Admin, map maker

[Lord Parkin]

Having a decent amount of land would certainly be a good thing. I'm not sure if having an "oversized" map would be a good thing, though. It just means it takes forever to meet anyone, and forever to build/move an army.

IMHO: It depends on what happens with the double civs on the team vote. With 6 teams and single civs each, a Standard or Large map probably works (sea level adjusted accordingly). With 6 teams and double civs each, a Huge map would probably be in order.

 

[Calis]

Has there already been a decision regarding the double civ thing?

In C3C I participated in a game where every player had two civs to play. And the experience from that was that the tech pace was so rediculously fast that once you built a unit, it was obsolete already. Additionally we had an island for each pair of civs. The result was that the game was over by space victory, before a single war could have been fought.

I am aware that C3C and BTS are not exactly comparable, but there might be some equal problem in BTS.

Personally I would avoid playing two civs per team.

 

[remake20]

As far as map preference I would like to see if you could combine more than one map script, like two continents both with inland seas.

 

[classical_hero]

Well if you start out with two civs, then it might be best to go for a higher level to balance that out.

 

[Darkness]

Considering the fact that we have 6 teams (so far anyway) I would say that anything larger than a standard map should be out of the question. I would say standard size, pangaea, high sea level sounds about right. Or perhaps small size, pangaea and low sea level. At least that way it won't be a space race from the start. There has to be competition for spaces on the map, otherwise it's going to be a dreadfully dull game.

 

[Indiansmoke]

Standard size for 6 sounds good. Pangea however sounds horrible as the team in the middle of a pangea will be screwed. It has to be a map where the land everyone has, the distaces from each other and the civs each one borders are roughly equal.

Early fight for land I agree but, if some are fighting with 1 and others are fighting with 3 this game will become unbalanced very quickly.

 

[HUSch]

If there are teams then the techcost are higher automatically

 

[ahmedhadzi]

Standard size for 6 sounds good. Pangea however sounds horrible as the team in the middle of a pangea will be screwed. It has to be a map where the land everyone has, the distaces from each other and the civs each one borders are roughly equal.

I think that Pangea would probably be the best. And this can be easily solved if all teams start on edge of the continent with no civ starting inland to avoid exactly that middle country = dead civ. It would be a race towards the middle of the continent, which for example can be full of resources, so it would spark some bitter wars IMO.

 

[Lord Parkin]

If there are teams then the techcost are higher automatically

But only by 50%, which means you have 150% tech costs but 200% research rate, allowing for slightly faster research. So turning up the difficulty to increase tech costs would indeed be a good idea for a double civs game.

Although, it won't actually matter too much if tech trading is off (which the general sentiment seems to be leaning towards at the moment), since the tech pace will be MUCH slower than any normal game anyway.

I think that Pangea would probably be the best. And this can be easily solved if all teams start on edge of the continent with no civ starting inland to avoid exactly that middle country = dead civ. It would be a race towards the middle of the continent, which for example can be full of resources, so it would spark some bitter wars IMO.

That's pretty much the design that the last map had. But it certainly worked (although resources and tile quality needed to be balanced a bit better). One other possibility would be to have a "ring" shaped continent (or two "ring" shaped continents), with sea in the middle of each continent. This would ensure that everyone had two neighbours and thus would greatly increase balance. (Think of an "O" with six people spaced around it, or a double "O O" with three people on each.)

One point to make is that if there are two continents, caution should be taken with connecting them by coast, since otherwise the teams closest to the other continent will have an easier time meeting other teams (diplomacy), as well as utilising the intercontinental trade routes (not a small factor). One way that this could be balanced is if the two continents are connected by coast on both the east and west sides - i.e. like a landmass wrapping around the whole map, except with two small channels to separate each continent on either side.

Anyway, those are just a few thoughts of mine.

 

[Irgy]

Lord Parkin's suggestions got me thinking about completely symmetric arrangments of 6 players.

There's one quite interesting one based on the projective plane, if only that was implemented as a map-wrap-around option.

Spoiler :

The projective plane means if you exit the map at one point, you come on at the point "opposite", which in this case means that if you connect the exit and entry points together the line would pass through the centre of the map (as opposed to toroidal, which does exist as an option, where the line would be either vertical or horizontal). It wouldn't be that hard to implement, it's just arguably a little bit silly as a map of the earth when it can't even be embedded in 3D space. Plus if you scrolled the map around the planet back to where you started it would end up upside-down.

