two v. two v. two v. two v. two (full)

[The Panther]

Ringworld is severly unbalanced. There are several areas of vast wastelands in places. Several of us recently played that map for the current slugfest game and about half the players had starting spots that were so bad, the game was mostly hopeless on the first move.

[Zooko]

Well, I guess we *could* edit Ringworld to have less expansive wastelands... :-)

Also it would have to be edited to be symmetric all the way around, instead of having a "jump" in the station connection pattern...

[Zooko]

Hm. The Ringworld graphics file -- Ringworld.tga -- doesn't show different graphics for different terrain types. I dislike maps like that, where you have to right click on a province in order to know what kind of terrain it has.

[Aku]

any ideas for another map?

[Zooko]

I think Inland will do. I'm working on laying it out.

[Zooko]

My brother Arc just pointed out to me that if we have score graphs *off* then two things will happen:

1. People will have to hire scouts.
2. People will want to gossip with one another in order to find out what is going on.

I consider that latter feature to be extremely important to the game as I envision it, so unless several people object (sorry, Griffin!), let's have score graphs off.

[Zooko]

Here's a proposed map. Start a game with Abyssia as a human and with the next 10 land nations as players, then play a round as Abyssia. That way you can see the 10 starting locations. Note that which nations go in those locations is not determined yet -- Alneyan has agreed to act as an impartial person to assign the five teams to the 5 pairs and assign each team-member to one of the two locations in that pair. The pairs are the starting locations which are closest to each other. They are northwest-southeast from each other.

If that doesn't make sense just pipe up and I'll try to explain it better.

If there's something inherently unfair about this layout, given that the teams will be randomly located to these five pairs, then speak up now!

[GriffinOfBuerrig]

Our second pick is Caelum!

[Zooko]

Okay! We're almost ready to let the war begin!

Final steps:

1. Have a look at the map I attached to see if the starting spots are acceptable to you.

2. Settings: all default settings except:
* Zen's Pretender Mods 2.01
* Zen's Scale Mods 1.2
* Zen's Spell Mods 1.8
(Honestly I don't care for these mods, but everyone seems to like them so I decided to use them.)
* 45% magic sites (instead of default 40%)
* Magic research difficult (instead of default magic research normal)
* Independent strength 9 (instead of default independent strength 3)
* Score graphs OFF (instead of default score graphs on)

3. After people have a chance to object, Alneyan will place the ten nations with allies near each other on the map, and send me the ftherland file, and I'll set up the server but I won't look at the contents of the file. Nobody including me will know who their enemies are at first!


By the way, I have only four e-mail addresses in my list of e-mail addresses who get automatic notifications of new turns. If you want e-mailed notifications of new turns then please send me your e-mail address.

[Alneyan]

Zooko said:
3. After people have a chance to object, Alneyan will place the ten nations with allies near each other on the map, and send me the ftherland file, and I'll set up the server but I won't look at the contents of the file. Nobody including me will know who their enemies are at first!

Do you really mean the fatherland file? It could be done too, in a game where I set up the full game, including the master password and the .map file: such a set up is best if you would rather lower your opportunities of cheating as much as possible, to avoid suspicion at a later date.

That way or only the .map file is fine with me, and will only take a couple of minutes at most.