Sullla
Patrician Roman Dictator
I know that this was requested by a number of folks, and today being Martin Luther King Day in the US, I had the time to sit down and type things up. You requested my thoughts on the map design and overall game flow, so here they are. I guarantee that not everyone will like them...
I was tasked with creating the map for this game. During the polling process, we asked the five teams to answer some questions about what type of map design they wanted to see created. There was absolutely no consensus on what script or setting to use, with results ranging from Kaz requesting an Islands map to Saturn wanting Global Highlands. The result was that there emerged an agreement that I would be given free reign to create a unique "mystery map" along whatever lines I wanted. As part of the pregame information, I told each team the following:
All of which turned out to be true, if not in the fashion that was expected perhaps. Putting everyone on a Pangaea satisfied all of those points, for example, even if the initial writeup was somewhat disingenous.
My vision for this game was to create a map that worked on a large, grand scale. The vast bulk of Multiplayer games are played out on cramped settings, where unit tactics and not grand strategy tends to dominate. For the second CivFanatics Demogame, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do something different, and create a sprawling epic map. After all, everyone KNEW going into this game that they were embarking on a project that would last at least a year, and each of the five teams had 20+ players. With a relaxed pace, dedicated players, and a huge roster of team members, surely this was one time that we could try something different and interesting, rather than a typical Team Battlegrounds-type Multiplayer game... right?
The base script for this map was Global Highlands, normal size, with Low sea levels. Indeed that's a lot of land for only five teams, but the original CivFanatics Demogame was also on a normal-size Custom Continents map, with only five teams, and that seemed acceptable to this group. I compared my initial map to the one Sirian created for that game, and it was only about 20% larger overall. That seemed like it was within the acceptable range for a game like this, since I had heard many compliments regarding that game's map setup.
After looking at some different maps, I liked this initial setup the most:
There was one continent of roughly oval shape, with the five teams spread out around the edges. First of all, why one continent? I've found that creating multiple continents is generally bad mojo in these games; although it sounds nice, a game with two continents inevitably turns into a race to see who can conquer their continent the fastest, and then that team is guaranteed (95+% odds) to win. One of the earlier Civ3 Demogames followed this exact pattern, FYI. And this doesn't even get into the problems of having unequal opportunity to make contacts raises...
So I wanted everyone to start on the same continent, with roughly even starting positions, all located around the outer edges of the map. This first necessitated moving some of the teams around from their starting spots; Kaz, SANTCA, and Cavs all started inland initially, and had to be placed on the seacoast. Secondly, for purposes of spacing, Saturn had to be moved to the east; otherwise they would have been too close to the Mad Scientist starting location. That dumped Saturn into a range full of peaks, which meant that I had to do some drastic reworking of the terrain there; I did a decent job there hiding the edits, but in retrospect made an obvious mistake not to include enough food resources. This was a MAJOR mea culpa, and represents the biggest failure of the map design.
About the peaks... The idea of this map was to have natural mountain barriers which would create interesting and unusual situations for the five teams. The general goal was to make it so that teams could either sail around the peaks to make contact, or they could take the long route through the barbarian-infested interior. Cavs were the ones who grasped this the fastest, and got a lot of value out of it... The drawings you see above are my notes on where to make edits with the peaks. I blocked off the corners near the Kaz start, put a mountain barrier between Cavs and Mad Scientists, then did the same thing along the coasts to the far east and south of Saturn. I then had to delete some peaks around the Mad Scientist start to create a new path moving east.
On the whole, I'm very pleased with how this part of the design panned out. The "long path" by land or the "short path" played out exactly the way I intended. I knew that the jungle interior would spawn massive amounts of barbarians, and that teams who wanted to settle those rich lands would have to fight them off. Teams did this in different ways; Cavs built the Great Wall, SANCTA went heavy on axes, and Kaz was shielded by their mountain borders. Saturn failed to push quickly to metals and ended up getting pillaged pretty badly, which was entirely their fault (you can't blame the map for everything!)
