Impossible to play tiny or small maps with 8 players.

[philler]

Why did they "fix" that?

I used to play PTW with a friend over my LAN, and we play only tiny and small maps, because we don't like the hassle of having to manage 20+ cities.
We also like to have more comp opponents than what the standard rules allow when you play alone (i.e. 4 civs on a tiny map and 6 on a small one, iirc).

With PTW it was possible to have 8 civs on a tiny map, now with Conquests it's not possible anymore.
Whenever you want to start a game with more civs than planned, the size of your map is automatically adjusted. If you have 5 or 6 civs, the map's size will be increased from tiny to small, and if you have 7 or 8 civs, it will be increased from tiny or small to normal.

That ruins the game for us, any way to bypass that stupid rule?

Is fixing things that aren't broken a new policy at Firaxis? oO

[Fried-Psitalon]

Actually, it WAS broken before, you just didn't see it unless you played a pretty high number of MP games.

Occasionally the map generator would place two start locations directly on top of one another (same tile) which would cause all kinds of bizzare effects for 2-3 turns, then OOS and make the game pretty much unplayable after that.

The only Firaxian error on this one was not realizing there was a significant community (nearly all of the online ladder MP community) and of course informal groups of friends who did want to play with large numbers on smaller map sizes.

In a recent chat on Gamespy, however, it was revealed that they do intend to fix it so that you can play with 8 on small and tiny for MP again in a patch, though.

[philler]

Ok thanks for the info, I'll wait for them to "de-fix" it then, or whatever you would call that.

In the meantime, what can I do to generate the kind of maps my friend and I like? I've never monkeyed with the editor before, but I assume there's something I can do to generate what I want, ideally under the form of a scenario so that I don't have to repeat the operation every time we want to play a new map...

I'll have a look at that tonight...

[LordVipper]

Change the scenario properties and set the map size to small or tiny then put 8 civs in