There are a few things to address:
If this is a test of builder verses momentum, neither player should feel that his personal record is at stake here. Personally, I am a builder by heart, so I almost always prefer the builder side of things. After looking at the new map, I prefer Univ/Aki/Drones to uphold the honor of the Builder side.
For momentum, the classic factions are Sparta, Believer, Angels, etc., but as far as I am concerned, as long as no Aliens and no Pirates, the momentum team can pick any 3 factions you want, including overlapping with the Builder factions if you choose. (I think a CNM can set it up to have multiple copies of the same faction if desired.)
In my opinion, the map is large enough that a well played builder can hold out and win against momentum. So I believe the momentum team is a losing proposition.
So we can change it to just teams verses teams, and the second team can pick any team it wants (regardless of overlap in I understand the that factions can be duplicated by a moderator if desired). So the other team can have Uni, Aki, and/or Drones, up to completely duplicating my team.
Or we can try to momentum experiment, if Roninscg or anyone else wants to champion the momentum approach.
I see there are a lot of pods in the game, presumably to reward the rapidly exploring/expanding momentum player. Can we set all of the pods to the same reward (somewhere between 50-100 EC each depending on the weight we give to exploration? I don't like the randomization of pods to what is otherwise supposed to the a balanced game that is supposed to tell us something about viable strategies. Because if one of us is popping worms and xenofungal blooms, and the other is popping AAs, monoliths, and Ogres, the pod roulette is going to determine the outcome, regardless of strategy.
What starting resources do we want each faction to have? I favor beginning with 2 CP per faction, 4 formers per faction, and 4 scouts per faction, with the scouts being special depending upon the faction.
For example:
1. Sparta: all 4 scouts can be 1-1-2 rovers.
2. Prophets: all 4 scouts can be mindworms. (They suck so bad they need the advantage!)
3. Angels: any of the 4 scouts can be probe teams if desired (still only a total of 4 scouts)
4. Gaia: if the automatic first capture is messed up by the scenario, Gaia should start with one mindworm and 3 scouts. This should be tested. Gaia is supposed to have a guaranteed first capture.
Did I miss anyone? Both Alien factions, all 4 scouts can be can be Ogres. Pirates, all 4 scouts can be foil 1-1-4. (Good thing all 3 are banned).
None of the factions I picked have special scouts.
Yitzi patch
Anything special here? I want rising water off, and the ecodamage bug fix. (No building and destroying building for ecodamage gain. Worm pops do not increase with ecodamage control buildings. Anything else we want to tweak? Is it possible to turn off sidetracks?
As usual, I prefer to ban atrocities and copters, but I am willing to allow nerve stapling if Yitzi rising water patch is in. Is this all good?
I will set the game up with those rules and be happy with it, I'm just debating this because it's interesting and fun.Yes and it makes interesting reading, too. ete, do keep in mind that EM is MP champ, and I assume that means an incredible amount of experience behind his reasoning. I've watched him kick ideas around with Yitzi at great length, and I thought, notwithstanding that Yitzi is a mental giant, experience almost always trumped theory.
Just looked at the settings, it seems the controls are turning off:
AAs
Monoliths
Resources
Vehicles
Technologies
with no other fine tuning available. Turning off Ogres would require turning off unity everythings (assuming Ogres are included in vehicles). Turing off multiworms, xenofungus, and completion events is not an option.
I notices that your initial map did not have much variance in attitude, so I tried to add a couple of large mountains.That's reasonable, but putting them on landmarks just looks really awkward to me. Your save was set to flattened terrain so I'm guessing that's how you play, but on unflattened it looks very wrong. Also, there is a significant ridge, a plateau, and a mountain on both sides? There are flat areas, but it does not seem to me like that part of the continent needs more variation?
You can eliminate the jungle from the starting locations very easily. I find this causes quicker expansion and a quicker game for everyone. For that matter, get rid of the nutrient bonuses from the starting locations. They are only there to facilitate faster expansion, If you want a more random look, make the start locations nothing special, no bonuses of any kind, no jungle, no nothing. It just results in a slow start.I made the start locations reasonably good because forcing the players to spend 3-5 turns wondering around in the dark with colony pods and ending up at the same place anyway is not interesting. I tried to make the continent as a whole roughly as fertile as a random continent, then placed the start locations on the best bits of the continent. Jungle Nut bonus squares and other extremely good start locations (in particular, removing the fungus from the uranium flats seems to make that one feel unreasonably good) are not something which feels like a natural map, and that is an issue as I'll get to at the end of this post.