Kaz has spilled a lot of virtual ink suggesting that their start was unfair, an argument that I don't mind even the least bit persuasive. You can see from this overview map that the opening from their starting corner is a mere 8-10 tiles away from their starting position. SANCTA, in contrast, began a full 20 tiles away from that same region, having to move first west, then south through the jungle, then further southwest to reach that same area. If SANCTA was able to reach that location first, and manage to defend it at the end of ridiculous supply lines in the BC years, well, tough luck Kaz. You should have expanded to the north sooner. Kaz founded no less than seven cities (seven!) in the south before trying to get through that narrow pass. They were simply outplayed in that particular situation.
Kaz start:
The idea for the starting positions, as everyone has probably figured out by now, was to have one land-based food resource and one seafood-based food resource at each capital city. And this worked fine for three of the teams: Kaz, SANCTA, and Cavs. However, I made three errors when it came to balancing out the starts. First, I didn't pay attention to whether or not the wheat/corn resources were placed next to rivers. My intention was for them to be unirrigated, but I accidentally placed the Kaz corn and SANCTA/Cavs wheat next to the rivers, so they all were getting the extra +1 food bonus from the start of the game. This was not my intention, and gave them all a starting boost.
Secondly, I failed to keep in mind the fact that not all seafood resources are created equally. Fish get one extra food compared to clams and crabs, so SANCTA and Cavs received another minor boost here. Again, this was unintended, but you can see how two +1 boosts for SANCTA and Cavs help get them off to accelerated starts and positions of later dominance.
Third and most critically, the "land" food resource at the Saturn start was supposed to be pigs. Why I left it as sheep, I have no idea. I have it written right in my notes, pigs resource for Saturn's capital, yet I must have clicked on the wrong resource and never caught the mistake before the game started. This crippled their team's opening because sheep + crabs was clearly vastly weaker than what the other teams were operating with. For this mistake, Saturn players have my sincere apologies. (Saturn made a lot of self-inflicted errors later - a LOT of errors - but they can't be blamed for how things started.)
If I were to do it again, I'd move those corn/wheat resources off the rivers, give everyone either clams or crabs, upgrade the Saturn start, and probably replace the rice at the Mad Scientist start with corn. That's it though - I have no issues with the land surrounding the capitals, aside from a desire to beef up Saturn's land with some more grassland and food resources. There was tons of land for everyone to expand, and many good city locations to be had for all teams. The larger the map, the less the initial starting position matters and the more the strategic decisions made by the teams come to the fore. I wanted to see how different teams would play things out here on this unorthodox map; while they were helped by their respective starts, I think it's clear that SANCTA and Cavs played by far the best games in that regard. They both figured out early on that rapid expansion would be the name of the game, and outdid everyone else in that respect. It's no coincidence that both teams worked to establish early Academies, moved their capitals to strong river locations, and so on. There was, at times, a very high level of Civ4 play from several of the teams in this game. When everything was clicking, it was fun to watch.
On the whole, however, I was pretty disappointed overall on the team dynamics. Kaz could never stop their constant infighting, and (much as I was entertained by their factional struggles) their inability to work together prevented them from acting effectively. Saturn had all kinds of disaster befall them early on and never recovered; they stuck together well as a team, but were disorganized. While SANCTA pulled off all sorts of amazing micro feats, the problem was that they were never really a "team" in the real sense of the word; it was Memphus and Krill doing everything, with about a dozen lurkers making occasional comments. That worked well, really well in fact, while they both were interested in the game... but as soon as they left, SANCTA completely collapsed. I thought their diplomacy was on the weak side too, and perhaps could have converted Kaz into an ally if they had been willing to be a little more cordial and maybe compromise a bit.
