Arduria map + a new one in the works

[Crandaeolon]

Heya to all!

Feels like it's finally time to un-lurk and make an attempt to be productive.

Here's a map that I banged together during the Easter holidays. It's not all that artistic, but it'll have to do for the moment.

The file is temporarily located here: dom2arduria.zip
Download size is 20 megs... the TGA is quite high-res. Here's a preview:



And finally, some design notes.
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188 provinces, 6-14 players. Optimum could be around 8 to 10.

Arduria is the larger of the two better-defined continents in my longstanding roleplaying campaign. Its history suits the Dom 2 backstory well; a great empire fell and spawned a number of splinter nations. These nations then started rather messy wars with each other until a group of godlike beings, the Immortals, arrived to stabilize the region.

The Dom 2 -customized map omits the arrival of the Immortals and lets the wars continue. The dominance of an undead magocratic empire in the West Mass was removed (though Ermor would fit the bill nicely in a scenario) and the sea nations were added to the mix.

Originally, the continent was formed according to fairly realistic principles. Most of the population are located in the mediterranean or temperate climates, while the mountaineous, swampy and cold regions are less populated. Major cities (=the various capitals) are in particularly rich or well-connected provinces. For Dom 2, I spread the population more evenly, though the central lands still ended up richer than other regions. I tried to balance this by the placement of starting points and victory points; the richer regions have more competition and are further away from the neutral victory points.

Natural features influenced province borders heavily. As a rule, rivers are crossable but wide lakes (that are too small to be considered inner seas) and tall mountain ranges are not. If two provinces share a very small border, they are usually considered neighbours if there are no terrain features at or near the border.

There are 12 land and two sea starting locations on the map. It is possible to have more than 14 nations, but they will start in randomly assigned provinces. The absolutely worst provinces and neutral victory point provinces are non-startable.

The default victory condition is by victory points, though it is not enforced by the map file. Each start location is worth one point, five neutral provinces are worth one point each and one neutral province is worth two. That's a total of 21 if no additional points are used. I recommend using a victory limit of 11 points.

Each of the neutral victory locations has a pre-built fortification. The two-VP province has a population of 50000 and some additional troops and commanders, and should be reasonably troublesome to conquer.
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If you decide to give the map a whirl, any comments (especially constructive ones) would be much appreciated.

UPDATE: to reduce possible balance problems due to the behaviour of neutral troops defending castles, the neutral VP provinces were downsized to medium size and the #population modifier of the Forge was removed.

Get the new .map file from here: mapfileonly.zip

[ May 04, 2004, 18:49: Message edited by: Crandaeolon ]