Re: Playtesters for new small wrap-around map need
Had a quick look at it. It's great.
Only some minor issues:
It's too big: The Cradle Map (220 prov) is 1600x1600 pixels, yet Chandrea is 1500x2188. This makes the icons appear very small if in standard size.
Solution would be to re-do the map in ~1300x1300 pixels, or, alternativly, use #defaultmapzoom x.y command, with x.y= 0.8 - 1.2 as it suits your taste.
Nevertheless, you could't get a complete overview even at minimum zoom.
City shouldn't be grassland: Grassland has about -50% ressources vs. Plains, and even those don't have much. But ressources in DOM aren't ore, but production capacity, which may come from ore, wood, trade or whatever. By making cities grassland, they won't be able to produce anything unless you plant a high admin castle there. And even than output will be small, as in inherent ress would be doubled, but only a %tage drawn from the neigbouring prov. So a wood/mountain province with a watchtower could have a higher production capacity than a city with a castle ...
Furthermore it's slightly irritating that province flags show up in the cities, but those might not be centered in the province at all.
So my suggestions: Make all city icons provinces on their own, maybe even with pre-build forts or pre-placed site (Archaic or Firbolg Fortress etc., which the AI tends to find reliably. Pre-Known Sites do not work, as castles are generated on finding it) Pre-placed castles is better for AI players, which tend to go for every castle they see. Players on the other hand could 'cheat' by taking over the province, but never attacking the province troops which defend the castle, not the province.
Making the city province "plain, large", it will have lots of inhabitants, but also some usuable ressources. Province border may have to be adjusted, so that the cities do not border only the province they're in atm. A city with multiple neighbours could one or more of them turned into grassland, so there're still some high-income provinces around.
More after I did some test games ...
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As for AI the most effective work around to this problem so far is to simply use an American instead, they tend to put up a bit more of a fight than your average Artificial Idiot.
... James McGuigan on rec.games.computer.stars somewhen back in 1998 ...
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