Battleground - CBM, max lvl 6 magic, no site search/research - Finished

[zlefin]

i'll take eriu.

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by zlefin

i'll take eriu.

Great, so we've got 8 players.

Ok everyone, I've attached the map to the first post. This version doesn't have fixed start locations. Please let me know if you notice any problems when testing it.

Also, see the JPEG on the first post to view proposed start locations.

I'll set up the game on the llamaserver shortly with a placeholder map.

[Valerius]

The game is ready to accept pretenders.

You can ignore the fact that Cradle is listed as the map. I'll swap this out for the real map before we begin.

So, any suggestions regarding the proposed start locations let me know.

BTW, I did make some small changes to the map. I added an extra bridge on the upper left of the map so there would be another access point to the upper landmass. I also added a second bridge to the larger island. Click on any of the provinces with harbors to see where they connect to.

[LDiCesare]

Even though I dislike water provinces, 50 and 32 should be linked considering they touch each other. It's quite distrubing visually that they are not.
I also have one issue with the map, I can't zoom out far enough to see it whole. I don't know how to change that. I managed to get it smaller changing the defaultmapzoom in the .map file, but then it would gladly ignore it and revert to full size...
17 should not be a start province. 3 neighbour provinces is really aweful.
21 is too near 7 for them both to be start provinces. It means a flying god can go from one to the other and try to dom-kill the opponent on turn 1, which is a bit mean. Whereas 54 is far from all other starting places, and therefore pretty safe. 98 is also pretty much isolated, having only one not-so-near neighbour.
Is lack of connection between 20 and 26 made on purpose? Can be explained by mountains, but not obvious at all.
Here is a proposal.
I drew black borders to show the Voronoi diagrams of the starting positions (i.e. what's inside your border is nearer your capital than anyone else) and the number of provinces inside one's "natural borders".
I think that this shows well that 17 and 21 are not good starting positions:
Proposed map on the left, my proposal on the right:

It's far from perfect. The central nations have more room due to not being able to hide in a corner, but the corners are more evenly divided (no lone nation in the north), so I think it should be more balanced. There's also less disparity in terms of number of neighbours to the capital.

[Valerius]

Wow! Now that's some testing!

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

Even though I dislike water provinces, 50 and 32 should be linked considering they touch each other. It's quite distrubing visually that they are not.

Definitely an error.

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

I also have one issue with the map, I can't zoom out far enough to see it whole. I don't know how to change that. I managed to get it smaller changing the defaultmapzoom in the .map file, but then it would gladly ignore it and revert to full size...

I've noticed the same thing with the ringworld style maps. I don't know any way around it, though I guess I could add blank space on the right and left of the map to have it zoom out properly.

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

Is lack of connection between 20 and 26 made on purpose? Can be explained by mountains, but not obvious at all.

That's an error as well.

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

17 should not be a start province. 3 neighbour provinces is really aweful.
21 is too near 7 for them both to be start provinces. It means a flying god can go from one to the other and try to dom-kill the opponent on turn 1, which is a bit mean. Whereas 54 is far from all other starting places, and therefore pretty safe. 98 is also pretty much isolated, having only one not-so-near neighbour.
Here is a proposal.
I drew black borders to show the Voronoi diagrams of the starting positions (i.e. what's inside your border is nearer your capital than anyone else) and the number of provinces inside one's "natural borders".
I think that this shows well that 17 and 21 are not good starting positions:
Proposed map on the left, my proposal on the right:

It's far from perfect. The central nations have more room due to not being able to hide in a corner, but the corners are more evenly divided (no lone nation in the north), so I think it should be more balanced. There's also less disparity in terms of number of neighbours to the capital.

I like your changes and am inclined to accept them wholesale. BTW, I did think the one bad spot was the start right in the middle. I thought about dropping some mountains in there to isolate it a bit.

[Fantomen]

Good work LDiCesare! Much better!

[Valerius]

LDiCesare, thanks for the map fixes. All changes have been made and the map has been uploaded to the server.

There is also a new zip file attached to the first post. It contains the same tga as previously, a map file without fixed starts (uploaded this to the server as well in case someone else finds it useful), a map file with the 8 fixed starts, and also a more zoom friendly alternative tga.

Adding space to the width of the map was successful in restoring the ability to fully zoom out and see the entire map at once. The quirk here is that adding space to the left of the map messes up all the province locations (my guess is that the xy coordinates are read from the top left of the map) so you need to add all the space on the right side of the map. This actually works fine with this map as we can just extend the ocean. If you want to use this version rename milkandhoney3.tga to something different like milkandhoney3old.tga and then rename milkandhoney3zoom.tga to milkandhoney3.tga - no guarantees but this worked fine when I tested it.

So now that we've got the map uploaded I set the game to start once all pretenders are in.

Reminder: when designing your pretenders keep in mind that we are starting with 3 provinces so you'll have some extra gems, gold and resources from turn 1 (well, no guarantee on the gems part).

[Valerius]

Three pretenders to go. How about we aim to start by the end of Friday? It would be nice to have this game rolling by the weekend.

[Squirrelloid]

oh yeah, i need a pretender for this game, lalala

[Fantomen]

Sorry for dragging the turn out, I'm having some kind of problem with the game crashing when opening this turn. Probably some map or mod thing, I'll solve it tonight.