Yeah, as wetbandit said lusher map gets game jump-started quicker. IMHO they're also much higher skill cap and more interesting to watch early. My thinking is, yes, eventually you'll want to settle all of your land (which isn't a bad thing) because yes, there's tons of great spots everywhere - but which do you get first? For example, I keep thinking of SevenSpirit's micro challenge that he posted a few years ago, where lots of good players all settled the same land in completely different ways: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid437300 To me, this is a perfect example of what makes Civ4's early game very special and unique and fun. In some situations, there may be an optimal ways to do things, but for most others, its not clear even with simming, and there's generally always tradeoffs involved.
So, a very lush map gives you many options, and, more importantly, they're all very different options. You not only have to identify which spots are good, but then you also need to make decisions, such as grabbing strategic resources ASAP, vs grabbing as much food as possible, vs auto-connecting your first few cities, vs hooking early luxuries, vs expanding towards a certain direction, vs trying to pink dot contested areas, vs dense packing and sharing tiles, etc. The ideal is a "different but equal" type of situation, where players can choose what they want and then develop from there, and what they choose early will make a big difference due to Civ being a snowball game. The alternative is limiting player choice, of which sparse maps are one example but a very samey lush map could be another. With sparse maps, if you've only got one new food resource within a 5-tile ring outside of your capital's BFC, that also claims copper, well your second city is probably going there. Or, for a more relevant example, consider Krill's unfortunate situation caused by our oversight of his copper. Because we screwed him there, he's now forced to a.) settle super aggressively directly towards TheWannabe and/or b.) beeline IW. (which I don't think is a bad choice in general but he is indeed a bit forced towards it). That means he's not expanding at all towards Adrien, or claiming his un-jungled silver, or optimizing for the best SH completion time, or for the most new food. Perhaps, in an ideal world, he'd still want to expand aggressively towards TheWannabe anyways, but the important point is that we took away his choice. Instead, the map is determining how Krill should play, not Krill himself.
This also ties in to balance too, IMHO, in that it is easier to balance an asymmetric random map if it is lusher. TRIGGER WARNING: RAMBLE ALERT FOR THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH. It's not really about not wanting to get beat up (although its funny to me that several people are complaining that the map is TOO lush
) but in feeling myself that the map is fair because that's important to me. With a lush map, you can trust players to figure out what stuff they want first, which then frees you to just make sure everybody has about the same amount of stuff overall, and that the stuff is distributed about evenly across the land. However, with a sparse map you actually think/guess on how players will settle, because seemingly-small differences can become a big deal because of Civ's snowball nature. A sparse map can work, but it's just a far tougher job to get right and requires more hand-crafting, and even then could be very brittle if someone does something far outside of expectations. Going back to random maps, consider two players with imbalanced starts, first on a lush map. Maybe player A's second city is slightly better than player B's second city, but because both A and B have pretty good spots, then the difference won't be too big, or at least hopefully not bigger than their other decisions. A 7/10 compared to an 8/10 is only different by 14%, for example. On the other hand, if the map is sparser, than the chance of A and B having more widely varying second cities increases, and the more players you have on a map the more likely it is that something will slip by. So now consider the sparser map, where A managed to get a great site while B has a mediocre one. Let's say that Player B is a more skilled player, and so he makes more out of his crappier starting position than A could have. However, A isn't playing out of B's starting position, he's playing out of A's, so that argument doesn't mean anything. If the difference is great enough, then player B can still lose no matter how well he plays, essentially due the map imbalance. It may help to think about that the difference between a 4/10 and an 8/10 is 100%! Considering how long these games last, this is a very frustrating situation that I want to avoid. The reverse is terrible as well, where the more skilled player B has the good start and player A has the crappier one. In this case, its likely that B will completely crush A. However, now the differences will seem exaggerated to the point where A may feel like he never had a chance at all, so why did he ever bother playing. He may even see it coming from a long ways way, but yet is still obligated to keep playing turns for months.
Regarding the commerce tiles - REXing is too good compared to what, oracle before first settler when your closest neighbor is Joao of Egypt? In seriousness though, there's already 4 teams planning for very early wonders, so I think pure REXing isn't necessary a no-brainer if guys like Krill, dtay, and Gavagai all see other opportunities too. In general though, REXing is just how pitboss is played. A player that tries libbing MT with 6 cities around a cottage-capital, SP-style, will just get fucking crushed with Horchers or Knights far before that.
The "free" commerce tiles are also there, as wetbandit says, get the game jump-started a bit faster, but there's another ~secret~ reason for them too. First of all, each player only has one such resource nearby (silver/gems/gold) that's not covered by jungle. Everyone's explored a fair bit now so I think its ok to spoil that. So, that's not too extreme - a single gold isn't enough to drive an entire economy. The big thing is actually the jungled copies. They're actually there to compensate for something else, something that players usually take for granted but so far only two players have noticed is missing.
