while testing with my bro that was in the best position. The first 30 turns when played as any other team did not lead to such a disparity that I felt the need to make any major changes.

[MJW (ya that one)]

LOL @ defending the switch. Let him have it Rowain! 

[pindicator]

As I said I can't claim to know what was going on in your head, only can glimpse it from what was in the thread.  So if you say it wasn't done specifically against one civ then I'm glad to hear that.

It sounds like you went way too far down the slope of trying to balance out players against each other.  Easiest and best solution here is just to let it go random and let player's process for selecting picks and playing against each other and staying out of that kind of placement.  Because now you're responsible for every player's bad start, at least in part.  And they will let you know about it.  (And did I really say I was planning on attacking Rome?  Might have mentioned it in passing once; I don't remember every seriously considering that.)

So the city state thing... It sounds like you placed them with a very different idea of what the meta was than me.  In my previous game city states were alive and well into the end, but only specifically because there were backline locations where players could protect them.  Now if they were randomly given a bad city state then of course they are going to take that as a city for themself, but even then city states still provide a very useful function in allowing gold generation from trade routes even in the case of not having any friendly neighbors.  Putting all 3 city states in the middle just makes it more likely they do get eliminated, as there are no safe backlines for players to keep them alive.  (Unless of course they eliminate another player like Rome pretty much has done.)  But all I saw in the thread that explained rational of city state placement was talking about leading the players to them so the Aztecs don't conquer them without being noticed.  (Irony:  aztecs were the last civ to find them.)  Anyway, seems like we have a very different understanding of what the best use of city states is.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Multiple units should have been banned as I said before. You cannot deny guilt. However, this has happened before so Archduke's rage-quit is total BS.

Pindicator, MFA got successfully replaced by Cornflakes...

[suboptimal]

I think that part of the meta evaluation that goes with offering or accepting a DoF is the potential for your "friend" to meddle in your affairs via blockading. We've seen a few unintended consequences of being part of a DoF and this is just one of them...annoying to "the victim" but not exploitative, imho.

Is Cornflakes just supposed to sit there, watch Germany get conquered and let Archduke run away on the continent or attempt to meddle where he can in an attempt to slow Archduke down and regroup?

[pindicator]

I agree, Suboptimal - I thought this had been established as fair play from previous games

[Emperor K]

Your statement of "It sounds like you went way too far down the slope of trying to balance out players against each other. Easiest and best solution here is just to let it go random and let player's process for selecting picks and playing against each other and staying out of that kind of placement. Because now you're responsible for every player's bad start, at least in part. And they will let you know about it. (And did I really say I was planning on attacking Rome? Might have mentioned it in passing once; I don't remember every seriously considering that.)"

I think this sums up what happened. First map i ever made and had to do way to many edits, that balance kind of became an issue. I now know for future attempts. Hopefully at least the map turned out pretty well aside from CS and player placement.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Guys, I'm concerned about this post from rho:

Hmm, I think something odd might have happened. A couple of my units that shouldn't have been at full health now are. It's as though healing units all got 3 turns of healing over the last interturn. Well, not much to be done about it, and it will be very handy for the attacks this turn.

If you'll recall from PBEM7 (discussion in the lurker thread starts here: http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...010&page=6), one of the consequences of Mike's editting the save was a magically healing Roman warrior that Sullla was confused by. So the same thing coming up again...well, all I'm saying is, it's concerning.