The Nobles' Club Bullpen: Second Cycle

Boo! Fie on him! A pox on dalamb! A pox on the entire dalamb flock!

...nah, man, it's fine.

 

Hi dalamb,

I've been playing the old NC games in the bullpen for a while now and credit that as one of the reasons I've gotten a lot better recently. I've been meaning to thank you for all the work you put into creating fun maps. I have been looking forward to Pacal but you could be a week late and I'd still be happy. Thanks again, I really appreciate it =]

But if you're feeling like you need some help I wouldn't mind chipping in. I know it must be a lot of work for you guys - I'm new to the forum and don't have much experience making maps but with a little guidance I could learn!

 

@Herodotus_Rex: Thanks for the offer. It's probably a good idea for more people to know how to make maps? Do you want to make one for Gilgamesh? I can give you some guidance; PM me if you want to try.

NC 101 with Pacal is up, finally. Sorry for the delay.

 

Do you change the generated maps much for the ones you provide in the NC? Is it mostly on changing the start location a little, or much more than that?

 

@ dalamb: I would love to! Boy that's a big responsibility - I'll do my best =]

I haven't quite figured out the mechanics of the forum yet so I sent you a friend request - is that basically the same thing or? Let me know if there's something else I should do!

 

Was about to offering the same, Rex, and searched therefore for Advice at the Forum, TMIT made a tutorial in the forum and also on Youtube. More Information about the WB-File can also be found here.

 

It would be fine if each of you created a map, perhaps Herodotus_Rex with Gilgamesh and Marvinlegend with Lincoln. I pick the order of leaders to spread out the traits and avoid duplicates, so I'd prefer you not pick other leaders instead. Next cycle starts in a small number of months and the choice of leaders is much freer.

I also was going to point to TMIT's guides, but there are a couple of other guidelines I use based on the notion that this is intended for Noble-level players and meant to be less challenging than an arbitrary map might be. I do a moderate amount of regenerating maps and editing to achieve a few effects:

1. I choose map type first. We try to spread around the type of map, with at most one "unusual" map type like Boreal every 5-6 leaders. Popular "ordinary" scripts are Pangaea, Big and Small, Medium and Small, Custom Continents, and to a lesser extent Tectonics and Fractal (some people have expressed a dislike of those two). With some scripts like Custom Continents you don't always get the number you specified so sometimes you need to regenerate.
2. If the civilization starts with a food tech, I regenerate until I get a start with that food source (so a Fishing civ gets seafood, and an Agricultural civ gets rice or corn or wheat). There's an issue with Hunting civs, since deer usually occur only in otherwise less desirable locations. Once or twice I've put deer somewhere the scripts don't usually put them, but some people don't like that. Sometimes a hunting Civ starts with a normal food source and elephants, which is also reasonable.
3. If the UU needs a strategic resource (horses, copper, iron) I make sure that resource exists somewhere nearby. If it's in a SIP BFC I use that; otherwise I usually put it where a 2nd city makes sense.
4. I usually go with random AI, but if a psycho starts nearby I sometimes interchange Monty/Ragnar/Shaka with some AI further away. Because of how the difficulties work, you don't do this by moving units; you do it by changing starting locations (StartingX and StartingY) between the civs. IIRC TMIT pointed out that you delete all the AI units but not the player's, since that makes sure the starting scout or warrior is in the same place for every player and that the AI gets the right number and kind of starting units (if you leave the AIs settler and warrior, they don't get the archers and scouts and extra settler they should get at higher levels). When you exchange civs like this you need to select the "reveal tiles" tab and, for each of the moved civs, click on the button that recalculates what tiles to reveal. You also do this if you move the starting warrior or scout.
5. If you change the player civ's starting location, you have to delete the player civ's units too, run a Custom Scenario to find out where the starting warrior/scout shows up, then save the worldbuilder file again before making TMIT's other edits. You can probably deduce why this is necessary from the other instructions.
6. Since some people play at high difficulty levels, you need to look out for one AI having some huge nice territory into which to expand without serious opposition: it makes them so powerful that Immortal+ players face a very difficult AI towards the end of the game.
7. It's a little tough for me to judge whether the map outside the starting location is going to be a good one, and I'm not sure what other advice to give. Generally you want to make sure that you're not isolated (unless you deliberately chose Islands, which I did only once IIRC).
8. You should feel free to make other edits that you think make the game more fun, but don't overdo it (I've made some maps that wound up being "too good" but a few of those "too good" maps arose spontaneously). I sometimes add a hill or two if there aren't enough in the BFC to give reasonable production -- unless there is a good-looking production site close by. I often extend nearby rivers so the starting location is riverside. As I've said before, the more edits you make the less some people will like it (I used to hate deserts and changed them to plains, but stopped).

