Re: New game
Count me in. I would like to claim Abysia. This was a fun game, and not just because I won (lol). I have had fun games where I lost too. And a couple of my games were really not fun at all due to some annoying players in them plus the one where I badly messed up my pretender design and am about to die.
I have never player Cradle of Zen, or even looked at the map. I did look at the map Tyrande, and it has some problems to prevent it from working properly:
1. Eight players as a maximum might be a problem.
2. The map would have to be edited to remove all starting provinces with the premade sites. It my test, I had a nation start at the province with the Chillsick Swamp, which meant all troops sitting in the capitol would eventually get diseased.
3. The map is not well balanced in that whoever starts in the left lower corner will not be near those juicy built-in sites. In particular there is a massively powerful province in the NE with FOUR splendid sites, including a devil's den. Whoever starts over that way will be given a nice boost when taking that province.
It is a georgeous map, though, and I did like it a lot. Removing most, if not all, premade sites and putting in several #nostart in a few places would made it a fine, well-balanced MP map.
As for Aduria, I have played that map before in SP and found it to be a good map.
I will therefore comment on the map choice sometime later. Also, I know exactly nothing about Zen's mods and would need time to download and study them. I would bet that my lovely GK Abysian pretender which I made this weekend no longer works under Zen's mods.
I would suggest starting a new thread, Grim, unless you want the ten people in our just-finished game here to have first dibs on slots. If all want in, then we can just play another game with the same 10 players. That would certainly be fine with me.
As for your game settings, I love the very difficult research setting. I have always thought that normal research is far too easy. I mean, the high research nations will complete all research at about turn 60! Ugh even! What's the point in that?
I have been wanting to try another very difficult research game, for I think it makes national troops far more important instead of relying mostly on summons that would then take quite a while to research.
I don't agree with standard victory settings, as it can make for an abysmally long game. Of course, everyone can always agree on a winner (or even two allied winners) like apparently happens a lot. Maybe put in a victory setting requiring half the provinces. If someone owns half the provinces, they got it won anyway and it would be just a matter of cleaning up at that point. Under such a setting, I would not have won our current game just yet, though it would be getting quite close.
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