New way of starting

[chrispedersen]

A lot of attention has been paid to fair starts - I'd like to suggest a new mod or program.

BalanceStart.

All of the participants in a game would submit pretenders as usual.

People often complain that Prod is not sufficiently useful (and I agree); and to a lesser extent while the longterm implications of a growth scale are great it has little immediate effect.

The way I'd like the program to work, is that each province is rated on its *own* resources, and the resources of its neighboring provinces. This might yield a score of 249.

Similarly, each province would be rated for growth, with a waste as 0, other as 1 and farmlands as 2.

Normalize the data.

Then calling the catgod you rank the submitted pretenders according to Prod and growth scales.

Highest aggregate gets the best province. Next best .. and so on.

The program then creates the games mapfile, setting the #Specstart commands.

A nice way to boost the value of the prod and growth scales. Taking a good production scale means you will more likely be in a place with 5 neighbors.

Take a low production scale and you will be off in the untravelled boondocks somewhere - which is where such menaces such as ermor/ryleh deserve to be (it also by definition lowers the effect of their dominion kill slightly, starting them in low pop areas, which seems thematic.

[lch]

Sounds rather ambitious. But please, go ahead!

[Edi]

The biggest problem with this that I can see is that the base resource value of a province is random and then added to by population, mines etc. At least that's the way it has seemed to me. Besides that, the resources are not assigned in the map file, but during game generation. So there is no objective way to implement this that I can think of. Not unless the program can insert instructions into the Dom3 game creation process after map has been selected and other settings determined.

Of course, I could be wrong.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Edi

So there is no objective way to implement this that I can think of. Not unless the program can insert instructions into the Dom3 game creation process after map has been selected and other settings determined..

Yeah I thought about this too. Best thing I could come up with was that you could take normalized values for each terrain type, by inspection.

Ie., mountains..80. Swamps 10. Forest 20. Large+50%; small -50%. Etc.

[Sombre]

The biggest problem I can see is that this is never getting made ;]

[chrispedersen]

well I'm glad you like the sound of it....
it actually isn't *that* hard to do.. I'm contemplating it....

[Illuminated One]

Why not do it the other way round? Give a player with prod extra resources or a Iron Mine in his cap and a player with growth additional population?
Sounds much easier.