Cavs played a great game, but like SANCTA, it was something of a one or two man effort most of the time. First oyzar and then later slaze were doing just about everything over there. On the whole, this team managed to make things work, and they were effective throughout the game. Finally, Mad Scientists were just a joke in this game. No disrespect intended to HUSch, who did what he could, but it's a serious problem when one of the five teams became a total ghost barely three months after starting. There were entire WEEKS going by without a single post in the Mad Scientist forum. The whole thing made a mockery of the team concept; in the future, it is probably not a good idea to have someone who is a non-native English speaker in charge of posting literally everything in the team forum! Even I had no idea what was going on with the Mad Scientists most of the time...
Maybe I was spoiled by my experience with the Apolyton game, where our team was increasing in membership well after a year of playing, but I honestly expected better from this game. Perhaps the map indeed needed to be smaller to drive more action... although there was a lot of fighting from early times in the Angle/TKY valley, and there was plenty of action taking place when the game collapsed. I think you might indeed do better to get clear leaders (team captains?) of some kind in place before a game starts, or recruit teams from other forums. This game needed to do better in terms of keeping the teams together, most of which wilted very quickly. Going to Simultaneous Turns format would help enormously, and I strongly recommend that you do so in the future. (Those darned Pauses should be verbotten as well!)
I don't think anything needs to be said about the whole end-of-game cheating issue, which killed this game. I know that I walked away from the game at that time, back in September, and only learned that things had ended when Krill sent me a message. Definitely make sure that never happens again...
Wrapping this up (which is already way too long), I'm sure this map didn't please everyone. But I'm not losing sleep over that, because no map is ever going to please all of the participants, and the five teams all had mutually exclusive desired maps anyway. My goal was to create a unique, interesting, and memorable map for this event, and I stand by my work on those terms. Could it have been better? Of course, and I've pointed out some of the flaws above. I would leave about 98% of the map intact if I had to do it again, which is good enough for me.
Thanks for playing!
I was tasked with creating the map for this game. During the polling process, we asked the five teams to answer some questions about what type of map design they wanted to see created. There was absolutely no consensus on what script or setting to use, with results ranging from Kaz requesting an Islands map to Saturn wanting Global Highlands. The result was that there emerged an agreement that I would be given free reign to create a unique "mystery map" along whatever lines I wanted. As part of the pregame information, I told each team the following:
All of which turned out to be true, if not in the fashion that was expected perhaps. Putting everyone on a Pangaea satisfied all of those points, for example, even if the initial writeup was somewhat disingenous.
My vision for this game was to create a map that worked on a large, grand scale. The vast bulk of Multiplayer games are played out on cramped settings, where unit tactics and not grand strategy tends to dominate. For the second CivFanatics Demogame, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do something different, and create a sprawling epic map. After all, everyone KNEW going into this game that they were embarking on a project that would last at least a year, and each of the five teams had 20+ players. With a relaxed pace, dedicated players, and a huge roster of team members, surely this was one time that we could try something different and interesting, rather than a typical Team Battlegrounds-type Multiplayer game... right?
The base script for this map was Global Highlands, normal size, with Low sea levels. Indeed that's a lot of land for only five teams, but the original CivFanatics Demogame was also on a normal-size Custom Continents map, with only five teams, and that seemed acceptable to this group. I compared my initial map to the one Sirian created for that game, and it was only about 20% larger overall. That seemed like it was within the acceptable range for a game like this, since I had heard many compliments regarding that game's map setup.
After looking at some different maps, I liked this initial setup the most:
There was one continent of roughly oval shape, with the five teams spread out around the edges. First of all, why one continent? I've found that creating multiple continents is generally bad mojo in these games; although it sounds nice, a game with two continents inevitably turns into a race to see who can conquer their continent the fastest, and then that team is guaranteed (95+% odds) to win. One of the earlier Civ3 Demogames followed this exact pattern, FYI. And this doesn't even get into the problems of having unequal opportunity to make contacts raises...
