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

[Samhain]

I'm not very fond of symmetrical maps myself. My top pick from the above list would be First World.

To make the water less of an issue, I find dead seas to be pretty effective. I would think combining provinces would make ships much more powerful. Though, that could be interesting too.

[Valerius]

I see the points regarding symmetrical maps. They have their virtues but asymmetrical maps are usually more visually appealing. Since I've been playing so much on perfectly symmetrical map, I'd also like to try something different.

FirstWorld looks good to me. And making the seas dead sounds like a good solution for dealing with the water provinces. The only thing I'll mention is that starting in the middle of the map and also having a lot of low pop wasteland provinces will be very tough for the nation that starts there. Maybe we could reduce the wasteland in that area and add one or two more bottlenecks so it's more defensible? Disconnecting 38 from 25 and 29 is the main one that comes to mind. And/or disconnect 54 from 53?

Louist, if we go with your map would you like to make the changes? If you don't want to I'll do so but of course it's your call.

[Olm]

There seem still to be some issues with the mods. I played Ulm against AI, and my archers had only daggers, no bows.
So especially Louist as Ulm should look into that!

[Valerius]

I've just uploaded a revised version of the mod.

It looks like the problem with EA Ulm was due to the unit's weapons being listed by name rather than weapon number. It was specific to EA Ulm and wouldn't have affected us but I went ahead and changed it anyway. But a good catch; if anyone else notices problems with their nation please let me know.

Here is a list of other changes:

* Found some more sites that allowed mage recruitment and removed them.

* Removed Bloodletting.

* Reduced number of effects of Call Maenad spell from 15 to 10 and made it level 1 instead of 0.

* Increased cost of Pangaea's Construct Manikin spell from 3 gems to 5.

If anyone has concerns about the Pan spells please let me know. I originally added these with the idea of compensating them for the loss of those aspects of the nation and with the idea that someone else would be playing them. But it feels a bit strange to be adding and pricing spells that impact the nation I'm now playing. I'm quite willing to remove them or nerf them if anyone has issues with the spells.

Btw, the revised version of the mod has "v2" at the end of the name when you look at the list of available mods in-game. You can also tell you have the new version if Bloodletting is no longer on the list of spells.

[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).

[Louist]

Originally Posted by Olm

There seem still to be some issues with the mods. I played Ulm against AI, and my archers had only daggers, no bows.
So especially Louist as Ulm should look into that!

Oh, nice catch! I didn't even notice that at all! (Though I didn't recruit many ranged units at all, and by the time I had, I was in comp-stomp mod and didn't feel the need to watch the battles.

Oops, EA Ulm? That might explain things better

[Louist]

Originally Posted by Valerius

Louist, if we go with your map would you like to make the changes? If you don't want to I'll do so but of course it's your call.

I'm sort of working backwards through the posts in an odd order, as you've no doubt noticed.

I can make the changes to neighbors, if we don't mind the existing borders as they're drawn, or me fudging them somewhat by replacing the dotted lines with solid ones.

As for the wasteland, I can set them all to no-spawn, so no one is forced to start there. It will make for a tighter fit along the sides, though.

[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.

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Louist

I can make the changes to neighbors, if we don't mind the existing borders as they're drawn, or me fudging them somewhat by replacing the dotted lines with solid ones.

I think solid lines instead of dotted ones are fine - definitely no need to rework the map graphics.

But if we go with your idea about everyone starting on the sides then we probably wouldn't even want to change the borders.

Hmm, tough call. This gets me wondering if we should set fixed start locations? The top locations on the east and west of the map would have less access to the empty middle of the map but they'd also have the most defensible positions, which seems like a fair trade.

In any case, I'm flexible. I'm not really concerned about everything being balanced; I was mainly worried that the person who started in the middle wouldn't have fun because they'd be surrounded and struggling to get enough gold to do anything so I just wanted to do something to help that position out.

[Valerius]

Btw, I only removed magic sites allow recruitment (in order to emphasize the "no indies" aspect and increase the value of conquering an opponent's cap) - I didn't remove any other sites. In one of my test games the Ultimate Gateway popped up and I imagine if you get that or one of the forge bonus sites it will be just as much of a game changer here as it would be in a normal game. Definitely something to keep in mind with your site searching strategy.