OK, after spending some time rolling maps today, I think I have one that will work for this game. Here's the overview picture of the setup screen:
![[Image: PBEM2-1.jpg]](http://www.sullla.com/Civ6/PBEM2-1.jpg)
I had to make one change from the original setup plan: I had to set the resources to "Standard" and not "Balanced". This is due to the way that the map generation works; you would think that the Balanced option would take the normal player starting positions and then add resources to them to ensure everyone has access to strategic resources. You would be wrong. Instead, the Balanced option apparently generates the map first, and then forces the player starting positions into areas where all of the strategic resources are nearby. This doesn't work at all for purposes of fairness; I rolled about a dozen of those maps, and it was always cramming someone into some godforsaken corner to ensure that the Balanced condition was achieved. Seriously, you have no idea how bad this was; once I almost had a viable game because ALL FIVE PLAYERS were in awful starts that lacked fresh water. But I didn't really think that's what you had in mind here...
Turning off the Balanced option resulted in much more viable starting positions, and after a half dozen more rolls, I ended up with something that looked pretty fair. Now keep in mind that I still couldn't edit this map at all. This is not one of those Civ4 maps with mirrored starts and carefully balanced terrain. I did the best I could and I think what we ended up with is reasonably good. However, it's still a random map, and there's going to be some areas where one player has an edge over the others. I can't avoid that when rolling random map setups. What I can tell you about this map is that:
* Everyone has a fresh water start
* Everyone has room to spread out and establish an initial core of cities
* Everyone has access to several different city states
* The total amount of land in each player's sphere of influence is roughly similar
Feel free to complain when things pop up that are unfair, just keep in mind the limitations that we're working with here.
Now for the actual game setup. I don't know if the PYFT client can load a savegame file, and fortunately it doesn't matter. I've tested and so long as the map is generated with the same seed and the same game settings, it will produce the same map with the same starting positions every time. I'm going to email a screenshot with the game settings to the first player in turn order (oledavy) and let him create the game in the PYFT client. Then each of you will have to join the game in the same order that the save will be emailed back in forth, since it doesn't appear that can be changed once the game is underway. Again, that order is:
Oledavy: Greece (Gorgo)
Woden: China
Singaboy: Germany
Alhambram: Russia
TheArchduke: Greece (Pericles)
I'll also send oledavy a screenshot of what his starting position is supposed to look like, and if for some reason he gets something else, we'll know that we have to abort and start over again. Anyway, I think that everything should work out fine if we set things up that way. Does that sound OK to everyone?
I had to make one change from the original setup plan: I had to set the resources to "Standard" and not "Balanced". This is due to the way that the map generation works; you would think that the Balanced option would take the normal player starting positions and then add resources to them to ensure everyone has access to strategic resources. You would be wrong. Instead, the Balanced option apparently generates the map first, and then forces the player starting positions into areas where all of the strategic resources are nearby. This doesn't work at all for purposes of fairness; I rolled about a dozen of those maps, and it was always cramming someone into some godforsaken corner to ensure that the Balanced condition was achieved. Seriously, you have no idea how bad this was; once I almost had a viable game because ALL FIVE PLAYERS were in awful starts that lacked fresh water. But I didn't really think that's what you had in mind here...
Turning off the Balanced option resulted in much more viable starting positions, and after a half dozen more rolls, I ended up with something that looked pretty fair. Now keep in mind that I still couldn't edit this map at all. This is not one of those Civ4 maps with mirrored starts and carefully balanced terrain. I did the best I could and I think what we ended up with is reasonably good. However, it's still a random map, and there's going to be some areas where one player has an edge over the others. I can't avoid that when rolling random map setups. What I can tell you about this map is that:
* Everyone has a fresh water start
* Everyone has room to spread out and establish an initial core of cities
* Everyone has access to several different city states
* The total amount of land in each player's sphere of influence is roughly similar
Feel free to complain when things pop up that are unfair, just keep in mind the limitations that we're working with here.
Now for the actual game setup. I don't know if the PYFT client can load a savegame file, and fortunately it doesn't matter. I've tested and so long as the map is generated with the same seed and the same game settings, it will produce the same map with the same starting positions every time. I'm going to email a screenshot with the game settings to the first player in turn order (oledavy) and let him create the game in the PYFT client. Then each of you will have to join the game in the same order that the save will be emailed back in forth, since it doesn't appear that can be changed once the game is underway. Again, that order is:
Oledavy: Greece (Gorgo)
Woden: China
Singaboy: Germany
Alhambram: Russia
TheArchduke: Greece (Pericles)
I'll also send oledavy a screenshot of what his starting position is supposed to look like, and if for some reason he gets something else, we'll know that we have to abort and start over again. Anyway, I think that everything should work out fine if we set things up that way. Does that sound OK to everyone?
