Looking for a couple of players to try a map

[ete]

The map is designed primarily with multiple factions per player in mind, though it should still work for 1v1. I can use yitzi's (and kill global warming/do whatever alphax changes are wanted), and will be sure to check diplomacy is correct between all factions (locked incorrect diplomacy was the issue with the other game, right?).

[Earthmichael]

I would try the builder side of this with Uni/Drones/Cycon or Uni/Drones/Morgan.  Uni is too good a builder faction to leave out of this equation. 

Let's use Yitzi patch also.  What options were you thinking?

Is there a way to verify that locked incorrect diplomacy was the problem with my latest game with Roninscg?  If so, is there any way to fix it?

[ete]

Are your factions correctly allied? If no, that may be the issue. I'm willing to take a look around your save and see if I can figure out what's going on, but I'll need your password. Knowing whether your opponent has the same problem may help track it down.

Either way, I'll play this game far enough to test handing over control of units to verify that works before giving you the starting save.

[ete]

And excellent, very glad to have you two playing . It'll be especially interesting to see if an all builder faction team can hold up to a mixed or more rush focused team on a map with land linked starting positions where early pressure gives control of some excellent resources and the Nexus.

Now, things to decide:
roninscg, are you okay with having 3 factions as EM seems to want?
Do you want to take it in turns to pick factions, use some other method, or would you like to both just pick what you want and I'll make clones if you both want a faction?
What rules/settings/starting units/any other specifics do you want to play with?
Do you want a powerful/angry AI to start on the fertile continent? I could put the Caretakers there with a few starting bases/formers and constant war with everyone to make it harder to take that land, which would probably smooth out a potential balance issue with first to WP getting to landbridge to there (other suggestions for this welcome).

I'll make some final tweaks to the map, upload it so you can both look around, then you can both PM me which starting locations for each faction, bonus tech choice for uni etc..

[ete]

Okay, I've made my final tweaks (unless one of you feels strongly there's an imbalance to address) for the version of the map you'll be using and attached it to this post.

Main changes are cosmetic, but I've altered some of the start locations a bit (4 now has an excellent initial spot for one base, but other bases will be far away or have bad places, and the spot near the Uranium is a bit weakened).

Please have a look around and decide which factions you want in which starting locations.

[Earthmichael]

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?

[ete]

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.

I would imagine that a pure momentum team would struggle a great deal if it failed to do decisive damage early on, but perhaps a team with one rushing faction (Believers for supporting units given by other factions, or perhaps one of the green factions to wormrush with the Nexus bonus. I really like how arguably the best faction for conventional spearhead (Mirram due to support and fanatic) is the worst at taking advantage of +1 Planet, letting others be viable.) and other factions which can be aggressive could take the useful and fertile ground, and give them enough of a leg up to make them hard for the pure builders to stop (at least diverting enough away from their building to stop them flying ahead).

Perhaps a pure-builder team can win, but I'm hoping to set the map up so that a mix of styles of factions is the strongest to make factions balanced against each other. Letting early pressure happen and giving a notable advantage to whoever holds the middle ground may be enough to get both players to produce an army early on, but not enough to let the game end quickly if both players prepare for war adequately.

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'd like it if at least one of you picked 1-2 momentum factions, but think that pure-momentum is likely a suboptimal strategy. Ideally I'd like to see a player use either one highly aggressive conventional faction (Sparta, Mirriam, Cult, maybe Gaia), one researcher, and one mineral builder (Domai or Hive), or something similar to that.

Most of all, I'd like to see if a somewhat balanced team of builders and rushers can win against someone going all-out builder. Seeing if a all-out rusher can win is also interesting, but my intention for this map is not to make it favor rushers, but to favor balanced teams and give all factions a chance to shine while slightly discouraging extreme strategies (either all builder with little army until late or all rush end game quickly).

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.