Getting back to the reality of 3D space, there's still a fair few options. The circle or ring has been mentioned, it's not completely symmetric on a cylinder wraparound map (i.e. the normal option), as the players to the left and right have an ocean route to each other while the top and bottom players don't. This isn't probably such a big deal though.

There's also plenty of completely symmetric options that arrange the players like the pips on a dice, or like the white squares on a 2x6 checkerboard, where the land wraps around the whole planet. For instance a zigzag landmass like "/\/\/\/", or vertical strips connected across the middle "-|-|-|-", or just a flat band around the planet.

You can do some awesome things with toroidal maps. You can actually set it up so that each of the 15 pairs of two of the six players (and amazingly you could even still do it with 7 players) have a significant section of common border between their lands. You should even be able to get all pairs roughly an equal distance from each other (although I haven't confirmed this). EDIT: Here's a wikipedia link explaining what I mean here. If each coloured region is a player (with the 7th an ocean maybe?) then they all share borders here. Not quite the same distance from each other pairwise, although a bit of manipulation of how difficult it is to travel in different directions could nearly make it so. Completely symmetric layout though which is nice, as well as great potential for conflict with everyone bordering everyone else.


Of course despite all this silliness, I'd be just as happy with a random fractal start - complete with asymmetric locations, risks of isolation, differing quality starts and everything else. People are probably going to whine that their start wasn't as good as everyone else's anyway, the more similar you make them the finer the details people will pick on. The more effort the map makers puts in evening things out the more justified people feel in blaming them for mistakes. At least if it's completely random people can complain about bad luck but can't direct it at anyone. In which case they should really just learn to suck it up and make the most of it. I much prefer the idea of everyone having completely different random starts and playing the map in different ways than all having the same land and doing the same things with it.

But that's likely just my minority opinion, and I'm happy to go with the flow.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Actually I believe you can accomplish the map you have drawn if we use a "Toroidal" map wrap in civ. EDIT: Ah, I see, that wouldn't actually quite work. Flipping on "Toroidal" would certainly be interesting for the "duel ring" map, though.

Anyway, you certainly have some interesting ideas to consider, which is great. The more discussion the better, IMHO - it might give the map makers some food for thought.

 

[ahmedhadzi]

@Irgy: the idea is definitely fine, but I don't know if we want perfect map or not? Now, we would like to balance out as much as possible and give each team a fighting chance, but that also misses a point in my opinion.

First of all, teams are not equal, some have more experienced MP players then other, some teams have more players playing top two levels, etc..., so no matter how hard we try to balance the field, it will come to a moment in the game which will be off balance situation between the teams due to their expertise.
Secondly, I would personally be disappointed if I knew that all teams have equal starts, since then game loses its charm (play the man not the board!). There should be a level of uncertainty and surprise about the map, people should feel like they are EXPLORING a new world, and beyond knowing the rules necessary to play the game and knowing the fact who are your opponents they should approach the game like tabula rasa waiting to respond to the new facts discovered each new turn.

Now since it is going to be almost impossible to find consensus between all the people involved in the game, and I liked Lord Parkin's notion about 2 continent ring world, or maybe Pangea like in the last game, maybe we could add one more option to the poll and have map makers decide which map they are going to make out of these three options, so there won't be connection between choice of civilizations for teams (water map we will choose Dutch, or similar train of thoughts) and knowledge of map before the game even starts.

The bottom line is: try to balance the map as much as possible, without letting the teams know what to expect. And I think that is doable.

 

[Irgy]

@ahmedhadzi: If you read the last paragraph of my previous post, I don't want a perfect map either, I agree with your points there.

More to the point though, for all that I talk about complete symmetry, my suggestions were intended for rough global layouts not maps which are symmetric to the finest detail. I wasn't clear on that though. The map for the last multi-team demogame for instance is one I'd describe as a circle in terms of layout, for all its obvious lack of actual symmetry in the details. That's the sort of level I was thinking about.

