Despite the convention of including username in NES thread titles, no, this is not an actual NES starting up, at least not yet. I would kinda like to try my hand at running a NES game, although I still am pretty new; however, this right here is just a theoretical discussion.

A while back das tried to run a NES with a random world and random countries thrown in, which was a pretty good idea in my view, but it flopped for lack of interest. I was wondering two things: 1. How many people might be interested in something along such lines, and 2. What public opinion would be as to how such a game should be configured.

Currently I'm fiddling around with ways to make a nice clean map suitable for managing in a NES thread using Civ3's random map generator--with touch-ups, of course, to maximize readability and playability. The question remains, though, as to what sort of map should be used: Pangaea? Archipelago? Lots of water or little? I'm just using blank featureless terrain, so the heat/humidity settings don't really matter. I think the best way to do a random-map NES would be to use real-world nation/civs rather than making up new random ones, even if the fictitious nation/civs were based off of real ones; the game's just more accessible that way, which is probably a major reason why the Civilization series uses real-world names in the first place. However, how should territory be divvied up? Should the moderator divide the world's territory amongst various predefined civs, or should starting players get to pick their own territories with some moderator supervision and tweaking? There is, of course, no historical basis for territorial control, so if it could be managed fairly, having players define their own territory might make for a fun starting twist.

Any comments or ideas?

In the other thread you suggested using cities...that would work well because this is an undeniably Civ 3 type game. I think that the map should be a small continents or large archipelago to avoid much city confusion.

A city layout could work like this:

City = Paris
Production: 6 Corruption: 0
Commerce: 4 Corruption: 0
Happy Citizens: 3/7
Content Citizens: 2/7
Unhappy Citizens: 2/7
Currently Building: Spearman Time: 2 turns
City Improvements
Palace
Temple
Resources and Luxuries
Iron
Wines

That is why I suggest using a small map or Archipelago so that there would only be a few cities for each civ (5 or 6). This wouldn't require much maintenance, just some calculator and some time.

I'd join if it were worked like this.

Well, this is getting a bit off from the original topic of how to set up a randomized NES game... but I suppose discussing basic territory control could very well be in order. The question then is how basic the territory control should be: Troquelet's idea for using provinces basically boils down to the about the same thing my actual city idea I had in terms of complexity; my primary idea would probably be to just have 2-4 different city sizes, representing in Civ terms a combination of population size and number of improvements, and have that be the extent of the statistical side of a city; each city size would then have the ability to produce x amount of commerce/gold, or x many soldiers/ships, or could spend a round upgrading itself (in civ terms, building improvements). A slightly more detailed version might be to have various generalized improvements; you'd have a "basic infrastructure" improvement, a science improvement, a naval improvement, and so on. The kind of full-on Civ emulation you describe would be pretty interesting, although my original reason for suggesting using cities was to simplify things (it's easier to count dots than it is to try to quantify abstract blobs of territories when you're trying to figure out how large and powerful a nation/civ is!)

Your post also touches on the issue of timeline... now, my favorite time period for this sort of thing is somewhere between WWI and WWII (I'm not a specialist in the history of this period AT ALL, but I think it makes for interesting gameplay). On the other hand, the random map does seem to lend itself towards a less-settled world. I wouldn't want to see another ancient-era NES game, since it looks like The Troquelet has some rather big doings planned for such things; maybe a roughly 1600s-ish setting?

Oh, and one more thing I just remembered: What about randomized player starts? It seems that balanced-start NES games might be a little less active; having a few big bullies might probably encourage a bit more action, but the problem with setting up different-strength civs is that a lot of people beeline for the big powerful ones and often the weaker player spots never get filled at all. Maybe at the start of a game, after a good number of players have signed up and done all their starting selections, etc., a couple civs (maybe 20-25%ish) could be randomly picked as first-rate powers and get a few bonuses, and a couple civs (again, 20-25%) could be picked for third-rate powers and have a couple penalties. Of course, if someone wants to be an underdog civ to begin with, they could just volunteer to be a weaker nation/civ and save that from having to be assigned randomly.

Just for reference, here's an example map using an edited Civ3 map. It took about 40 minutes to get it to this point (it's not quite polished, but I figure since it would be heavily edited by the time the game started that wouldn't matter so much just yet), but I could convert another map quite a bit faster than that now that I've figured a basic method out. It should be a bit easier to work out the question of scale using an actual sample map like this, I think. I started laying out civs using a couple different methods (I tried once using cities, and once just coloring in territories); using the first spacing I tried, it took 10 cities to cover the northwestern peninsula, which is way too many for any but the simplest city system (probably a one-size-fits-all solution that made no distinction between city sizes). With a full Civ computer-game detailed system, two or three cities tops should be crammed up there, because anything more would be too many numbers to crunch; with a bit of city specialization and a few basic statistics, I think anywhere from four to six could fit comfortably up there without the game bogging down too much. In terms of raw territory, a starting nation/civ might take up anywhere from just the peninsula itself to that peninsula and all the way south to that big gulf, depending on how populated the world was supposed to be at the start.