The desirable spots are still going to be desirable for expansion, no matter now how good the starting spots are. The better starting spots just tend to cause expansion to occur faster.However improving the start locations makes the difference in quality of land between the bit that I want fought over and the bit which you start on much lower, which does disincentiveize people to fight over that land because.. they already have pretty good land.
I eliminated very little fungus from the map, primarily removing it from special resource squares. The special resources squares might as well not be there if there is also fungus, since fungus suppresses the special resources; the fungus effective removed the special resources from the early game, since terraforming will be difficult early on. By eliminating this fungus, it gives players more strategic options in how to expand. You can put fungus anywhere you like, but the more fungus you add, the less strategic options you are giving your players. In my view, the fewer strategic options that players have, the less interesting the map.Not having those special resources available immediately is, in my view, an increase to the strategic options. It means that a player has to decide to use former turns killing fungus rather than building other improvements. I disagree that it reduces options, it just makes the start slightly less accelerated (the start is already slightly accelerated by placing them on good bits of map), and forces an extra decision about whether to remove fungus or do other things.
Rushers benefit more than builders from the better starting locations, because builders will just expand to whatever good locations they can get to. If builders are saddled with bad starting locations, they look for better locations for their expansions. So the rushers (or momentum players) benefitted the most from my changes, because it meant their starting locations were good enough to fuel a war economy, without having to start their priorities on expansion, to get enough resources to fight.I can see the line of reasoning, but feel it is more than outweighed by diluting the advantage of holding the useful middle ground since the middle ground is no longer that much better than the start locations, arguably worse especially with the two very large mountains.
I think you should rethink how much you want your map to look like a random map (how important is that to you), and who will benefit most from good starting locations. I think you will find the builders are not so dependent upon good starting locations, but are keen to find decent secondary locations. It is the momentum factions that benefit most from good starting locations.More than wanting it to look like a random map, I want it to play and feel like an extremely balanced random map. The reason for this is that I view alterations to the.. base natural state of the game as arbitrary unless well justified. Mirroring and various forms of balance are well justified alterations to the base state of the game, in my opinion, because they make the game more fair and make more factions and strategies viable. Likewise removing pods near start locations and making the sea more attractive to reduce luck and diversify strategies are well justified alterations. Modifying natural landmarks to make them have higher altitude so you can get more energy without investing so many former turns in landscaping does not seem strongly justified, but more of a personal preference. The same goes for other unnaturally fertile land, except the separate continent which is designed for an AI to live on to give the AI a chance. Having a land bridge, while high land is an option, does slightly go against the base state of the game, but it is absolutely required if the rush factions are to be balanced with the builders so is also, in my opinion, justified.
ete, do you want to set up the game and moderate?Yep, but still need some more info from you (exact factions and start locations, rules).
| Setup | Preferences | Roninscg | Earthmichael |
| Yitzi patch | Game: SMAX & patches | Yitzi patch | Yitzi patch |
| confirmed | Factions** (turn order) | 1,2,3 | 4,5,6 |
| Balance0.5EMnoPods.MP | Map | Balance0.5EMnoPods.MP | Balance0.5EMnoPods.MP |
| custom | Size | custom | custom |
| custom | Ocean coverage | custom | custom |
| custom | Erosive forces | custom | custom |
| custom | Native life forms | custom | custom |
| custom | Cloud cover | custom | custom |
| Off | Unity pods | Off | Off |
| Transcend | Difficulty level | - | - |
| Setup | Preferences | Roninscg | Earthmichael |
| On | Allow Victory by Transcendence | On | On |
| On | Allow Victory by Conquest | On | On |
| Off | Allow Diplomatic Victory | Off | Off |
| On | Allow Economic Victory | On | On |
| On | Allow Cooperative Victory | On | On |
| On | Do or Die: Don't restart eliminated players | On | On |
| On | Look first: Flexible starting locations | On | On |
| Off | Tech stagnation: slower rate of research discoveries | Off | either |
| Off | Spoils of war: Steal tech when conquer base | Off | Off |
| Off | Blind research: cannot set precise research goals | Off | Off |
| N/A | Intense Rivalry: Opponents more aggressiv | N/A | N/A |
| On | No Unity Survey: World Map not visible | On | On |
| N/A | No Unity Scattering: Supply Pods only at landing sites | N/A | N/A |
| On | Bell Curve: No Random Events | On | On |
| custom | Time Warp: Accelerated Start*(on/off/custom) | custom | custom |
| 4 | Colony pods at start | 2 | 2 |
| 8 | Scout Patrols (1-1-1) | 4 | 4 |
| 4 | Starting Formers) | 4 | 4 |
| ON | Iron Man: Save/Restore restricted to exit | - | - |
| N/A | Randomize faction leader personalities | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | Randomize faction leader social agendas | N/A | N/A |
| min.1-2/day | Expected turn rate (usually 24h) | few/day | 1-2/day |
| N/A | Number of days to wait before turn is 'pushed' | N/A | N/A |
2. Roninscg, when I loaded the nopods version of your map, there are still tons of pods. I must admit I did not check it after your initial upload. When you said you removed ALL pods, that was good enough for me. So, are we actually playing on a map with lots of pods, or with no pods?
