The Map ???

[emperor]

Personally, I am not at all fond of Archipelago maps. Commerce tends to be very high while production tends to be on the low side. Thus, it's often very difficult to raise a sufficient military to go and conquer the world. Often the lucky presence of a few extra hills on one particular island will give that civ enough of a boost to favour them winning the game, since their production will be increased so much relative to their neighbours. The dependence on naval vessels to move units everywhere also becomes a bit tiresome. Financial civs are favoured even more, and the Vikings become a beast of a nation which will make for an uninteresting choice of nations (pretty much everyone as Ragnars).

All in all, Planet Generator sounds fairly good to me.

[Keygen]

It's not time for a single and final poll for the map, it is more complicated than that.

I will start a series of polls that all together will determine the hopefully few finalists.

[Zoid]

[Pinchak]

Archapelago with rocky terrain perhaps to address the production issue?

Otherwise, Planetmaker gets my vote. But as mentioned before, I think it would be best to put each and every setting to a vote.

Individual polls for each setting might be a bit much though. May just want to list the settings and options, then let people respond in the thread.

[emperor]

Otherwise, Planetmaker gets my vote. But as mentioned before, I think it would be best to put each and every setting to a vote.

Erm, from what I've seen in the past this is usually not the best option. The best option, in fact, is usually just to chat and talk things over beforehand like we're doing now, and see what settings actually need to be put up for vote (if any). Polling each and every possible thing that can be thought of just needlessly wastes time, when we could be getting started with the actual game sooner.

[Paddy]

inland sea looks good

[Fosse]

Snaky Archipelago's as generated by the World Maker seems fun to me. I've never played that sort of game.

Smartmap has settings so that there can be different continents that would have contact with each other via galleys. I wouldn't mind looking into that so there can still be different landmasses but our diplomacy wouldn't be so limited. It also is nice to have naval techs take more importance earlier on, giving yet another viable research path.

[snoopy369]

dp

[snoopy369]

The only things I care about on the map are:
1. Not that big - it should be small enough that there is some competition for land area from fairly early on. With 9 players, that would be a Large map with high or normal sea levels.

2. Not archipelago - or at least not one-civ-per-island archipelago. I definitely think that much of the interesting part of the early game in demogames are when different civs are next to each other on the map and have to figure out how to live together, or in many cases don't figure it out and fight it out. For nine teams, I'd prefer at most 3 continents (or large archipelagos).

Beyond that I don't care

[ChrisiusMaximus]

archipelago seems an excellent choice for a large game, much exploration

[emperor]

Incidentally, I think we have 11 teams now, so a Huge sized map with medium sea level (or Large sized map with low sea level) would be most appropriate.

[Paddy]

are there minimun settings needed for pc's to play on these map settings?

[emperor]

If you can play right through a single player game on a huge map then you should have no issues with it.

[Keygen]

Originally posted by Lord Parkin

Incidentally, I think we have 11 teams now, so a Huge sized map with medium sea level (or Large sized map with low sea level) would be most appropriate.

10 teams, we're still 10 teams

[snoopy369]

There seems to be some significant support for planet generator ... how do people feel about planet generator, continent: snaky natural, 1 continent, low sea level (if that's an option), large map (huge if low sea level isn't an option), normal everything else? Or two, or three continents?

We of course could have it previewed by nonplaying admins...