Don't worry, I have no intention of changing your start.
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.
I think Merovech is smart enough to know that map making is the most hated role on the forum, and to ignore everything said in a player thread about what they "ought" to do.
(August 27th, 2013, 16:11)Krill Wrote: Seven, I know there isn't a smiley in that post, but it's meant as a deadpan joke.
The start's actually fine from a balance perspective, depending on what the other players have. I just don't like it.
Just to expand on this, I think that my start is OK. If everyone else had, say, nothing more than two 5 yield food resources, and no plains hill plants, I'd say there are roughly even, because even though I have access to two 6 yield tiles, the cost of hooking up the fish is so high that it outweighs the benefits for the first 40 turns or so, not counting opportunity cost of the hammers for the work boat, or the beakers for Fishing compared to something else like going for religion or Pottery.
If everyone else however, has access to two 6 yield land tiles, or two land food resources that together make up 10 food/production and a plains hill start, I think my start is actually significantly weaker. Plains hill starts are important because they get the starting worker out 3 turns sooner, which is 3 turns quicker to size 2, 3 turns sooner that the food resource can be hooked. Starting with a plains hill or rather any 2 hammer plant, is fairly equivalent to the difference between the second food resource being a dry rice and wet corn IMO.
To put this into perspective, I'm looking at building 1 worker and 1 settler, with no work boat or warrior, by T25-ish with what I can see. If I had 2 hammer plant, I can get it by T21 and go straight onto the work boat afterward, or finish the warrior those additional 3 turns just snowball through the game. Frankly the fish screws everything up more, because I have to spend 30 hammers on a work boat whereas other players can spend that on half a worker. Because of the lack of hammers at this start (no 3 hammer tile, no 2 hammer plant) I can't actually start building it until T20, and don't have the hammers to finish it unless I specifically slave or chop it until T29 (and if it is slaved I have to time the slave to workout that the fish is hooked for regrowth to size 2). That is with no warrior being produced and wMMing for the quickest workboat, finishing at size 3.
Players with 2 land based food resources and no plains hill can get worker done by T15, and then both land based foods hooked by T25 but:
Haven't slaved away any population points, opening up different tech lines
Have not had to spend none-renewable resource such as forests and worker turns on producing the hammers for the chop.
Have built warriors to escort settlers and fight barbs
This isn't a comment on the surrounding land that is hidden under the fog of war: no players have vision on that so can't judge it. We are only able to compare what we see to what we think our opponents will, or could, have. I'm only commenting on the land that I' will have available for the capital.
Now the reason why balance is so much more important in this game than in others such as PB13, PB8 and PB5 is because of hte map dimensions. The players start close enough together that a slow start can mean the inability to grab strategic resources and frankly even enough city sites to be viable: 126 tiles on average pales in comparison to the average of over 200 for the other PB games. These starts need to have been very highly balanced to not put players into unwinnable positions. That means there is a lot less variability in what can actually be used at each players start given that I know what I have.
EDIT: tl;dr: I'm not complaining about this start being bad, I'm describing what would happen for me to start complaining about my starting being objectively bad.
I don't like the plains hill extra hammer mechanic, I think it should have been taken from the game. It's too imbalanced, giving a big advantage for almost no cost whatsoever. I got a significant disadvantage on my development in PBEM 50, for example, since mostly everyone had a plains hill start. There's simply no way I could compensate for that.
I agree that as a mechanic it does make it significantly harder to balance starts, but TBH I think it's manageable.
Basically whenever a map is made, the starting spot has to be better than any surrounding potential capital location. If the players know this, then you don't get the people looking at the starting spot and then wandering into the fog for 5 turns looking for a better start. That route has 2 outcomes: players are so far behind they turn the game into a farce because they just gave up a huge head start to everyone else, they give up and use troll strategies like warrior rushing someone and completely break the game, or they actually find a better start and come out ahead. Stuff like plains hills is what makes scouting a much better proposition because it makes up for all of the lost turns just on the worker.
The problem is, the map maker often places players a good distance apart and a player wandering 4 tiles in either direction can cause people to be so close together that players then start focusing on warrior rushes and archer chokes and it isn't even troll (like when capitals are 5 tiles apart).
That's not so bad on much larger maps, but frankly it's still bad map design IMO (though giving players enough information to judge that moving a tile or two isn't so bad, it's when people spend longer than that that problems arise). And on this map with players being no more than 12 tiles apart, it's even worse.
On the original map scripts, the starts weren't great but the surrounding land was often quite barren (but still playable), so people generally didn't wander very far and sucked up a bad start, in the knowledge that other players were unlikely to get a truly great start. Now though the maps are often much lush and that makes players more willing to spend time looking for a better start, as the expectations of what sort of start quality have increased.
So really, there are a few options:
Make the starts good. 2 hammer tiles and decent food etc. In my case that would have meant just giving a 2 hammer plant and a plains hill forest and that would have made the fish a viable resource provided I picked a Fishing civ.
Make the surrounding land significantly worse again. Most players wouldn't be that interested in this IMO, because it makes the game less about conflict over useful resources such as land and more about eking out an economy and minimal military usage.
Players get preplaced capitals. I dunno, some people may want to try this out. I personally wouldn't like to give up control unless I knew the starts were highly balanced.
Nerf 2 hammer plants (and the 3 food plants) by making every city tile a 2/1/1 tile. This would have numerous small effects such as never wanting to settle on a resource, but players will still want to settle on junk like desert.
I don't know if the latter is actually needed, because the first point works fine on a pre-made map, and when using random maps, the settings are generally designed to have some level of redundancy built into them.
How about this: I'm going to eat lunch. When I come back, I'll make a decision and send the map to Caledorn.
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.
Dude if you are that unsure, toss a coin. If you feel like either option is valid, it's fine to do either. And if you have an emotional reaction to the answer the coin gives you, you know what you have to do.
But also, go have lunch. Bit late for you for lunch though, isn't it? Unless you are still a student...
EDIT: Please don't feel like I'm biting your head off or anything, but if this is an either/or question, we trust you do make that call, especially if you've spent a day or so figuring it out. You should have some confidence in your abilities; I know the rest of us do.