I've tried to balance out the pop popping in a few ways, firstly by making few pods very near initial bases so you don't get a key resource or load of fungus right in the middle of your base, second by making quite a lot of pods available to both players so that the pods will very likely approximately even out. If you both feel these precautions are not enough I can adjust pop pops, but my personal feeling is that not being able to get various bonuses changes the game significantly, removing strategies and altering balance. For example, a flat EC boost is effectively a penalty to Native factions since they lose a major source of worms to capture, and explorers can't go for AAs early to get a SP to compensate for their otherwise poor infrastructure.

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.

Worth glancing over the discussions going on here, particularly Kirov's last post. I'm happy with these suggested settings, though Gaia's ability to make formers at the start is significantly watered down by free formers for everyone.

Also, I think the way the Gaia capture thing works is just part of the capture formula. Basically, if you have no native life and you try to attack one with +1 Planet, you get the capture. Gaia's first fight always happens when she has none, so she gets it.

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?

All sounds okay to me. All Secret Projects allowed?

[Earthmichael]

I made a few edits to the map, mostly to improve starting location.  I tended to remove fungus where there were special bonuses, and I increased the rockiness of a few squares.  Also, I increased the elevation in a couple of places.  All of the changes, I tried to make completely symmetrically wherever rivers would permit; otherwise, I did what I thought was equivalent.

Please see if I made any errors (where North or South got accidentally favored), and see if you like the changes in general.  Since I tweaked the map, I am more than happy to let my opponent pick North or South starting locations.

Also, I like the fact that we have extra starting locations.  This allows us each a bit of flexibility, since one starting location will be left unused.

Here is the map  ( I called it  Balanced 0.5 EM).

[Earthmichael]

If we think Gaia gets too watered down by everyone having some Formers, I am all for allowing 1 or 2 Gaia scouts to be mindworms.

I am also open to Gaia getting a different starting tech, such as Centuari Empathy, if the feeling is that the Centauri Ecology advantage is too watered down.

I am OK with all SP.  Some people don't like allowing Empath Guild, but I am OK with it.

I would like to propose the Free Drones get a more useful starting tech.  Since they can't research anything for 10 turns, and then need quite a few turns for a breakthrough, they need a decent starting tech.  I would proposed Doctrine Mobility or Biogenetics choices for Free Drones alternative tech (I am thinking we pick one or the other as an optional patchable change to Free Drones; I lean toward Biogenerics).

As for pods, I don't have a good solution other than the one I proposed.  75 EC seems like more than enough compensation to help momentum teams keep up with builders.  If we use abundant native life, this would allow worm harvesters to do their thing pretty well.

Other than just popping great stuff like Ogres and AAs, pods are also subject to abuse.  I know a player than right before he popped a pod, he designed the most expensive tricked out Supply Crawler that his tech would allow.  I mean, with a few techs, we are talking about a 100+ mineral crawler.  He would set his closest city to build this monstrosity, and then popped the pod, hoping for a completion event, which built that supply crawler in one turn.  After his second early SP build, which I showed was mathematically impossible, rather than be called on cheating, he revealed this strategy, which seems to be allowed by the rules.

If we would limit the pod pops to a few not-completely game changing outcomes, I would consider this.  But I don't think any strategy game is improved by adding a lot of chance events (with both good and bad outcomes), which just widens the gap between possible results.  If I pop an early Ogre, I am going to be on the attack, whether I had initially planned to or not.  If my opponents has his major city blanketed by xenofungus, it is going to slow down his critical early expansion phase.

Who is to say whether the map is any good or not, or the strategies any good or not, when a couple of pod results can skew things in such a way?

Assuming we could limit pod outcomes, I would completely get rid of the following overpowered pods:
0. Volcanos, tidal waves, water rising, and the like.  Anything that can cause this kind of upheaval in elevations screws up the game.
1. Xenofungal bloom.  Can be devastating close to a base.
2. Multiple mindworm pops.  You should only get a single worm from a pod. I am OK with land pods doing away with mindworms altogether, although I could see a native faction wanting to keep the IOD as a possible result for sea pods.  (A sea pod can give you an IOD carrying a passenger.)
3. Completion events (these can be completely abused, as show above).
4. Tech discovery's
5. Ogres and Alien Artifacts  (This could be allowed only if some global counter made sure than you could never have more than 1 AA or Ogre more than any other faction.  This sounds difficult, but not impossible to implement.)

