Map: The Eight Gates

[Kristoffer O]

Thanks for the zip! Now I can play on the map as well

[Zylithan]

thanks for the .zip suggestion folks. It's up now as a zip(in third post).

Cheers!

Edit. KO! gotta say, very cool to have a dev try my map. Then again, not so much if he hates it

[Gandalf Parker]

Way excellent! You seem to have taken all of the best suggestions scattered all over this forum and put them to work on a beautiful map.

The only thing that bothered me is it being in a subdirectory which might confuse some people as to how to "install" it.

[Zylithan]

Thanks Gandalf - I tried to gather advice. I think I could really do a lot more with your comment about multiple .map files (such as making interesting provinces outside of the nodes, etc...) but I am just way too busy in rl to do a more complete job on this map, and I'm still very much learning. But I've got maybe 3-5ish ideas for a "next map" whenever that happens, and whatever it is, my goal is to have it be better I think it could be cool to make a BIG version of a portals map - here the portals are shortcuts. But one can imagine distances being prohibitively long if you dont use portals. Or the void (inspired by the nothing from the neverending story) could make some places totally unreachable except by portals or teleportation, etc.

agreed about the subdirectory.. that was an unintended thing.


And Llamabeast - let me know if you run a game/s on this map. I'd be curious to see how it works, and I'd love to get in on it, especially if it was for noobs or teams.

[jutetrea]

Starting my first game on it now, one thought if you want to spend the time on it:

Would it be worth making all adjacent provinces to a node a no-start? I'm restarting my game creation as my castle has a node as an initial neighbor. Some folks might like it though, but I like a buffer from the get go. 10 players on this one for a bit of expansion.

edit: Never mind, probably not feasible - not too many provinces don't border one or the other. This should be interesting

[Zylithan]

Yeah. Many start spots have a neighbor node.

Start spots all have the same number of (non-water) neighbors, and are prevented from having a gate in the start spot, and prevented from having bad terrain or bad neighbor terrains, or multiple neighbor gates. Also edges are avoided. I can imagine that especially version 3, where nodes let you recruit and aren't guarded that well, that starting next to a node you don't have magic access to could be a big advantage... but that's why there are versions 2 and 4! I like to think of this map as being "mostly balanced" whatever that means. I guess it means its not symmetric. But a perfectly symmetric map can only be played by a very specific number of people.. this map could go for 2 or 16...

Thanks for the feedback, and let me know if you have more observations as you go along.

[jutetrea]

One observation - its already fun and I've only just started. I'm only playing with 10 nations and I'm already "bordering" 6 of them.

I've just been concentrating on taking territories, not rushing a neighbor. I'll be curious to see how mighty AI with its big armies move them around the nodes.

I'm playing 4? guarded/recruit, so I'm trying not to take advantage of the sites right away for recruiting, letting the AI take what they will and just PD'ing the jump spots on my territory.

Did you specifically put a good amount of the gem priestesses around? onyx, jade, etc? I've got like 20 territories and already have 5 of those pop types. Bit odd.

So far so good.

[Zylithan]

Glad you're enjoying. Outside of the nodes I did not place any special sites, so you're just getting lucky.

[Endoperez]

Once the new patch comes you might want to check out if any new sites offer cursing without unwanted special abilities.

[Zylithan]

good call endoperez... i dont know if undead, etc are affected by curse, but because they dont care about diseases (right?) I was worried that undead could camp in the nodes.

Also, that reminds me, major props to Edi and his database, without which I couldnt have made this map.