[SPOILERS-PBEM14] scooter's thread - Mansa Musa

[scooter]

Well apparently I have found the south coast of this continent? Something like that. Perhaps it's not very round-ish and is just oddly shaped.

Just had a thought occur to me after I hit post... My warrior is still in the jungle line... This means he is roughly at the equator...... Which makes it seem quite odd that he'd hit the "bottom" of the mega continent. To me, this hints that perhaps the map is not very circular in nature. This has some potentially interesting repercussions in terms of map design/balance/etc, but I'm not sure I'm in a great state of awareness to be able to think it through and figure it out at the moment... So I'll sleep on it and see if I can figure anything out at all. I think the most likely explanation is that the water I'm looking at is just some quirky inlet, and the land I'm seeing down there is connected from either the east or the west, but probably not both.

In case you can't tell, I quite enjoy trying to crack the map mystery in each game I play.

[pling]

Maybe everyone's on some sort of peninsula-type thing, joined up in the middle? Tho now I type that, I guess it doesn't fit with Serdoa finding you by walking west ... did he ever send you a screenie of his exploration?

[scooter]

Well since we're speculating on map, I finally got a screenshot from Serdoa... He forgot to attach it apparently... This one looks weird because it was made using my poorly angled screenshots, but you still get the idea of the geography. I'm sticking it in spoiler tags becuase it's very big.

Some random thoughts...

1. Looks like the floodplains/gold/marble spot will be the natural boundary between us. Could be interesting figuring out who gets it. I think it's slightly closer to me.

2. This is a really, really strange map. I say this because of the abundance of lakes everywhere... This is highly unusual honestly, and your typical Big&Small map will not feature lakes like that. Even the frequency of peaks is really bizarre... There seems to be no map script at all that matches up with this... Either this thing is really hand-edited, or Plako messed with some crazy Full of Resources settings or something.

3. Since Serdoa moved, the best explanation seems to be that he moved to get the gold in his capital. I can't quite tell where his original spot was though...

I need to go now, so maybe I'll have more thoughts later...

[SevenSpirits]

Probably some sort of Lakes-style script then.

I feel we got significantly worse capital options than he did. Hopefully this is compensated for somewhat by the surrounding terrain. We really need to scout westward - it seems quite plausible there's a good second city site there. If not, the plains hill southwest of the corn and north of the horse looks pretty nice and doesn't even need a border pop.

[dazedroyalty]

Highly edited map is a distinct possibility tho the completely different capital areas makes that seem less likely. It's really tough to figure out what exactly is going on. I'm still guessing a large landmass. Can't figure the placements tho.

[scooter]

As for Serdoa's capital - I can't place exactly where his settler started, so I'm not quite sure what he had to look at when he opened the save... But yeah, he seems to have a lot more options. And yes I need to get westward and figure out what's over there, but the first settler is going to have to go without knowledge of what's west of me - I just can't delay settling that long. In the next 2 days, I'll re-visit dotmapping the land to my east to figure out where to place my first city, as my settler is due in 5ish turns, so I'll need my decision to be made by the weekend.

Lakes-style script seems odd though, as I don't know any "global lakes" script... That's what gets me. Lakes scripts are generally all land, no ocean, with lakes on them... Rather than a massive continent that also happens to have a bunch of lakes on it. That's pretty highly abnormal... So here's the most realistic options:

1) Plako came up with some whacked-out settings using the "Full of Resources" generator. I can't think of how he'd use it to come up with this, but it IS a very powerful generator.
2) This map is highly edited or highly hand-drawn
3) There's something I've overlooked in terms of scripts

In terms of likelihood... I rank 1 and 3 as about equally likely, then 2 as pretty unlikely. Haven't had time to see if I can duplicate something like this with Full of Resources...

[pling]

I had a play around with that map stitch-up and looked back through bits of the thread for my own benefit, but having done it, thought it might be worth sharing



The two purple lines mark the mid-point between us & Serdoa, the twelfth tile from each capital is between them.