I consider the following to be a waste of a pod.  They are not overpowered, I am just always disappointed to get such a pod:
1. Survey pods that just reveal a scan of the nearby area.   This is a total waste.  I would rather have 25EC.
2. Mining pods.
3. Solar pods.
4. Comm frequencies.
5. Dislocation of my unit to some remote location.

I am OK with:
1. A special resource is found.
2. A monolith is found.  (Although getting a lot of monoliths can really help early expansion).
3. I am OK with getting a Unity [scout,rover,transport,foil,copter] whatever, or cloning the exploring unit in a differential rift.  If copters are banned, you may never upgrade the unity copter.
4. Forest and kelp pods.
5. Pods with up to 75 EC.  (Anything above 75 EC I think is a overpowered.)  I am OK for something like 50 or 75 EC being the default.  Every faction can use money to help speed up production, so I don't think anyone benefits more than anyone else.

Can we agree to limit pods to just these 5 options.  (Please let me know if I have overlooked some options.)

If we want to allow some admittedly overpowered options, like AA and Ogres, can we put some kind of balancing mechanism in place so that you cannot have one faction "having all of the luck with Ogres and AA", and the other factions are always left out?

[ete]

Having a look around the map. I may not have balanced rockiness as well as other elements, and changes to elevation are likely fine/positive. The fungus on special resources was intentional to slow down the start a little/balance out start locations/encourage players to pick start location 1 for earlier conflict/compensate for lack of near to start location pods which often generate resources on fungus making the game play a little more like a standard random map, but I'll see how it looks.

Giving Gaia MWs should help compensate, though does change her advantage significantly.

Ok about SPs.

Is the Drones slow start not mostly counteracted by the fact that later on, if fed tech, they can outbuild everyone? And with three factions, can't you just give them some better techs from another faction right away? Changing an aspect of a faction like that seems uncomfortable to me, but of course if you two want it I'll build it.

Pods.. hm. It's not so much a matter of how many credits per pod, but the fact that not having random pods significantly changes the game. I think that the worst imbalances can be smoothed out through clever mapmaking and design, while keeping the game and strategies intact. I'll address each point:

Flood events (earthquake, etc)
This is solved by following the instructions and building the map properly. If the map is initially generated as random, this kind of pod does not have the flood the planet side effect. It just makes a little mountain, which is generally does not affect the game (occasionally you'll get a land bridge, that's it).

Xenofungal bloom
So long as you don't put pods too near start locations it should not be too crippling, a patch of fungus some way from bases is generally not a huge deal until late enough where the former-turns needed to clear it are only a slight dent in your development.

Multiworm pops
Similar to previous one (a few worms far from bases may kill a unit, but they should be deal able with), except removing these would significantly alter balance between the speed at which a native, morale boosted, or non-FMer can explore and the rate at which others can explore. These also give much more of a feel of a hostile Planet.

Completion events
This seems better to deal with via a rule against that exploit (e.g. if you get a completion event on a crawler with cost above x mineral rows, you must disband it immediately) than by altering pop pops?

The really good pops (Ogres/AAs/Tech discoveries)
These do have the potential to shift the balance of the game, but if both players are given access to a significant number of pods it is highly likely that the effects of these positive pops will roughly even out, with some advantage given to whoever gets them first (explorer bonus). Again, making pods not be too close to the start locations should help reduce the effects in the crucial early turns.


Again, I will set up the game as you guys agree, I'm just giving my opinions on how to make the game both balanced and as close to the full game as possible. Pods are a significant part of the full game, and it seems like a both a shame and a change to inter-faction balance to neuter them by removing all of the important good and bad events when it should be possible to set a map up so these events even out well enough for it not to be the determining factor. I also don't know quite how fine tuned I can make pop pops, but will look into it. It's unlikely that a forced luck balancing system can be imposed without a large amount of work by an exe hacker, and the way such a system operated would be difficult to agree on.

