Mapmaking for Dummies [Mapmaking Thread] [Yes there are spoilers] [lurkers only]

[greenline]

firstly if anyone has instructions for how to manually edit civ4wbsaves to make them compatible with RtR that would be great

Anyway, I thought I'd try posting concepts for maps here in this thread before I actually made one. Here are a few I came up with in about half an hour with MS paint. The red dots are player spawn points. I'd like to hear feedback about which ones seem like the most interesting and the most fair to play.

And call me old fashioned, but I believe multiplayer maps for any game should be treated with dignity and respect. By that I mean they should have overly mystical sounding names written_like_this.

Without further ado:

ffa_many_connections

The idea is to have 6 players to a starting circular island, which connects to many smaller or medium sized islands via narrow land bridges. The final, balanced version of this map would have it so that each player has a bridge closer to them than to anyone else which leads to a fair share of the islands that they could claim as their own.

ffa_reflecting_pool

This is similar to the last map, but with more of an emphasis on naval combat and geometric symmetry. There are various rings of islands laid around a thin edge of land at the "poles" of the incomprehensible toroid mass that is the map. Players will need galleys to escape their own islands. Sizes of the landmasses not to scale.

ffa_distorted_squares

The simplest and probably the most balanced concept, as well as having the least amount of water.. Just three groups of four players laid in squares, then pulled apart from each other, followed by drawing a continent around them. The player at the top right will have their position adjusted to make sense in the final version of the map.

ffa_eternal_stripe

The final version of the map would be set up for 12 players instead of the 8 shown here, but the concept is the same. A basic ring pangaea where the players spawn in on alternating peninsulas next to a medium sized island. The arrows indicate various angles that this strip of land can be tilted at.

I also made some ideas for starts that I'd also like to have some feedback on. The starts for any of these maps will probably be mirrored or something very close to mirrored.

"Hungry Hungry Capital"

(apologies for the worldbuilder uglyness) (all desert/coast tiles outside of the capital's radius are there to discourage fog gazing)
The idea here is to give a start with a lot of food, but a lot of food poor cottage land. The wheat could be changed to grass if this is too slow a start to be fun for a long PB game.

"Fish OR Chips?"

The idea for this one is to present a choice between a coastal and landlocked capital that hopefully isn't weighed too heavily to one side or the other. Landlocked gets a grass cow, wet plains wheat, and a wet grass sugar. The coastal capital trades the wheat and sugar for a fish and a clam, and loses one forest. Let me know how I should adjust this to keep the decision interesting.

"Stacking Small Advantages"

The idea here is to give a food heavy capital, but not one that gets all of its food in one or two big tiles. Each plains cow gives +1 food, and the sugars each give +1 when farmed (+2 with calendar) leading to a +6 surplus, which goes well with the mostly flat grass tiles the capital has.

"i like to play random maps in year long pitboss games"

I think this one is self explanatory.

So yeah, go nuts. If they all suck I'll just roll ten billion big and small maps until I find an interesting looking one then redraw all the terrain by hand.

[spacetyrantxenu]

The easiest way to edit world builder saves to be compatible with RtR is to generate a RtR save for comparison and copy over the additional player slots that will be missing from a BTS save. BTS saves are built for 18 players while post 2.0.6.4 or so (PB18) require 40 player slots, if I'm remembering the number correctly. It's been a little while and I can't access my civ pc right now. Just roll a RtR wb save and add the missing players/teams to the BTS file you want to work on and see if it will open in the version of RtR they'll be using in this game.

Thanks for volunteering for map duty. May you enjoy your work and have thick skin!

I'll try to conment on your map ideas when I'm not on mobile.

[Dreylin]

Quick thoughts: it's a casual game, so I'd suggest nothing too gimmicky with the map - ref back to PB28 & 32 for previous Casuals. Also, strongly recommend not going food-poor for the starts - ref comments in PB31. That was a Vets game, so they adapted & went on, but I'd half expect you to lose a player or two early on in a Casual game if the starts are inhospitable.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Ditto what Dreylin said. It's enjoyable to loose if you have nice big cities, rather than a mix of tundra/desert rubbish. Unless you have very thick skin for being abused!

One thing you most consider is how these different setups affect what players will do. That low food yield cap will really neef early slavery even more for example, whereas the high yield tiles cottage poor land makes Slavery very attractive.

But with a causal game I wouldn't want to give them too much of an awkward choice to make when settling.

[Qgqqqqq]

Map concepts:

1. I like it. I can see it being very difficult to balance correctly (I haven't followed the signup thread so I've no idea what your directives are). Also, I'd recommend breaking up the continents a tad as I can see a blob of interior terrain being boring. Obviously you should put the best terrain where it'll be competing between players.

2. Players won't want to start on different islands, and they're right - it'll be boring for too long. Especially if they get non coastal starts, as you seem to be going for. That's also a bit of a problem because some civs are better suited for naval maps (ORG, Carthage, Dutch, Lanun) and some are worse, so they definitely need to know what they're in for or there will be (more) complaints.