What I was really getting at is the issue of how many immediate neighbours each civ has (how much land as well I guess). The number of neighbours and the global structure of who is near who is something which may be nice to keep symmetric, and there seems to be less options than you might at first think. In fact, I can enumerate them, there's exactly 8 structurally symmetric graphs with six nodes:

• Everyone isolated
• Three pairs of people on three continents
• Two continents with three people on each
• A ring/circle
• A triangle inside another triangle, with each person in one triangle connected to one person in the other (this is the structure of my silly projective plane map for example, although it's layed out differently there).
• As above, but each connected to two people on the other triangle. Only three pairs of people not neighbouring in other words.
• A strange non-planar graph known as the utility graph.
• Everyone connected to everyone.

There's then a few different ways of embedding these neighbour graph structures onto a map. The more connected versions would require the torus wraparound to work and are possibly a bit silly on the whole. Of course if you don't mind some players having two neighbours and others having three and so on then there's plenty of other options.

As you can probably tell, I'm a mathematician at heart. Apologies for heading off on such an odd tangent here.

And again, for all my personal interest in symmetry, I don't actually want the map to be too symmetric. I also don't want to know what it is in advance, but the more options there are the less chance of that there is.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Three continents of two teams each is interesting to consider. I don't think that's been done in a demogame before. It would somewhat simplify diplomacy: either ally with the guy on your island, or destroy him and take over the whole island for yourself. My guess is most likely you'd end up with 3 islands each with a single civ at some point, and then it would be down to a battle between the 3 islands. Perhaps somewhat predictable, but could be interesting. What would make it more fun, I think, would be if the three continents were not separated by ocean but just by coast. In that case, each player would have easy contact with 3 others, or easy contact with all 5 others if it was a toroidal map. This is assuming a layout something like a triple stripe (think "I I I" for the continents).

 

[Darkness]

My guess is most likely you'd end up with 3 islands each with a single civ at some point, and then it would be down to a battle between the 3 islands.

I doubt it would be a battle. 3 Civs on 3 different islands almost invariably means space race in multiplayer. Some minor raiding may occur, but invasion of another continent is almost never cost-effective for the conquering nation (and also very difficult if you don't have a big tech lead). And if you have a big tech lead, why would you invest in offensive units? Since then space race is a far easier VC to obtain...

 

[HUSch]

You presume, 3 players at 3 islands have same chances,
I see some other possibilities:
In constellations with 3 is allways the 2:1 fight possible. If the islands have contact only with optic you can see the paranoia at every island. When is the best time to fight against your neighbour. Is it good to support the weaker opponent at the next islands vice versa or not.
For diplo you need imo tech-trade

 

[Darkness]

And you're assuming that it will be possible to do real damage in the late game on a technologically more advanced opponent who has an island for himself. That team got the advantage for a reason, so it is logical to assume that they would be able to defend that island. And considering the advantage in CIV is with the defender I don't see how two technologically inferior civs will be able to wage a successful war in the late game if the defender has his own island to defend.
Especially if tech trading is off: then it will be almost impossible to catch the leader.

Which is why I would prefer to have all civs on the same landmass...

 

[Lord Parkin]

I doubt it would be a battle. 3 Civs on 3 different islands almost invariably means space race in multiplayer. Some minor raiding may occur, but invasion of another continent is almost never cost-effective for the conquering nation (and also very difficult if you don't have a big tech lead). And if you have a big tech lead, why would you invest in offensive units? Since then space race is a far easier VC to obtain...

Fair points, although inter-island battles actually aren't that difficult in my experience, unless you wait right until the end of the game. Coastal stabs are fairly easy to implement, effective, and very tricky to defend against, especially if the continents are close. Conquering a continent is made a whole lot easier when you raze most or all of the coastal cities first.

 

[Chimera1804]

just to put in my two cents worth....

While I agree that the starts need to be somewhat balanced, I also think that we need some element of surprise (as ahmedhadzi said). I would be perfectly happy were the map-maker to generate a fractal map and just balance it a bit. I just think that trying to "set the map" so you have a certain type of game play out is missing the point of a game in Civ.

 

[Indiansmoke]

just to put in my two cents worth....

While I agree that the starts need to be somewhat balanced, I also think that we need some element of surprise (as ahmedhadzi said). I would be perfectly happy were the map-maker to generate a fractal map and just balance it a bit. I just think that trying to "set the map" so you have a certain type of game play out is missing the point of a game in Civ.

It is all good and well in theory...but....when you get to play human experts of the game, if you don't balance the land in all respects (quantity, quality & bordering) then the best land situation will win... as simple as that.