Cottaging will still be very important! The difference between being a tech leader and being behind always comes down to cottages, which in turn always comes back to how well you manage your food and worker labor.
So, a very lush map gives you many options, and, more importantly, they're all very different options. You not only have to identify which spots are good, but then you also need to make decisions, such as grabbing strategic resources ASAP, vs grabbing as much food as possible, vs auto-connecting your first few cities, vs hooking early luxuries, vs expanding towards a certain direction, vs trying to pink dot contested areas, vs dense packing and sharing tiles, etc. The ideal is a "different but equal" type of situation, where players can choose what they want and then develop from there, and what they choose early will make a big difference due to Civ being a snowball game. The alternative is limiting player choice, of which sparse maps are one example but a very samey lush map could be another. With sparse maps, if you've only got one new food resource within a 5-tile ring outside of your capital's BFC, that also claims copper, well your second city is probably going there. Or, for a more relevant example, consider Krill's unfortunate situation caused by our oversight of his copper. Because we screwed him there, he's now forced to a.) settle super aggressively directly towards TheWannabe and/or b.) beeline IW. (which I don't think is a bad choice in general but he is indeed a bit forced towards it). That means he's not expanding at all towards Adrien, or claiming his un-jungled silver, or optimizing for the best SH completion time, or for the most new food. Perhaps, in an ideal world, he'd still want to expand aggressively towards TheWannabe anyways, but the important point is that we took away his choice. Instead, the map is determining how Krill should play, not Krill himself.
This also ties in to balance too, IMHO, in that it is easier to balance an asymmetric random map if it is lusher. TRIGGER WARNING: RAMBLE ALERT FOR THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH. It's not really about not wanting to get beat up (although its funny to me that several people are complaining that the map is TOO lush
) but in feeling myself that the map is fair because that's important to me. With a lush map, you can trust players to figure out what stuff they want first, which then frees you to just make sure everybody has about the same amount of stuff overall, and that the stuff is distributed about evenly across the land. However, with a sparse map you actually think/guess on how players will settle, because seemingly-small differences can become a big deal because of Civ's snowball nature. A sparse map can work, but it's just a far tougher job to get right and requires more hand-crafting, and even then could be very brittle if someone does something far outside of expectations. Going back to random maps, consider two players with imbalanced starts, first on a lush map. Maybe player A's second city is slightly better than player B's second city, but because both A and B have pretty good spots, then the difference won't be too big, or at least hopefully not bigger than their other decisions. A 7/10 compared to an 8/10 is only different by 14%, for example. On the other hand, if the map is sparser, than the chance of A and B having more widely varying second cities increases, and the more players you have on a map the more likely it is that something will slip by. So now consider the sparser map, where A managed to get a great site while B has a mediocre one. Let's say that Player B is a more skilled player, and so he makes more out of his crappier starting position than A could have. However, A isn't playing out of B's starting position, he's playing out of A's, so that argument doesn't mean anything. If the difference is great enough, then player B can still lose no matter how well he plays, essentially due the map imbalance. It may help to think about that the difference between a 4/10 and an 8/10 is 100%! Considering how long these games last, this is a very frustrating situation that I want to avoid. The reverse is terrible as well, where the more skilled player B has the good start and player A has the crappier one. In this case, its likely that B will completely crush A. However, now the differences will seem exaggerated to the point where A may feel like he never had a chance at all, so why did he ever bother playing. He may even see it coming from a long ways way, but yet is still obligated to keep playing turns for months. (September 18th, 2015, 12:36)MindyMcCready Wrote: Why build cottages when you can just work more gems and gold? The map-maker gets beaten up less this way?
Regarding the commerce tiles - REXing is too good compared to what, oracle before first settler when your closest neighbor is Joao of Egypt?
In seriousness though, there's already 4 teams planning for very early wonders, so I think pure REXing isn't necessary a no-brainer if guys like Krill, dtay, and Gavagai all see other opportunities too. In general though, REXing is just how pitboss is played. A player that tries libbing MT with 6 cities around a cottage-capital, SP-style, will just get fucking crushed with Horchers or Knights far before that.The "free" commerce tiles are also there, as wetbandit says, get the game jump-started a bit faster, but there's another ~secret~ reason for them too. First of all, each player only has one such resource nearby (silver/gems/gold) that's not covered by jungle. Everyone's explored a fair bit now so I think its ok to spoil that. So, that's not too extreme - a single gold isn't enough to drive an entire economy. The big thing is actually the jungled copies. They're actually there to compensate for something else, something that players usually take for granted but so far only two players have noticed is missing.
Cottaging will still be very important! The difference between being a tech leader and being behind always comes down to cottages, which in turn always comes back to how well you manage your food and worker labor.
