Big maps, few players: Balance?

[Nagot Gick Fel]

For me (and for many other players I know) it's the provinces/player ratio that's the most important factor, and the size of the maps is dependent on that ratio and the actual number of players. I suggest you reformulate your poll to take this into account.

[Chazar]

Yes, you're right that the provinces/player ratio is the important thing here, but I couldnt decide upon all sensible combinations.

On the other hand, I do assume that people rather play bigger maps with fewer people than vice versa. Therefore by looking at the shift between the answers of the first and the second questions one can deduce the ratio I am interested in.

But I guess the poll isnt that important here anyway. I am really more interested in what people do to keep the balance.

[Cohen]

I'd believe:

World Rich if Ermor or Pangea CW are IN.
Unless world standard is fine too.

Research:
Standard in map with 1-200 province.
Difficult in map with 201-300+ prov or
V.Difficult in map with 300+ prov

Usually I believe this is a nice setting.
Number of players counts not so much for this, but much more for pretender desing, since the more we're the earlier we come at war.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Chazar:
Following this forum I got the impression that people tend to prefer larger maps, albeit this seems to unbalance the game in my opinion.

I think it's more a single extremely vocal player, than a collection of other players.

[Gandalf Parker]

First, the definitions of map size do cause some heated discussions until its dicovered that they have very different ideas of things like "small" and "large". You might take a galnce at a write-up I did on the subject. http://www.dom2minions.com/maps.shtml
Actually your poll looks like it got pretty close.

In general people tend to prefer the smaller maps. They dont get alot of discussion that way because small-medium maps are the size that can be dome manually. So most of them have names and people declare their love by saying the name of the map. Really big maps are hard to do manually. Most of them are done as ugly random generates so they dont tend to have names.

And yes big maps create an imbalance. Small maps create an imbalance. Long maps, plains/woodlands, water, mountains, design of the province borders... all of those in a map can give an advantage to one nation over others. The game is very complicated and the perfect "chess board" fair balanced tournament map would be very VERY difficult to create.

[ May 26, 2004, 15:15: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[NTJedi]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
I think it's more a single extremely vocal player, than a collection of other players.

Well Gandalf has told us the most popular downloads are the largest size maps(400+). No opinions... just FACTS.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by NTJedi:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
I think it's more a single extremely vocal player, than a collection of other players.

Well Gandalf has told us the most popular downloads are the largest size maps(400+). No opinions... just FACTS.

---

Well thats the most popular on my site. I was just surprised that anyone other than me was willing to play on such monsters. I wouldnt expect alot of interest in my small maps since they are ugly and we now have such excellent ones manually made. I think if we compared the huge and epic downloads from my site, with the map downloads from Illwinters site (most of the small-medium maps are there) we would discover that Dom2 players cover the whole range rather nicely.

I would point out though that there is apparently a need for someone to take one of my Epic sized maps, make it pretty (I can explain how some paint program commands can help alot there), make it interesting (the biggest request is for uncrossable mountains to create zones and chokepoints). The new Faerun map is I think the only Epic sized map we have other than the random ones.

[ May 26, 2004, 17:11: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]