If you happen to use Emacs, I can give you my macros that automate some of this. I started a Java program for it a couple of years ago but that has been on the back burner for a very long time. To satisfy everyone you need one map for Noble (which covers Prince and below), and one for each level above Prince. You also need to generate the original map with huts, create one set of maps for all the necessary difficulty levels, then create copies with huts deleted and events turned off. I'll do this for you the first time you each make a map (with my macros that step only takes 10-15 minutes including trying out the Noble Huts and Deity No-Huts scenarios to make sure I've done this step right).

Let me know if I need to explain any of this further. I suspect in the 3rd cycle we'll need to put these instructions in spoilers in the 2nd or 3rd message of the new bullpen thread so they're easier to find.

 

Awesome! I'll get started today and I'll contact you if/when I have questions as I go. Thanks for the guides/tips, they're very helpful =]

 

I have no idea what the "friend" mechanism in CivFanatics is for; I never use it. A Private Message is different; it's just a within-cf mail system to avoid revealing external email addresses.

 

Herodotus_Rex got me a map for NC 102 on time, but I was delayed in checking and posting it; I hope to get it done by mid-afternoon Eastern time. Marvinlegend's NC 103 is done, so ought to be posted on time in 2 weeks.

 

Nice looking forward to this next game been pla
ying through some games and enjoying comparing my strats to others

 

Hoping you might post soon i got tommorow off hoping to play a game

 

I'm sorry to disappoint everyone. I sent the map a while ago but dalamb had some stuff come up in RL and couldn't finish/post the map, while I've been out of town until today. If someone else will volunteer to help me we could have them up now.

I first made a map I think will be balanced and fun on Noble difficulty with huts. I then deleted all huts and made a No Huts save. I went through and made a new save for each difficulty, adding techs as I went. Finally, I went back through the saves and made only Gilgamesh playable and fixed the starting warrior's position. Is this correct, are these maps playable on all difficulty levels? As this is my first map I just don't know.

I do know that there is one problem with the map. The No Huts saves start with more territory initially revealed. I don't understand why, and deleting the revealmap line didn't help. Maybe because there was a hut in the BFC? I don't know.

If you understand this stuff well enough to either do it yourself (or preferably help someone new to making maps learn what to do) please post or send me a PM. Here is a .zip with the files View attachment NC 102 Gilgamesh.zip and here is the boilerplate for the match View attachment NC 102 Gilgamesh.txt . It is missing the picture of the starting location, because I didn't know how to fix the initially revealed map.

Thanks for any help you can provide, and again I'm sorry this has been so late.

 

Never mind, he did what I said to do...

 

You have to find&Replace with a blank "TeamReveal=" too, then you get the same mapreveals for both settings.

In Deity No Huts, you've took the Immortal Handicap. It doesn't matter though, I just removed the lines, but with this the player get the wrong preselection for Deity.

Also you should make Speed=NONE and MaxTurns=NONE, for choosing speed.

Due to the difficulty levels, Team two misses Archery in all Huts-Saves but Monarch, rest should be right.

 

As Herodotus_Rex said I've had some real-life issues delay my dealing with the next game, the draft of which he got to me in plenty of time last week. Thanks to him for making the .zip accessible. Given all that work I may be able to post an "official" thread with the last couple of fixes (such as the unit's starting location) by tomorrow.

 

Unfortunately Herodotus_Rex' WB save files have AI units in them, which means they don't give the AI their extra units on Monarch and above. It will take me longer to fix this than I have time for at the moment, though it's possible I might be able to do so this evening.

 

NC 102 with Gilgamesh is finally up. Sorry for the long delay.

 

Marvinlegend has posted NC 103: Lincoln. Thanks for the map!

 

That appears to be a link to Nobles' Club XC: Napoleon of France.

Correct link is http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=472785