3. I don't see any inherent problems, though a bit boring. You'll run into similar issues with winning their own continent/how fast becoming the minigame, but that's not inherently bad.

4. I reckon it'll either have people too far from one another or too little land. Should probably put something between the fold, even if keeping a coastal connection - islands that can be fought over. Still, it works, just be careful about the width.

Starts:

1. Players won't enjoy it. Tundra is miserable to deal with, and on RB they won't see the lush resources as anything beyond the normal.

2. Everyone will settle in place or one south. If you switched starting position they still might, wet wheat is just too good. Look at the demogame for a very similar start.

3. Heh. But no. Too slow, and low yield starts upset people.

4. No.

[GermanJoey]

Fish or chips is ok, but, like Q said, everyone's gonna just settle on the sugar. The "stacking little advantages" is kinda like what I did for the PB32 starts... I guess it was ok, cause it was kinda tricky/interesting, but I think a faster capital, more like those Fish or Chips starts, woulda been more enjoyable for the players.

There's four main reasons why so-called "lush" starts/maps are preferred, in no particular order:

1.) As Dreylin and REM said, low-food starts are unfun, both for the players and the lurkers. A big part of civ is that you're building a civ. When your civ sucks right from the get-go, it feels sucky. A big part of reporting is that you're excited about your civ, so you want to post about it. When you're not so excited, you might not post so much. That feeds back to the lurkers too; when the players are more excited and posting a lot, the lurkers will get more excited and post more too. (see PB33)

2.) Lusher maps speed the game up. Pitboss games are exciting when the game first begins, because there's lots to do in planning out your start and you're still uncovering the map, and exciting when players first start interacting heavily in the classical/medieval era. Between those points the game tends to be more of a drag, as you already have your plan mostly in place but you still need to log in and hit end turn, sometimes without even having a unit to move. Lusher maps make this part of the game go faster without having to resort to quick speed. (this is also a reason to give everyone a plainshill at their start)

3.) Lusher maps are higher skill. When there's only a few sparse food resources nearby, where one settles is pretty obvious and there won't be a big difference between what different players will do. Increase the lushness, and eventually there stops being one right choice, and players will have to start making decisions on what to do. Both PB27 and PB29 are good examples of this effect.

4.) Lusher maps are easier to balance. In the early game, civs will only have a few cities and they'll each be only working a few tiles. When one civ has three 6f tiles, three 5f tiles, and a pair of grass gems between their 4 cities while another civ has a bunch of plains sheep and no happy resource at all, that latter civ will get real bitter real quick once map trades start flinging around at Writing. Players will naturally try to optimize their civs to choose the best tiles to settle nearby, so the same exact distribution of tiles isn't necessary (although try to avoid heavy clusters), as long as both civs have some good stuff nearby - players will choose what they want from it. Think of an Iron Chef battle, where one chef has filet mignons, foie gras, etc, on their side of the kitchen, while the challenger chef has instant cup noodles and some microwaveable steamer bags of vegetables to work with on their side. Maybe the challenger can make a miracle out of what they've been given, but it's a massive uphill battle for them and certainly doesn't feel very fair or fun. (which, again, is important, because you're gonna be stuck with it for a year, and every time you login you're gonna have that shoved in your face)

At any rate, it's also not very novel or interesting to have those horrid low food capitals, because half the capitals in PB31 were even worse than these.

[greenline]

point taken on the starts. I'll try and come up with some nicer looking ones to compare with the Fish or Chips start.

For the Fish and Chips start, would it be more even if I added a third clam in the radius of the seaside capital? Or would that be pushing things too far in the other direction?

Seems like map 1/many_connections is looking the most interesting, so I'll probably start working on a draft for that tomorrow unless anyone else has anything to say about that

[Qgqqqqq]

It would be more even, sure. I think I'd still settle for wheat.

Remember that the seaside needs to be a better option than the wheat, because people are moving towards it, putting themselves behind the curve. At the moment I think it's worse.

[GermanJoey]

Yeah, Another clam could be good, or first-ringing the fish and adding another tree or two would help too. That forested PH is a must I think. At any rate, I think the seafood start needs to be better in some way than the land start because you've got to waste a turn moving, so if they're equally good you'll choose the land start every time. (and land will tend to be faster and more flexible with equal food) edit: woops Q said the same thing.

At any rate, you definitely want make sure that you reveal both potential BFCs!

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

It would be more even, sure. I think I'd still settle for wheat.

Remember that the seaside needs to be a better option than the wheat, because people are moving towards it, putting themselves behind the curve. At the moment I think it's worse.

Good point. If you wanted a proper choice like that you could place the settler in the middle of them, and make them choose the move. Lock them in with forest/jungle. Maybe add some vision so they can see both choices fully? There was a map here that did a 2 hammer 1 food start or a move to a 1 hammer with that food and seafood start that was interesting...

Depends how serious the game is. If it is casual you want to keep needed simming to a minimum IMO