0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
Trolls Wrote:We would also be pleased to tell you when we meet another team, and we'll re-direct our EPs as soon as that happens. Let's refrain from providing other teams specific details, e.g. capital locations without first getting permission. Speaking of which, who did you meet and where are they located :-)?
Darrell
Tropical Trolls
Still nothing from Menagerie. Assuming they're ignoring us because of the wonder question. That's dumb, at least man up and deflect the question or something.
Tempted to poke them on that as we literally emailed them 2 weeks ago. That's quite a long time.
Well, maybe they messed up like we did? A polite little poke is probably fine.
I'll go ahead and type something up for the Trolls, everything they suggest sounds agreeable to me.
Here:
Quote:Hello again, fine Caribbean Cyclopi!
That agreement sounds good to us. The only civilization besides you which we have found is Team Menagerie; they are to our Northwest.
Merovech
Team Gillette
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
Just checking in - we haven't gotten a response from you in a couple weeks so we wanted to make sure we didn't miss a message or anything. I know things are slow in this phase so diplo is a lesser priority, but we felt it would be prudent to check in and make sure everything is ok.
Good, hopefully Menagerie will get back to us soon.
I fixed two grammatical errors in my message nd sent it.
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
Once again we want to apologize you for the delay in communication. Most of our team (including diplo folks) is currently on vacation and it doesn't seem to change before September.
Returning to the topic, we have just met TEAM, but they seem to come from afar.
As for questions about our Wonder plans, we afraid that this information is strictly confidential, and unfortunately can not be shared outside. I hope you will understand that
In hope of a further peaceful cooperation.
Menagerie Trois
Guess they aren't interested in any goodwill from admitting they're building a wonder we all know they're going to be building?
Okay, let's try to start getting things in order here. The diplo department has been pretty neglected thus far due to the slow early turns, but let's try to get some sort of planning going. We need to start seriously thinking about who we want to befriend, who we want to make deals with, etc. We have two neighbors - Menagerie and Trolls. Menagerie has said 0 useful things thus far, and Trolls have done just a tiny bit better but not much. Very non-committal which is how we've been too. However, we really could use a friend on one of our sides. Some thoughts on both neighbors.
Menagerie
Their diplo department is apparently pretty lackluster, going 2 weeks without responding until I poked them to respond. This can be forgiven, but there's also other cracks which may make serious cooperation difficult. First, we're about to go settle a key location between us and them. Hard to sell ourselves as BFFs and then settle in their face. Also, they are being tight-lipped over information that isn't really worth being tight-lipped about IMO. I'm not saying they needed to just list all wonders they plan on building, but a logical move would be to counter with at least some sort of coordination attempt. Instead they just said "nope sorry" and that was that.
Overall, the biggest issue is settling towards them, but the other annoyances in their (lack of) diplo is an issue too.
Tropical Trolls
I think things are more promising here, but again, we haven't really put any effort. They kind of served things up in this message:
Trolls Wrote:I'm tempted to spam 100 e-mails to see just how many tropical troll permutations you have .
We agree that cooperation is key in these games, and feel your team is made up of honorable folks. Did you have something more concrete in mind, or just a generic "let's hold hands and sing Kumbayah"? Have you had friendly relations with the other team you've met?
Despite settling a turn later Menagerie seems to have built both a Worker & a Warrior at least as fast if not faster than the rest of us - seems they got a good capital site, perhaps even a plains hill city & a 4 yield tile in the BFC.
Regards,
Darrell
Tropical Trolls
We responded at the time with something fairly non-commital, but as we see how things are unfolding with Menagerie, I'm starting to regret not pushing Trolls a bit here. We're in the classic settling dilemma that many map designs have setup (PBEM7 as the most notable) where you can settle in either direction towards a neighbor, and nobody wants both neighbors coming at them. Furthermore, Trolls are playing Sury of India which is decidedly faster than Menagerie's Huayna. We probably will settle multiple cities in Menagerie's direction early on, but we don't really want Sury of India doing the same to us, if we can prevent it.
So what do we do? What I don't think we do is try to con them out of the gold location and try to get 2 to ourselves. That's the human nature response, and I would try it if my neighbor was inexperienced, but we can't afford that here because they're smart enough and have good enough traits to call our bluff and submarine our relationship with them in the process. Let's use the dotmap Cheater Hater suggested:
What we really don't want is them settling that brown dot or even settling the gold first. I think we can live with them actually getting that gold, so long as that forms their absolute western boundary. If we can get the wheat, corn, and deer, I can live with them snagging the gold. Thoughts on that? Anyways, I'm going to propose we work towards the following goals with Trolls:
1) Try to negotiate an agreement where our first cities do not go towards each other. Tell them we feel more comfortable with them than Menagerie, and as a result we'd rather claim land towards Menagerie and encourage them to also settle away from us.
2) If step 1) works, the next logical step is to push for some sort of settling agreement. I don't really like settling agreements in general, but again they'll have the jump on settling, so it's to our advantage to have an agreement in place. We can quibble over the gold later, but I think more important than who gets what is ensuring that we deal with it in just that way - later. The longer the land between us and Trolls goes unsettled, the better for us. We also don't want them depositing dozens of turns of CRE culture all around the gold while we can do nothing about it. Even if they do eventually get it, we'd rather them get it with their 4-5th settlement than their 1st.
Any thoughts on all this? So far we've had no real focus in the diplo, which is ok, but we need to change that now.
