[NO PLAYERS] PBEM 7 Map Making & Lurkers

[pindicator]

That's the impression I got, and hopefully I'm wrong and they have additional plans for just plowing through on their own. If so then kudos to them

[mackoti]

Is CMF map as bad as he said? Man i know i would quit right away when find this, from what he said he got a very bad map compare to others...Was that hard to gave him some rivers and some strategic resources? I understand the RB ethic the one which play the hand you were dealt but seems he got no hand, but a punch in eyes...I remeber in pb2 , the one with sulla and spearker, that there were as well teams which practicaly had no rivers and very few grasland while SS team has lots of them and a very good land,I didnt said much then as i was a begginer here but the diference between theyr lands and Nakor for example was huge, the only team whci had something comparale was Atheletes team. If teh difernce is that big between CMF and other like in that game thats huge...

[T-hawk]

Sullla realizes this is a blatant "screw you,"

No he doesn't. He and Singaboy are busy congratulating each other for the brilliant strategic move. Sullla said "it almost forces TheArchduke to attack Woden next because there's nowhere else for his ships to go." Sullla's oblivious to how much he just absolutely pissed off Archduke.

[oledavy]

Sullla realizes this is a blatant "screw you,"

No he doesn't.  He and Singaboy are busy congratulating each other for the brilliant strategic move.  Sullla said "it almost forces TheArchduke to attack Woden next because there's nowhere else for his ships to go."  Sullla's oblivious to how much he just absolutely pissed off Archduke.

Oh dear.... 

I thought he had some inkling.

[Mardoc]

I think Shimomo makes a good point. It's certainly criticism we've seen of Sullla's game in the past, that he trends to write about other players like they are AI opponents at times.

I think Sullla's handicapped by being so often in the evangelist role.  Normally when he plays a game here, he's been playing and thinking deeply about the game quite a bit more than his opponents have.  That means he sees an extra-large amount of 'not what I would have done' moves.  If his opponents were of equal skill, he could attribute those moves to personality, and use that information to predict them in the future.  However, quite often those questionable moves are simple mistakes, that don't predict anything about future play because they'll be learned from and not repeated.

Then, by the time people start to catch up to Sullla in skill, he's further down the path toward 'seen it all, ready for the next game to be released', and he stops playing before he has a chance to metagame based on personalities.

It was even worse with Civ4, because he was obviously a tall poppy then, and people made moves (like the 5v1 dogpile in PB2) that they wouldn't make against anyone else.  Which a) made them even less predictable and b) burned Sullla out faster.  It seems like OleDavy's right, that's not going to be quite the same with Civ6.  Possibly because the Civ6 AI wasn't capable of giving Sullla enough challenge, so he wasn't as far ahead this time.

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Then, of course, there's the additional factor that he explains what he's thinking in enough detail that lurkers can spot the errors.  I'm sure lots of us make similar mistakes, but not in a well-detailed entertaining report, so no one particularly notices that time when, say, Mardoc didn't have a plan for naval defense so he chose to believe that there would be no naval invasion, despite some pretty clear indications.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Is CMF map as bad as he said? Man i know i would quit right away when find this, from what he said he got a very bad map compare to others...Was that hard to gave him some rivers and some strategic resources? I understand the RB ethic the one which play the hand you were dealt but seems he got no hand, but a punch in eyes...I remeber in pb2 , the one with sulla and spearker, that there were as well teams which practicaly had no rivers and very few grasland while SS team has lots of them and  a very good land,I didnt said much then as i was  a begginer here but the diference between theyr lands and Nakor for example was huge, the only team whci had something comparale was  Atheletes team. If teh difernce is that big between CMF and other like in that game thats huge...

Civ6 has no map editor and Cornflakes did the best he could do.

[suboptimal]

Is CMF map as bad as he said? Man i know i would quit right away when find this, from what he said he got a very bad map compare to others...Was that hard to gave him some rivers and some strategic resources? I understand the RB ethic the one which play the hand you were dealt but seems he got no hand, but a punch in eyes...I remeber in pb2 , the one with sulla and spearker, that there were as well teams which practicaly had no rivers and very few grasland while SS team has lots of them and  a very good land,I didnt said much then as i was  a begginer here but the diference between theyr lands and Nakor for example was huge, the only team whci had something comparale was  Atheletes team. If teh difernce is that big between CMF and other like in that game thats huge...

I'm no expert at map balance, but...

Fresh Water - he needs to look at the former Khmer lands.  Not much better unless a long river right along the tundra boundary is considered "better".  England could have also settled the river area NW of Trafalgar and on the northern coast instead of leaving those spots for Nubia.  

Natural Wonders - there were four natural wonders, so four players were not going to start near them.  The original map had Mt. Everest NW of his start location, not sure how or why it got moved unless something happened when Cornflakes finalized the map.

Resources - In Woden's T134 screenshot he has four iron, three horses and three niter.  They haven't been sharing, or discussing sharing, why?  The fact that they didn't think to move his excess strategics over to CMF is not the map's fault.  If he needed the resources and saw that Woden had plenty he should have asked for a few.  

Is there some bad luck involved here?  Absolutely.  Is it as bad as CMF is making it out to be?  I'm not so sure.

[Old Harry]

Interesting discussion. I think mardoc's closest - most other players don't give as much detail and don't have such a big audience, so Sullla's mistakes get a lot more notice.

On the map:
- I think only suboptimal and I checked in detail and then it was just to make sure each continent had 2 strategic resources. Is Woden just not sharing nicely with his teammate?
- I thought I'd checked for canal suitability, but obviously missed that one.
- Cornflakes specified where the water was and the rest of the terrain was generated by a map script so I guess freshwater is something else to check in future...
- Natural wonders aren't movable (are they?)

[suboptimal]

The ability to edit natural wonders is not really within the capabilities of WorldBuilder. I think in PBEM 4 there was a natural wonder that didn't look like one on the map because of Cornflakes' tinkering.

Each land mass had four of each strategic resource located on it or on the border of the continent and a land bridge. In CMF's case two of those (one iron, one coal) wound up in Valetta's territory (city-states were placed after the map was checked). Those resources remain in their control so long as they maintain suzerainty.

I've noticed that for some reason river placement seems sparse whenever Cornflakes has generated the map. I'm not sure why that is considering that he just does land/water placement and then the standard map scripts take over. That's also why the placement of continental boundaries is a bit hokey -- that's the DLL code at work.

[pindicator]

To be fair to Sullla, this is also us commenting on the ONLY flaw we find in his game. I think if you poll the site about who the best Civ 6 player is at RB, he'd probably won out. So this is a lot like saying Kobe Bryant didn't pass enough and get his teammates involved: it might be technically, but he's got enough skill in the other areas of his game to make up for that.