New Horizons - New Diplogame Set-Up Thread

[St Jon]

Sorry, no posts for a while but very busy at work.

I vote Europe as a change.

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As an aside. Heraclitus, I just bought Civ Col and I reckon it's brilliant! Same spirit as the original but much better mechanics and a lot tougher to beat the King - in fact I haven't done it yet at any decent difficulty level.

If you fancy a 1v1 some time I'd love to try. Cannot be PitBoss as my only other PC is a crappy old laptop which can only just run CivIV and could never be trusted as a server.

[OzzyKP]

Come back Dubhghlas! I want to get this game started before Civ5 comes out!

[Heraclitus]

Don't worry fall is still a long way off. I think we should aim for starting sometime early next month.

[OzzyKP]

Ok, I'm going to try and set up my own server tonight. Please keep an eye on this thread (or look for me on AIM) so we can test. I'm not sure what happened to Dub.

[Russia (DoC)]

whass happnin?

[Dubhghlas]

dunno. It appears that trying a RFC game won't work, my computer had server issues, which I wasn't able to solve, and I think Ozzy got busy.

[OzzyKP]

Ah, I thought we were still going to work on figuring out your server issues. Ok, I'm gonna work on setting up my own server. The desktop I lugged home from the office really isn't suitable for this. I just set everything up again a few minutes ago and trying to start BTS took several minutes and caused the computer to restart for some reason. I think it just can't handle it.

So I'm gonna try it on my laptop. Not ideal, but I don't know what other choice we have. Anyone around tonight to test stuff out?

[OzzyKP]

So I believe this is the final roster for the game:
OzzyKP
Dubhghlas
CyberShy/Robert Plomp
St Jon
deity
LzPrst
Heraclitus
mzprox

And since RFC isn't going to work we are going to do a Europe map game. I found a decent Europe map of the right size for our game. The one problem with it, or any Europe game is there is a large amount of empty space between Berlin and Moscow which strengthens both these civs, especially Russia.

So we have some options for fixing this:
1. Really make Russian land crappy. Put in loads of tundra and take out most of the resources, etc.
2. Give Germany a start in Prussia or even further east of that in order to better balance things.
3. Create a mod that has Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, etc civs in it and make sure someone picks a civ occupying this eastern Europe area.
4. Drastically trim the map so that most of Russia (and Turkey, middle east, black sea) is cut off.
5. Some combination of all the above options.

Assuming we figure out the Russia situation we will need to pick from the following civs:

England
France
Spain
Germany
Rome/Italy
Russia
Ottomans
Dutch or Vikings or Greece or Arabs or Poland/Ukraine/Lithuania

[St Jon]

Always a downer with Europe.

As the rest of the map fills quite quickly in Europe why not turn on 'Raging Hordes' and flood the Russian steppes with barbs? Early game that should slow them down and also force Germany to look east.

Downside, of course, is that we could have a dead Russia if they cop a few axemen hordes very early!

[Robert]

I'm sorry but I'm not in this anymore (see post #118)

[Heraclitus]

I think having a few easter civs should balance this.

Perhaps have the Mongols start East of the Russians and Polish, Hungarian start west of them?

[OzzyKP]

Well we've only got 8 civs. So we couldn't do Mongols AND Polish/Hungarians.

First I'm going to trim the map. I think it needs to happen regardless of what else we do to nerf Russia, it just has too much land in that direction. Plus we don't need all of Iraq on the map.

[OzzyKP]

I'm sorry but I'm not in this anymore (see post #118)

Ok, no worries. We've got Toni on deck!

[OzzyKP]

Ok, here is the map:


I think I'm going to do most of the options I suggested. I am going to cut down the map where indicated by the black lines. That'll keep it better focused on Europe.

If we decide not to go with the Vikings we can cut off some of the north too. I numbered the civs I think are pretty much mandatory to have in this game. I think also that for geopolitical and balance reasons that we shouldn't have Portugal, the Netherlands and Greece in the game. So that leaves Carthaginians (probably disrupt the feel of having this a Europe game), Vikings, and and eastern civ.

I think the most obvious choice is picking an eastern civ. I indicated the spot that Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine would start. Russia would be moved west a tile or two.

If we are going to use a mod to add in one of those eastern civs then we can use a mod to replace Rome with a modern Italy.

and.... while I didn't want to... I suppose I could be open to adding a 9th civ, just so we don't have too much empty land.

[LzPrst]

I've looked at the map a bit.
Looking at natural expansion I assumed the following easy to grab territories for most nations.





Spain will dominate north Africa without much challenge.
Germany will dominate Scandinavia (ocean between England and Scand)
France seems to have the least land... (France should be quite big)

Certain nations will be more challenging to play than others.
England, Spain, Russia, Ottoman are corner civs with fairly easy to defend borders.
Germany, France and partly Italy have challengers on many sides.

I would like to see a Scandinavian (Viking) civ to limit German expansion north, but that would result in yet another border for Germany who already has the most neighbours (5!). However, Germany has a lot of land eastwards to expand into. If we want the Vikings in the game they should start on the small island between Sweden and Denmark (map should be slightly changed to create a land bridge on / off that island).
An Austro-Hungarian empire would be a great addition that would put competition for the eastern plains into the game. However, that will also be another neighbour for Germany.

The map is a bit strange. Great Britain is similarly sized (possibly bigger) in landmass relative to France while in reality, Britain (with Ireland) is merely 2/3rds the size. I believe we should reduce England in size to counterbalance the advantages of being on an island (easy defence, financial civ bonus from alot of ocean).


Suggestion 1
Put in Vikings in the north. Move Germany south and rename them to Austria? The German states weren't united until the late 1800's anyway. With Austria as the main central European player, there will be more room for France and Vikings.

Suggestion 2
Put Germany further east, rename them to Prussia, put in Austria or Vikings as another civ. Vikings will create more fronts for England and Russia. Austria will be a rival to Italy, Ottoman, Prussia and Russia.