So I wanted everyone to start on the same continent, with roughly even starting positions, all located around the outer edges of the map. This first necessitated moving some of the teams around from their starting spots; Kaz, SANTCA, and Cavs all started inland initially, and had to be placed on the seacoast. Secondly, for purposes of spacing, Saturn had to be moved to the east; otherwise they would have been too close to the Mad Scientist starting location. That dumped Saturn into a range full of peaks, which meant that I had to do some drastic reworking of the terrain there; I did a decent job there hiding the edits, but in retrospect made an obvious mistake not to include enough food resources. This was a MAJOR mea culpa, and represents the biggest failure of the map design.
About the peaks... The idea of this map was to have natural mountain barriers which would create interesting and unusual situations for the five teams. The general goal was to make it so that teams could either sail around the peaks to make contact, or they could take the long route through the barbarian-infested interior. Cavs were the ones who grasped this the fastest, and got a lot of value out of it... The drawings you see above are my notes on where to make edits with the peaks. I blocked off the corners near the Kaz start, put a mountain barrier between Cavs and Mad Scientists, then did the same thing along the coasts to the far east and south of Saturn. I then had to delete some peaks around the Mad Scientist start to create a new path moving east.
On the whole, I'm very pleased with how this part of the design panned out. The "long path" by land or the "short path" played out exactly the way I intended. I knew that the jungle interior would spawn massive amounts of barbarians, and that teams who wanted to settle those rich lands would have to fight them off. Teams did this in different ways; Cavs built the Great Wall, SANCTA went heavy on axes, and Kaz was shielded by their mountain borders. Saturn failed to push quickly to metals and ended up getting pillaged pretty badly, which was entirely their fault (you can't blame the map for everything!)
Kaz has spilled a lot of virtual ink suggesting that their start was unfair, an argument that I don't mind even the least bit persuasive. You can see from this overview map that the opening from their starting corner is a mere 8-10 tiles away from their starting position. SANCTA, in contrast, began a full 20 tiles away from that same region, having to move first west, then south through the jungle, then further southwest to reach that same area. If SANCTA was able to reach that location first, and manage to defend it at the end of ridiculous supply lines in the BC years, well, tough luck Kaz. You should have expanded to the north sooner. Kaz founded no less than seven cities (seven!) in the south before trying to get through that narrow pass. They were simply outplayed in that particular situation.
Kaz start:
Spoiler :
The idea for the starting positions, as everyone has probably figured out by now, was to have one land-based food resource and one seafood-based food resource at each capital city. And this worked fine for three of the teams: Kaz, SANCTA, and Cavs. However, I made three errors when it came to balancing out the starts. First, I didn't pay attention to whether or not the wheat/corn resources were placed next to rivers. My intention was for them to be unirrigated, but I accidentally placed the Kaz corn and SANCTA/Cavs wheat next to the rivers, so they all were getting the extra +1 food bonus from the start of the game. This was not my intention, and gave them all a starting boost.
Secondly, I failed to keep in mind the fact that not all seafood resources are created equally. Fish get one extra food compared to clams and crabs, so SANCTA and Cavs received another minor boost here. Again, this was unintended, but you can see how two +1 boosts for SANCTA and Cavs help get them off to accelerated starts and positions of later dominance.
Third and most critically, the "land" food resource at the Saturn start was supposed to be pigs. Why I left it as sheep, I have no idea. I have it written right in my notes, pigs resource for Saturn's capital, yet I must have clicked on the wrong resource and never caught the mistake before the game started. This crippled their team's opening because sheep + crabs was clearly vastly weaker than what the other teams were operating with. For this mistake, Saturn players have my sincere apologies. (Saturn made a lot of self-inflicted errors later - a LOT of errors - but they can't be blamed for how things started.)
