High likeliness

[Rhye]

It seems to me that you all pick high likeliness.
Why don't you ever play with medium or low?

 

[Fierabras]

For me the main appeal of RFC and RFC RAND is (semi-)historical accuracy, which means the map should resemble earth. For that reason less resemblance has no appeal for me.

I can imagine medium and low could be better for generating decent starting positions, because there is "script tension" between likeliness and resource placement in the map script. Too be honest, I haven't even tried lower likeliness, so I'll try that and see if it makes a difference.

 

[mikeemike]

Occasionally I enjoy playing on the other ones, but mostly I choose High. Low is sometimes fun because I have no idea what the world is like and it becomes interesting. For example, when the Mayans start in the old world 10 turns early and build a huge tech lead because of their +40% science. Or when Rome founds Taoism or something weird

 

[Metal Alloy Man]

I like medium because it definetly spices things up but still leaves some historical relevance. Low is very cool to play once in awhile mainly because anybody can end up in the new world. High is overrated in my opinion. I'd rather play classic RFC than high personally.

 

[KaiserBenjamin]

I never play High. I'm a straight, Medium & Low person. I play RAND almost exclusively now, FYI, so don't take the lack of activity on the forums as a sign no one is playing it.

The problem with low if you're an early Civ, is there's no way to know where new civs are going to pop up and so it makes playing the game rather frustrating. On Medium there is still uncertainty, but you can have a general idea. Also some of the New World goals are a bit more cut-and-dry on Medium. Although, I do like having the Conquerors event against European powers (happened to me in one Japan game and I was able to completely take out the Dutch.)

 

[Arkaeyn]

I've been playing medium almost exclusively. I may try some low games as well, but the couple that I did try seemed pretty much the same.

 

[musicfreak]

I play mostly medium, and some low as well. I never play high because I might as well play RFC. I agree with KaiserBenjamin, low can be a bit frustrating without knowing which civs spawn where, but if civ spawning is improved I don't think this will be a problem.

 

[Fierabras]

You guys make it sound if "high likeliness" is very close to the map from RFC. It isn't, even when it comes to civ spawning. I have seen them spawned in very unlikely positions. As it stands now, it's "Low likeliness", "Lower likeliness" and "Lowest likeliness".

 

[Ambassador]

I simply prefer High likeliness because I don't like Atzecs next to Paris...

;-)

 

[ZachScape]

One of the only things I don't like about it though is that the Americas are too blocky, and besides Australia and the Americas, there is not a real distinction between continents. But it is all worth it when the classical Europeans start on a sea. I LOVE that, and hope that it is possible to program it to do that everytime.
And I think every game I played, Rome started as a land locked city. Rome became powerful because of it's location, but in RAND, it spawns in the middle of no where.

 

[onedreamer]

It seems to me that you all pick high likeliness.
Why don't you ever play with medium or low?

because as Firebras has said, high likeliness is already low likeliness compared to the real thing

In detail, these are the things that need improvement in order for high likeliness to be more likely, and consequently other options to be used more.

1- there needs to be a mediterranean sea and ancient civs start on it.
2- smaller britain and not so close to America
3a- Carthage shouldn't have a start due to proximity. It should start in West Africa. Or if it must have one, it should start near Egypt (currently it starts near Greece 90% of the times).
3b- Better positioning for Egypt as well. It needs to be more to the west IMO.
4- India should start in Asia. Currently it starts in Africa half of the times. This also screws the starting position of Khmer.
5- more differentiation among: Eurasia, Africa, Arabia/India/Indonesia. Currently it's all a single pangaea with no clear pattern. Incidentally this makes the turkish UHV almost impossible to plan, you have to have luck and guess where to have cities !

 

[Rhye]

alright.
I will try to make high higher and low lower.

 

[PinkPallin]

Actually, I play low likeliness, whenever I can find some time.
I'm interested in having a new world, that's why I'd appreciate a lower low likeliness. At the moment, low likeliness means six landmasses located simmetrically (three on top, three on bottom). Usually, Europeans on one side, Asians on the other. Let's mix it up!

 

[The Q-Meister]

You guys make it sound if "high likeliness" is very close to the map from RFC. It isn't, even when it comes to civ spawning. I have seen them spawned in very unlikely positions. As it stands now, it's "Low likeliness", "Lower likeliness" and "Lowest likeliness".

True.

Played a couple games as China and both times Russia spawned right next to me. I must say though that RFC RAND is the only "random" map I can play now; like many here I suppose I wanted a break from playing an earth map that I knew inside out for a change of pace but when I tried to play terra on vanilla civ I turned it off after 15 minutes after looking at the worldbuilder and saw how the game had placed each civ so perfectly apart from one another so each got an equal amount of land to settle in I knew there'd be no meaningful wars until at least the renaissance era.

So I came back to RAND and it is infinitely better than vanilla.

That being said, one thing you might to want to look closely at is what I've mentioned above how the civ-engine has a tendency is to place the civs at a certain distance from each other so that each one gets an almost-equal amount of land to settle in. I think this might be a reason why Russia and China are so close together because the game -engine is not giving a civ like Russia, blessed historically with a abnormally huge land area to expand in, enough land to look close to how it did in real life.

Here are two screenshots from that game (which resulted in an AI-Inca UHV ) This was a high-likeness map where I as China seemed to spawn closer to the European civs than to India or Arabia. The 2nd you see how close Russia was to me.

 

[Ambassador]

Just for your interest, since some of you guys seem to confuse two words:

Likeliness means probability as in "There is a high likeliness for Praetorians to be Romans troups."

Likeness means similarity as in "The Likeness between Romans and Greeks is higher than between Mayans and Chinese."

Okay?

 

[Ambassador]

So its "High/Low Likeness" if you talk about the similarity of RFCRAND worlds to normal RFC, but high/low likeliness if you talk about automatic ressource placement on a given terrain.

 

[onedreamer]

no you got it wrong actually. It's high/low likeliness that India spawns in Asia (IE in its real life location) and not in Africa, etc etc stuff like that. Likeliness that it's alike the real life thing, so they aren't different terms but connected terms. Currently for some civs it's a bit broken and it's all low likeliness since a 50% african India or a 90% Taoist asian Russia are both pretty low likeliness in my book.

So I came back to RAND and it is infinitely better than vanilla.

tried to warn you RFC fanatics for some time, but you were too focused in getting to North America in ~750 AD with a raft or conquering the world with Incas

 

[Ambassador]

@onedreamer

That's exactly what I said: The likeliness (= probability/probabilità /likely -> probable) for India to spawn in Asia is very high.

But one can't say: "I play low likeliness" because the difference between the three modes Rhye offered concerns the similarity (=likeness/affinità/alike -> similar to) to the actual RFC world map.

Anyway, it's not a big thing.

 

[onedreamer]

actually I objected that it means that the options affect the Likelihood (I think it's more correct than likeliness) that map and other elements are alike the regular RFC. So it isn't wrong to call the option in any of the two way, although the current choice is probably more correct than the one you suggest, since it is not sure that high likeliness will be highly alike regular RFC, but there should be more chances that it will be, compared to the other 2 options.

 

[Zdarg]

I almost always play random likeness.