EpikBattel - Started

[Zeldor]

llamabeast:

I don't care about nearby nations, I care about getting 3 or 6 capitol neighbours. Or getting wasteland only or bad terrains. Or having 4 or 5 nations near me, while others have for example 2. And even with diplomacy the one with better starting position has diplomacy options too and will use them.

I just want to play on a fair map. I love dominions, but 95% maps are good only on SP, not MP. Twan made a great map like WoG, but it is the only one that is really good and supports MP games [except for really small maps].

[Torin]

im ok with WoG. or a Wraparaound instead of an unbalanced map. unbalanced=boring.

[llamabeast]

95% maps are good only on SP, not MP

Well, I guess that's obviously subjective. I don't think it's generally considered much of a problem, and it's not like there hasn't been many MP games going on. There are of course a few notably unbalanced maps (e.g. unmodified Parganos), which I agree should be avoided. But such problems are easily corrected - e.g. if manually placing start positions (which I recommend), you should simply choose start positions with similar numbers of neighbours. And putting one player in the middle of a load of wasteland or something would be silly, so you wouldn't do it. With Parganos I just altered a lot of the terrain so it is much fairer.

I have to agree that letting Dominions do the capital placement and using random maps both tend to lead to quite unfair positions, and aren't as good an idea.

I don't care about nearby nations, I care about getting 3 or 6 capitol neighbours. Or getting wasteland only or bad terrains. Or having 4 or 5 nations near me, while others have for example 2.

Actually you've just pretty much listed the problems which can be easily fixed by manual capital placement.

[Zeldor]

llamabeast:

It really narrows map choices. I hope Twan makes a smaller map I will take a look at new Parganos, but Crafle isn't wraparound and that alone makes it unbalanced [there is no way to have balance even with manualy placing capitols]. And with a team play [I know that is not dominions goal, but it is fun] it is even harder. You need 2 players as one place but both need enough space to expand.

P.S. Parganos would be too small for that game...

[DrPraetorious]

How many teams?

If it's six pairs and-no-water, you could use the map from allegiances 2, which is the best balance we could get without wrap-around.

Each pair of teams is arranged as spokes on a wheel, and the distances among teams and territory easily available to each team are very close to equal. But again, it has no water.

[FrozenFalcon]

We have now 12 players. Now, Zeldor seems to absolutely want to play WoG. Llamabeast, have you played the map, and can you absolutely say that it really takes months to finish, or is your estimation based on purely the province count? Because WoG does have that Victory Province.

I think that even "unbalanced" map works, there's always luck included in the game, like Llamabeast said, this is not chess. And because being in a good position gives you advantage, it also gives you diplomatical disadvantage if players find this out, because advantage makes threat and being threatening can be disadvantage.

Zeldor, if we choose Cradle of Dominion, can you play it, or are you absolutely against it? We have 12 players now, so when we get the map decided we can set a deadline for Pretenders and start playing. Of course, we need to set teams.

[llamabeast]

Nope, I haven't played the map, and the estimated time is just from map size. I guess the VP might help. It's very hard to judge how it might work out actually.

Dr P's suggestion does sound like a good third option to me. I believe they put a good deal of thought into it.

There is of course also always the possibility of making it two games - one for those who want WoG, one for those who would like a smaller map.

Just so everyone knows by the way, this degree of indecision doesn't normally happen when organising MP games. This one's been unusual because the original organiser disappeared and it's sort of been organised by committee. Generally the organiser just acts as a benevolent dictator.

[MartialDoctor]

Hmmmm, after looking through the maps, my vote is for Cradle of Dominions or a similar sized one. Dr. P's suggestion sounds good except don't we have a couple of water nations?

World of Geometry is far too large, with 337 provinces, for 12 people.

[DrPraetorious]

If you guys want to make sure that the game finishes in a reasonable amount of time, use Victory Point accumulation. First player to reach threshold - his team wins (even if he is eliminated.)

Arrange six pairs of start locations like spokes on a wheel on any old random map. With one water team, ~1/6 of the area should be water (which is about 1/10 of the provinces so the water players have to have some presence on land if they wish to compete.)

Place 6 victory points on the map, one in between each spoke. You might want to put some other bonuses in those province as well.

Someone will certainly have accumulated 7 VP by year 4, 10 VP by year 5, or 15 VP by year 6 - and that's an upper limit, it could easily end much sooner.

Getting the water right is actually the hardest part of such a map - but if you tell me how many provinces you want I can post an example.

[FrozenFalcon]

How does victory points actually work? You get one from a VP province each month and a certain limit is set?

Another question: WoG has four "Gateways" that supposedly lead to the isle. How do they work? Is there some sort of teleportation on game mechanics of is the Gateway part just some lore stuff and you cannot really go through gateways?

But since we have gathered 12 players, and we have 2 water nations, just for WoG, I want to try it.

Our team experiences are near similar, so I'll randomize the rest (Zeldor and HJFudge gaining a minor advantage when choosing teams but let's just not care about that).

Llamabeast is probably right that listening to everyone's opinion takes time, so I'll declare myself a dictator and make the rest of the decisions.

Teams:

HJFudge and Zeldor
FrozenFalcon and Torin
DonCorazon and Niarg
Bananadine and Gregstorm
otthegreat and MartialDoctor
BigandScary and Networkingguru

Since there's new information (the teams and map decided) everyone absolutely against these decisions can leave now. We cannot make everyone happy. The teams (except for the first one) are completely random.

Then, I need to decide on Pretender deadline (is 3 days ok?) and then Llamabeast can host the server.

To make decisions about victory points I need to know the answers for my questions asked in this post.