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Krill · July 17th, 2010, 13:50

Square Leg · July 17th, 2010, 15:08

Awesome map.

What is going on with the fish under the ice though on the left hand side? Is that just a pointer problem?

Krill · July 17th, 2010, 15:12

Pointer problem. They are in fact at the far left edge of the map. And Thanks smile

I should point out that everything except the large strip of land was handcrafted. The large strip of land was copy/pasted from several Inland Sea maps (Highly Balanced versions that were created for MP play)...and then I edited the rivers to fit, and added some resources, took some away...on the whole took me about 7 hours to make. Maybe 8, including setting the saves up. It's worth it. I think that it would be possible to code a map script to make a map like this, but I can't code...

Square Leg · July 17th, 2010, 15:15

Those islands are rally lush with food. I think anyone who see that and goes for it will do well - an early WB exploring will be key.

pocketbeetle · July 17th, 2010, 17:19

Interesting that TT's warrior has Combat I. tongue

I haven't managed to understand those screenshots yet, still confused what the overall map looks like, but does seem interesting.

Krill · July 17th, 2010, 17:21

Oops. I know I got rid of the Quechua, but I have no idea why it would have C1 promo?

I'll try and do a write up tomorrow, I was just way to tired today after making the map.

But one thing is for certain: if they don;t get off their shared starting landmass, they aren't going to get very far in the game.

Krill · July 18th, 2010, 11:30

So, the map...I'll begin by discussing what I thought the map should be like.

I started by checking how many players were in the game. 5. Ouch. 5 is the hardest to balance, because of the shape of the map: you can't fit one in each corner, or side of the map...only reasonable map is an inland sea, as each player gets 2 neighbours. You'll note that that is what Sullla did for PBEM1. I personally prefer 6 player games, but 5 with NTT, well, it can be made to work.

And so Inland sea...the Inland Sea map script uses a flat map. But what if you using wrapping? Cylindrical wrapping means that you only need 1 ring of land going from left to right, and that gives you a lot more of the map to mess about with for other purposes. Now, I'm a sucker expansion games, as everyone probably knows, I like players to have to think about how to expand, and balancing it against teching and defense, and I especially like it when they include expansion of the naval variety.

So, that explains the island directly next to each civs capital: more land, containing resources not on the ring. The resources are iron, horses, silver, gold, banana, and technically not clams. The ring itself only has fish, corn, ivory, and copper, with the horses being inside the capital radius. The islands are connected to each other, north and south, by peaks to extend the coast in a natural fashion, so one player can steal anothers' if anyone goofs off.

Now, one could argue that no one is going to tech AH with no food resource that needs it...especially when each player founded on a copper plains hill. But each player here knows the power of horses, so I expect it to get teched at some point...working out as one kind of easter egg. Another point is that 3 of the 5 teams will/do see that silver on the island when the capital borders expand, the other two won't.

[Image: Civ4ScreenShot0200.jpg]

The fun thing is though, that this is a Tilted Axis map; one of the players has already caught onto the hint, that the snow covered trees are on the left ring, and that normal fur trees are on the island.

Here is the map from F5, to give a decent overview. Remember that the map is 52 by 52 tiles.

[Image: Civ4ScreenShot0187.jpg]

Jowy · July 18th, 2010, 11:54

Quechua's get a free Combat I as far as I know.

Krill · July 18th, 2010, 12:01

OK, originally when I was making this map, all of the civs started on the other side of the ring, on the left hand side of the map. After some thought, I decided to swap them over to the right side of the ring, so that everyone had an escape route to the islands if they got attacked early. I think everyone could gain heart after how Plako pulled off the great escape in PB2. The reason why I put the 2 tile wide coastal sea in place is that it gives the possibility of a galley end around attack, and in the late game galleons/transports are going to make defending/attacking over there quite fun...I toyed with the idea of making each capital a 1 tile wide choke point, to speed up exploration of the islands, but in the end, it was just simpler to move the starting locations.

The small ring was created at 8 tiles wide specifically to decrease the amount of living space, and force the players to focus on other avenues of expansion. The river was laid down so that each team will get some easier commerce to fund expansion/tech, but the three parts of the ring that I had to think about were the forests, the food resources, and plains. I knew that I needed each player to settle on the starting location, if anyone moved off the coast, then they were fairly screwed. To support this, I made sure that no player would see another food after they moved their starting warrior, and that they would loses forests as well. The plains I added so that if someone decided to move to get a better bureaucracy capital running more cottages, well, they wouldn't get any more food, and they wouldn't get many more grassland tiles.

I did wonder about altering the dimensions of the map, using a custom made python map script, but that would have meant asking someone else to code it, and I didn't want to trouble anyone when this map script would suffice.

Krill · July 18th, 2010, 12:05

Jowy, when I generated the map, I started off using random leaders. so it turns out that the leader that started in TTs' place was aggressive, and I didn't delete/replace the warrior...that is why it started with C1.

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