Houston, I think we have a problem.Will check.
1. I don't think we are playing on Transcendent. ete, can you check this please? I think we must be a couple of steps short of transcendent.
2. Roninscg, when I loaded the nopods version of your map, there are still tons of pods. I must admit I did not check it after your initial upload. When you said you removed ALL pods, that was good enough for me. So, are we actually playing on a map with lots of pods, or with no pods?I removed all but the pods on the poles while making the map.
3. University started with Industrial Base. University is not supposed to start with that tech. No harm, I suppose, since either of my other factions could easily give the tech to University. Still, I thought you should know, in case you use these setting in a different context, where University would not be so easily able to get Industrial Base. Still, I would rather University not have Industrial Base, since does not every tech a faction have, including starting techs, slow down research?I can change that, likely a result of the rush.
4. Finally, I though Yitzi's patch had a setting to avoid sidetracks (that let you research anything with perquisites). I thought I saw this somewhere. Was it a different patch, or did I just dream it? I remember the UI was a little odd, because the screen showed so many tech options that only the titles were displayed, which is fine with me. Does anyone else remember this?No such setting exists to my knowledge.
Either way, I think we will have to remake the game to due to the fact that I do not think we are playing transcendent.
Meanwhile, I noticed a few things about the map that I want to tweak (on both sides for balance) to make some squares a bit more useful. In particular, I noticed some arid squares that I would like to boost the water level 1 notch (not rainy, but so that with a farm, the square is workable for 2 N). Otherwise, to me arid squares are only useful for forests, so it would allow some additional options.Changing the map more now would be possible, but unless it's of great importance it'd be simpler to just stick to current. I already consider your version of the map.. not really what I intended due to the vast increase in productivity of starting locations and landmarks, would prefer not to take it further away.
But I won't do anything about water level tweaks until I hear about the transcendent and pods issue, and only then if tweaks to both sides meet your approval.
I made a mistake at the start of this game with University colony pod. I was targeting a nice spot near the Morgan boarder. Problem is, after Morgan built a city, this good spot was outlined within Morgan territory, and I could not build (without breaking the pact with Morgan). There was no option to say, my good buddy Morgan won't mind me building here.This is useful to know, I'll likely test out where borders end up and set it up to avoid too many border conflicts for good base placements for the next version of the map.
So the poor lonely University colony pod has about an 8 turn trek to the next good build site. Since early growth is exponential, I think this mistake (or really border surprise) will significantly slow University development. My other factions will probably have to send aid to help.
I have never played a multi-faction game with my factions so close together, so this border shift and the implications was a big surprise to me!
Mindworms! In my territory! Oh my! :o
Ronin, in the interest of scenario debugging, have you already visited the crash site? If so, did you get anything?I have not been to the crash site.
I am just asking because I am exploring the crash site now, thinking I was first, and surprised not to find anything. But if you already visited the crash site, that would explain why I can't find anything.
Native users can rebuild armies extremely quickly, but only if they have a small number of native units at a time. This means that collecting natives from near the site of battle is critical, and keeping a handful of forces back from each attack to catch the next wave is important. I'm not sure how carefully ronin has been doing this, but if he's playing right you could have another ambush or full attack on your hands in only a handful of turns.which parameters you use for natural/alien life forms?
How are you both feeling about the rush distance so far?
You beat me to the borehole cluster!