Indonesia 8 civs

[j@r]

This map, 84x47 tiles, centres about Indonesia, while also containing parts of Southeast Asia, the Philipines and Northern-Australia.
I decided to make this map, because to my surprise, I couldn't seem to find another one which concentrates on just that, geographically versatile area.
Also this is my first map for Civ 4, so resource placement and balance in general is no doubt improvable - thus any constructive criticism on that would be appreciated.

The civilizations are as follows:
Suryavarman II - Khmer Empire
Victoria - English Empire
Willem van Oranje - Dutch Empire
Bismarck - German Empire
Joao II - Portuguese Empire
Roosevelt - American Empire
Tokugawa - Japanese Empire
De Gaule - French Empire

While I tried to keep the starting positions of each former colonial power somewhat accurate, this also had its limits due to reasons of balancing etc.

 

[el_hidalgo]

This is good! I was thinking of doing one too since the only other one I know of (yes, there is another one out there) is really huge. But I like the smaller scale of this one; that's exactly what I would have done. My only constructive criticism would be the desert and tundra tiles -- in this part of the world there shouldn't be either. I think you used the tundra to represent workable mountains. I'd rather see regular mountains. Also I question the use of floodplains on grasslands/plains. And it seems like there are a lot of resources, maybe too many? But these are minor points. Overall, excellent work!

Did you upload this to the database btw? I didn't see it there. You really should! Not many people will see it here.

 

[7ronin]

Looks very good.

 

[j@r]

Glad you liked it.

This is good! I was thinking of doing one too since the only other one I know of (yes, there is another one out there) is really huge. But I like the smaller scale of this one; that's exactly what I would have done. My only constructive criticism would be the desert and tundra tiles -- in this part of the world there shouldn't be either. I think you used the tundra to represent workable mountains. I'd rather see regular mountains. Also I question the use of floodplains on grasslands/plains. And it seems like there are a lot of resources, maybe too many? But these are minor points. Overall, excellent work!

Did you upload this to the database btw? I didn't see it there. You really should! Not many people will see it here.

I had totally forgotten to add this to the dl-database, fixed that now.

Thank you for your criticism - I agree with most of it, however still left the map unchanged, since I don't really feel like going over it again.

Even though it might feel a bit out of place, I still regard a tundra hill a good replacement for a smaller mountain tho, as imo it resembles foothills (the transition between plains and mountains) pretty well and is furthermore crossable (plus workable as you've already mentioned) by your units.

 

[VinceV]

It's a fun map, I've tried it a few times. It just has some balancing issues. Portugal is always the strongest civ; they have a lot of initial food and fertility there on Sumatra. With a combo of flood plains and rice, their capital grows to 5 while most others are still at 2 or 3. By mid-game they have several cities that are around size 20.

France is by far the worst position, so I've done some tweaking to try to improve its start.

One overall issue related to this is that fact there is so much jungle and the different players' starting positions are affected by it more than others. Since it's a little bit of a wait until iron working, certain civs have stunted growth until they can get rid of the jungle.

I like the abundance of resources; it makes every square a great place for a city.
There is very few horses, though, not sure if that was on purpose or not.

As always, AI have a hard time dealing with a barbarian island city, and I think this affects Roosevelt the most with Bantu right in front of him.

So next time I play, I will make these adjustments at the start:

-nerf some of Portugal's fertility
-move France to the top of the peninsula
-sprinkle a few more horses around
-eliminate Bantu next to Americans
-improve the city site for Berlin as well

Great work overall; it's nice to have a map that fills up fast.

Vince