Nations - MA, CBM 1.6, max lvl 6, NI, Assimilation - Olm/Man and Louist/Ulm win!

[Louist]

Obviously I like First World, and have enjoyed my test games using it.

That said, the more I play it the more I find dubious borders and provinces that are scaled a tad small. As it was my first map attempt, I didn't realize the importance of saving a master copy of the map, with separate layers

My only real option, then, would be to stretch them image and hope the quality doesn't drop too far, and edit the .map file to ensure the in-game borders more closely resemble those that I've drawn. (I've been putting my spare time into working on new, hopefully more polished maps, which has kept me from trying this out.)

Still, it's a perfectly serviceable map, with problems that are really just cosmetic.

A question, Valerius: Is construction 8 empty of items? I understand you left some high level unique non-craftable items in for random events, but is there anything else?

Also, have you tweaked astral sites at all? Or am I just having poor luck? In a play through with an astral pretender I ended up finding only 2 non-capital sites after probing the my two-thirds of the map. These accounted for 2 pearls as opposed to the 60 or 70 gems I was pulling in (without having searched for any death, and only minor looks into water and fire).

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Louist

That said, the more I play it the more I find dubious borders and provinces that are scaled a tad small. As it was my first map attempt, I didn't realize the importance of saving a master copy of the map, with separate layers

...

Still, it's a perfectly serviceable map, with problems that are really just cosmetic.

I see what you're saying about some of the provinces being small but it's a nice map so let's give it a try. In addition to the work you mentioned the other things we'll need for this game are setting all the provinces to disallow indie recruitment and using Samhain's idea of dead seas. And thanks for spending the time to do this!

Originally Posted by Louist

A question, Valerius: Is construction 8 empty of items? I understand you left some high level unique non-craftable items in for random events, but is there anything else?

Constr. 8 is completely empty of items. In Battleground we set all items up to level 6 to level 0 (the idea was to get a quick start and get right to the fightin'). This caused a problem because the game didn't have any items to choose from at levels 2/4/6 if a random event indicated the player receive an item from those levels. So we set some lower power level 8 items to levels 2/4/6 (with extremely high forging costs so they wouldn't be forged). However in this game we have normal research until level 6 so there was no need for that (afaik random events never choose unique items).

Originally Posted by Louist

Also, have you tweaked astral sites at all? Or am I just having poor luck? In a play through with an astral pretender I ended up finding only 2 non-capital sites after probing the my two-thirds of the map. These accounted for 2 pearls as opposed to the 60 or 70 gems I was pulling in (without having searched for any death, and only minor looks into water and fire).

The only sites I removed were ones that allowed troop/commander recruitment. I don't think S sites are disproportionately represented in those...

Btw, if you want to run some more tests a quick way to do it is temporarily add the following lines to the bottom of the mod:

#selectspell "Acashic Record"
#researchlevel 0
#path 0 6
#pathlevel 0 1
#fatiguecost 100
#end

This will set Acashic Record as a level 0 spell costing 1 N gem to cast. Then start a game with several human played nations (no need for AI), each starting with 9 provinces, and start site searching them.

Be sure to either remove these lines or just copy over your "test mod" with another copy of the "real mod" before the game begins.