The dark blue measles round Serdoa's capital are places I think it's possible for him to've started given he settled on turn 1 and I think it's on a hill(?). I think some can be counted out because of visibility rules (the northernmost one?) but I don't remember enough about them to figure that out. My gut-feeling is to think he started on the coast between the crab & the western sheep, and moved for the hill+wheat - but I've no real reasoning to back that up with Oh, and if he moved east then that'd make his original capital closer to the gold/marble/floodplains site, so it'd be even more of a centre point (I'd guess that's a mapmaker-intentional border-treaty conflict point ).

The lime-green spot - is that a lake? It would get him 1 water in his capital, despite being non-coastal. And back when we were all speculating on what Serdoa & Sandover had moved for, didn't we think that possibly one had moved for floodplains and the other one (or both) had moved for coast. Well, that's clearly not the case with Sandover's landlocked capital Does this also mean that Sandover must be the chap with the floodplains at his (presumably coastal?) capital, or does it mean there's some other reason someone had low health and we missed it?

The red (and red-ish) dots - the two bright red ones are where scooter had talked about city two being placed - 2food site to the north, choke+horses to the south. The salmon pink one is SevenSpirits's most recent suggestion, and the one so pale it's practically not red is my thought while I was drawing dots & lines on the map - it's got pigs, gold and plugs the choke point at the north of the peaks (but is a bit far, maybe? actually the more I look at it, the more I see problems with it, but the dot's on the map and I cba to undo that bit & re-upload the pic).

[scooter]

Thanks for that pling, it helps a lot... I like your "white dot" for lack of a better name, but I think it's too far for a second city. It'd make a nice 3rd or 4th city, however.

At this point I'm thinking about something like this:

City1: SevenSpirit's salmon dot, getting me corn, horses, and a plains hill settle. It'll be a pretty mediocre city longterm, but in the short term, it'll be fine.

City 2: Pigs/Gold/Spices city on the hill SE of the peak.

This is highly dependent on if I find anything to my west... Thankfully, Serdoa is going to scout it for me apparently, as his scout is heading that direction. This is kind of a lucky break for me. I'm hoping he scouts around my capital and not just in a straight line to find my next closest neighbor, but beggars can't be choosers.

Oh yeah... I made contact with Lewwyn! Found his capital. Screenshot coming... soon!

[scooter]

(I thought about dragging this out for a few hours and waiting to post this report, but I had a few minutes so I typed up a report real quick)

Well I did check to see if I have seafood by the horses, and no such luck



My warrior moved onto the jungle hill like I said to get a better look, and boy did he ever get a better look:



I sent off a message to Lewwyn saying hello:

Lewwyn,

Greetings! We have now met in-game, as my warrior has hit your borders, as you'll see when you get the save. I came up on your southwest border and when I landed on the jungle hill, suddenly your green borders came into view! In case you are unfamiliar, I think you'll find that my diplo style is pretty laid-back, as opposed to my slightly more in-your-face style that I've used in the werewolf games, so fear not on that front .

I've always preferred being fairly up front with information, as it tends to help relations and tends to make the other person more likely to open up... You are the second person I've met, as I met Serdoa around 4-5 turns ago. I am to your northwest, and Serdoa is to your northeast, however it is a good distance, and as far as I can tell, we have fairly big amounts of space between us all. We are kind of arranged in a triangle actually - all roughly 20 tiles from each other.

So how goes your exploration efforts?

scooter

[scooter]

So I'm spending some time messing with map scripts, trying to figure it out... I did some looking through custom map scripts at CFC, and didn't see anything that seemed likely. I tried playing with Full of Resources for awhile - and I couldn't get it to replicate the oddity of a major continental map with this many bizarre lakes and even the somewhat unusual peaks. So honestly I'm at a loss, and I'm about to give up and just say congrats to Plako for stumping me . I may check out that Earth2 script just to see what it is, since it's the only script I didn't account for in my testing. Other than that though, I may just have to wait until I have more information. I guess Plako had to have done a lot of manual editing after all!