MP Map Request

[Fosse]

I'm looking for a map maker who is willing to design a multiplayer map for a Pitboss game I intend to set up in the next few weeks.

The thing is, I would love to be able to just play a Tectonics map for a 10-18 player game, but with that many players I just know the script will stick some poor sap on a polar island with room for three cities and no chance of contact until Optics.... not a fun setup for MP, and especially at the rate of 1 turn per day.

The solution I thought of was to have somebody generate maps until an interesting one came up, and then tweak start positions so that none of them are awful. Then I got to thinking about what I would do to make such a map (but since I am going to be a player in this game I cannot do it, of course), and thought I could throw my ideas to the community here and see if I got any takers.

What would be a very interesting map for MP, I think:

-Realistic terrain. No fantasy maps, or maze worlds, or symmetrical, balanced continents. The map should feel like a real world.

-No terrible starts. This sould not mean balanced starts, with equal resource access and the same terrain for all... life isn't fair after all. But nobody should be totally isolated pre-optics, and nobody's starts should be bad enough to inspire strategy thread posts. 80% of the start positions on most generated maps fit the bill, but with a lot of players in the game those 20% are going to be human players, and that's no good. Thus, no terrible starts.

-Interesting features. I would love a MP game with mountain ranges and other natural features that make neat borders between civs.... with cool land and naval choke points, "English Channels" and "Gibralters," "Suez Canals" and "Middle East oil fields." I find features like this really enhance games when they wind up happening in random maps for SP.

-The chance for interesting trade situations. Okay, so there is never going to be a game where only one civ has access to cows. But I've seen maps where there is only one place on the world where you can get, say, spices. And that lays sort of in the middle of three different civs... And that has potential for neat situations like price fixing or wars for monopolies.

-Anything else that's cool. There are lots of creative civvers here... whatever you think would make a cool MP game I'm sure would be awesome.

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Anybody interested in something like this? If anyone else wants to try out a game like that, I'd be willing to make the map. I just can't do it for a game that I'm in, of course.

Thanks all,
Fosse

[MMC]

Have you tried SmartMap? You can generate some spectacular features like decent chokepoints and strategic terrain just by tweaking the settings.

I admit the starting positions aren't great, but in my last game against 10 Noble-level AI players, I was first in Culture, and second overall, with just 5 cities. I actually spent something like 5 turns looking for s decent place to put my first city. I eventually found a place that had 4 different food/health resources and at least two luxury resources. It also turned out later on to be a cultural chokepoint, giving me the ability to stifle America's growth, as well as giving me plenty of land to the south, although mostly tundra, since I started literally on the south pole, and had to move north to find a decent city site.
Eventually (ie after only 4 cities) I had every type of resource (except ivory it seems) within my borders, or just one cultural expansion away (thank goodness for Great Artists). Whilst I didn't hold a monopoly on anything, I always had something another civ didn't.
TBH, the hardest resource to get was Iron, and that was a settler race, not just for the Iron itself, but because the city that claimed it would turn out to be another chokepoint from the outset, as well as becoming a canal city that connected the nothern sea to the southern sea.
I think my biggest problem that game was simply the fact that I didn't build enough wonders (for the points rather than anything else), even though my second city was sitting next to both Marble and Stone (which were next to each other).

If you want to see my save and perhaps borrow the map (to use or to modify), I'll upload it here. If you do use it, I suggest you don't modify the starting locations as I found it quite refreshing (and more realistic) without starting within 1 or 2 tiles of an ideal starting location.