[ete]

Okay, had a look around the map changes.

hm, I feel that the start locations as originally made were already good compared to what you would get on a random map, and improving them significant seems to take it further from a natural game state. More than that,  it reduces the incentive I tried to set up to fight over the fertile area with boreholes/monoliths/nexus or move to the good island by making the starting area already really good. It also looks.. unnaturally tuned to play. Especially putting a single jungle square under the Nutrient bonuses. Additionally, I'm not a fan of altering the heights of the natural landmarks for the same three reasons. It makes it more different from the default game, reduces incentive to fight for good terrain, and feels/looks unnaturally tuned to play rather than a generated planet, all things I'm keen to minimize. There's also the fact that significant reduction in initial fungus (which is already lower than most random maps) changes interfaction balance (natives do worse, factions running early FM do better).

And less importantly, the start location 2 spots seem less symmetrical.


Sorry, but I'm not much of a fan of your changes . One aim of the map is for it to feel as similar to a standard randomly generated map as practical while implementing various forms of balance (North/South, Builder/Rusher, Native/Conventional, and reducing the impact of early pod pops to make luck less of an issue). I feel your changes move away from builder/rusher balance in favor of builders, away from native/conventional balance in favor of conventional, and away from similar to standard play by editing landmarks and adding unnaturally fertile starting spots.

[Earthmichael]

I think pods are a good innovation for single player, since they can spice up the game.

Even the original game had option to limit the pods to only starting locations, so they did not become dominant.

I suggest that we smooth out pods by eliminating the very worst and very best outcomes, so we still can have some randomization based on the 5 outcomes left.

What are we gaining from adding this extra degree of randomness?  We can still reward exploration and being first to the pod.  We can allow momentum factions to send EC home to build faster.

There are a huge number of pods on this map, more so than any other map I have seen.  You expectation may be that with a large number of pods, the results will even out.  But that is not what happens in reality.  With this number of pods, the results of pods will tend to dominant the game for a long time, because comparatively speaking the output from the cities is relatively small compared to output from the pods.

My first preference is just to use the option to eliminate all pods except from landing sites.  Or just to eliminate pods altogether.  But as a concession to momentum faction who would tend to discover pods faster, I think giving 75 EC to the discovered of a pod is more than fair compensation for the momentum factions, while also eliminating pods which have a negative effect on the discoverer.  These both favor the momentum factions. 

So let's keep random pods, but smooth out the extremes.  Eliminate the worst of the bad effects and the strongest of the good effects, and eliminate the "no real effect results", that still leaves 5 different effects that can results from popping a pod.  I think that still leaves enough randomness  to be interesting, but it limits the pods from completely dominating the outcome of the game.

[ete]

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.

And.. I do see where you're coming from with trying to reduce the impact of luck, that's something I'm trying to do here but preferably not at the cost of changing the game in other significant ways The advantage I see from a bunch of ECs is a fairly different kind of advantage from getting 50 mins towards a SP, a free tech, or a one off powerful unit you can't heal. The pod system is built to be fairly well self-balancing, some really good pops like Ogres are rare, some like AAs are common enough that on average each player will get almost the same amount. Fundamentally, I like the idea of sticking closely to the base game unless there is strong reason not to.

As for no unity scattering, that seems backwards? Pods right at the start are a very big deal, later on less so.

And I'm happy to reduce the total number of pods significantly if you feel that would be better. My aim with having lots of pods was to smooth the randomness out by giving both players lots of throws of the dice, which should for the most part work, though I do imagine whoever gets to the sea first may get quite a boost.. but that's also not terrible, I'd like to see rushing for sea exploration since that seems to get skipped over in a lot of MP games.

Again, this is mostly a game philosophy thing. If roninscg and you want AAs or anything else disabled, 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.

[Earthmichael]

I notices that your initial map did not have much variance in attitude, so I tried to add a couple of large mountains.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Feel free to clean up any lack of symmetry on start location 2.  I tried to make them similar, but rivers may have made it difficult, or I could have just made a mistake.

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.

[Buster's Uncle]

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.