If I were to do it again, I'd move those corn/wheat resources off the rivers, give everyone either clams or crabs, upgrade the Saturn start, and probably replace the rice at the Mad Scientist start with corn. That's it though - I have no issues with the land surrounding the capitals, aside from a desire to beef up Saturn's land with some more grassland and food resources. There was tons of land for everyone to expand, and many good city locations to be had for all teams. The larger the map, the less the initial starting position matters and the more the strategic decisions made by the teams come to the fore. I wanted to see how different teams would play things out here on this unorthodox map; while they were helped by their respective starts, I think it's clear that SANCTA and Cavs played by far the best games in that regard. They both figured out early on that rapid expansion would be the name of the game, and outdid everyone else in that respect. It's no coincidence that both teams worked to establish early Academies, moved their capitals to strong river locations, and so on. There was, at times, a very high level of Civ4 play from several of the teams in this game. When everything was clicking, it was fun to watch.
On the whole, however, I was pretty disappointed overall on the team dynamics. Kaz could never stop their constant infighting, and (much as I was entertained by their factional struggles) their inability to work together prevented them from acting effectively. Saturn had all kinds of disaster befall them early on and never recovered; they stuck together well as a team, but were disorganized. While SANCTA pulled off all sorts of amazing micro feats, the problem was that they were never really a "team" in the real sense of the word; it was Memphus and Krill doing everything, with about a dozen lurkers making occasional comments. That worked well, really well in fact, while they both were interested in the game... but as soon as they left, SANCTA completely collapsed. I thought their diplomacy was on the weak side too, and perhaps could have converted Kaz into an ally if they had been willing to be a little more cordial and maybe compromise a bit.
Cavs played a great game, but like SANCTA, it was something of a one or two man effort most of the time. First oyzar and then later slaze were doing just about everything over there. On the whole, this team managed to make things work, and they were effective throughout the game. Finally, Mad Scientists were just a joke in this game. No disrespect intended to HUSch, who did what he could, but it's a serious problem when one of the five teams became a total ghost barely three months after starting. There were entire WEEKS going by without a single post in the Mad Scientist forum. The whole thing made a mockery of the team concept; in the future, it is probably not a good idea to have someone who is a non-native English speaker in charge of posting literally everything in the team forum! Even I had no idea what was going on with the Mad Scientists most of the time...
Maybe I was spoiled by my experience with the Apolyton game, where our team was increasing in membership well after a year of playing, but I honestly expected better from this game. Perhaps the map indeed needed to be smaller to drive more action... although there was a lot of fighting from early times in the Angle/TKY valley, and there was plenty of action taking place when the game collapsed. I think you might indeed do better to get clear leaders (team captains?) of some kind in place before a game starts, or recruit teams from other forums. This game needed to do better in terms of keeping the teams together, most of which wilted very quickly. Going to Simultaneous Turns format would help enormously, and I strongly recommend that you do so in the future. (Those darned Pauses should be verbotten as well!)
I don't think anything needs to be said about the whole end-of-game cheating issue, which killed this game. I know that I walked away from the game at that time, back in September, and only learned that things had ended when Krill sent me a message. Definitely make sure that never happens again...
Wrapping this up (which is already way too long), I'm sure this map didn't please everyone. But I'm not losing sleep over that, because no map is ever going to please all of the participants, and the five teams all had mutually exclusive desired maps anyway. My goal was to create a unique, interesting, and memorable map for this event, and I stand by my work on those terms. Could it have been better? Of course, and I've pointed out some of the flaws above. I would leave about 98% of the map intact if I had to do it again, which is good enough for me.
Thanks for playing!
. I joined this game since I had so much fun in the (ongoing) ![[c3c]](/images/smilies/c3c.gif "Civ3 Conquests [c3c]")
team demogame. I feel as though I made some great friends in that one. I purposefully avoided the teams in this game where my 
to you Sullla.
At least tack on an extra bit saying what you might be able to give in return, and preferably add a cordial greeting and farewell. Diplomacy is all in the sweet niceties, not in the blunt demands. 
