The quest for the Perfect Map

We are on a quest for a map that does not encourage continental team-play; that is, the natural tendency for players on the same land mass to work together against the other land masses. Even without Permanent Alliances, this seems to happen with regularity.

There's also a desire among some players to make sure naval activity is present. I concur with this (since I need to build navies more), and I definitely like the income benefits of coastlines (particularly with Financial civs, which I am very fond of nowadays).

While reading various map guides I came across an interesting statement:

Remember that a continent is not necessarily one single land mass (think Oceania).

So I played around with the map generator and came up with some interesting designs. All images are at their original res so you can see the detail, and crudely edited to keep the globe map in view; the sources were 16x9. All of these are settings on Hemispheres.




Tiny islands, 6 snaky continents, medium sea level. Sea contact from the beginning. Tons of coastline. Minimal ice.








Another run at these settings.






Islands, 6 normal continents, medium sea level. No sea contact (or combat!) until Astronomy, more land.







Tiny islands, 6 normal continents, low sea level. More land, oceanic separation.





Same settings, different map.






Tiny islands, 6 snaky continents, high sea level. Some beginning sea contact, but not as complete as at Medium sea level.

I think the first settings (tiny islands, 6 snaky continents, medium sea level) would make for a cool experimental map. Moreover, I think it'd be fun to pick our civs. I personally would suggest everyone take a Financial civ because of all the coastline; I certainly would.

I'm Doing It Wrong

However I'm doing it, I appear to be doing it wrong. Sometimes, it's the luck of the draw: in one of our recent out-of-band games (the Hives are going unfed while one of our participants completes his studies for the semester), I started sandwiched between an aggressive AI and a player with twice my starting area and no AIs to worry about.

I didn't really have much of a chance.

That said, I generally seem to expand the slowest of all the players in our group, and my score ends up being the lowest. And I have not yet figured out why. No matter what kind of build order I use or how I prioritize my settlers, I seem to lose out.

The one difference that I am trying (and which others have repeated) is overlapping. I HATE overlapping my cities and their fat crosses. But in the end, it's only toward the end of the game that full utilization can be acheived anyway. Moreover, in Civ 4, cities rarely get to that size. Even more importantly, unlike Civ 3, a city doesn't even have to come close to full land utilization to be productive and powerful. It may be that this is the last vestige of my Civ 3 habits I have to abandon to be competitive.

Or maybe I just suck :P

Moar Food: Uncapitulation

I think we all learned a valuable lesson last night about vassalage and capitulation when it comes to human players. Against the AI, I don't think most players have much experience submitting to vassalage, but in multiplayer, at least with this group, it's come up more than once.

At any rate, I was getting beat on pretty seriously by my evil Wonderland neighbors to the north, who decided on an opportunistic attack after Mikelandia pounced on some of my undefended coastal cities. The Wonderlandians took three of my cities, including my capital, then held out capitulation in exchange for giving my capital back. After exploring my options, I became resigned to this fate -- the alternative was pretty much guaranteed obliteration.

After about 10 turns, though, I wanted to see what the conditions were for breaking my vassal status. Turns out, I could break free if my population and land mass was at least 50% of my master's. Given that I had my old capital back, and I had planted a city or two in some newly denuded area, this was no sweat.

I was just as surprised as anyone that I could just choose to declare freedom -- again, because this is the first time I've ever agreed to become a vassal, so I was pretty unfamiliar with the terms.

Immediately after declaring my independence, I signed up defensive pacts with Wonderland's more powerful rivals. I'm still dead last in tech, score, and military power, but I'm at least back on my feet again. I'm nearly certain to spend the rest of the game acting as little more than a sideshow spoiler for the real competitors.

The moral of the story: if you're going to offer capitulation to a human foe, you had better be sure he's significantly smaller than you from the start, and has little chance to regain territory in any reasonable time frame. Otherwise, it's not that much better than a peace treaty.

Moar Food for the Hives: Mushroom Balance

When I fell down the rabbit hole, I had no idea that my tears would spawn a flourishing society - held together by the insatiable need for narcotics; specifically shrooms. Early in the development and planting stage of the queen’s garden, some drunken jungle folks with funny hats, and whose men wore dresses, soiled every tree in our great forest. We found it necessary to protect our borders from more raids by building forts to stop any more aggressive acts from those speech slurring baboons. As strong as our efforts were, we were not able to fortify quickly enough and our workers (perhaps persuaded by alcohol) left there projects. We haven't seen them or the escort that was with them since. It wasn't until an all out raid which landed by boat on our central coast did we understand the magnitude of our situation. Our trumpeters sounded their horns and all the woodland creatures that were able to wield a weapon answered the call and drove the bottle tippers back into the sea. Shortly thereafter their leader, "Armand" claimed that there was a miss understanding and that we looked like some "guys"... Being avid shroom addicts and not really sure of reality most of the time, we felt inclined to accept their apologies and begin a solid foundation for trade and commerce.

Since peace has come, many voices tell me that we should look to the seas and search for glory. We should have a message any day from the brave explores that search in the name of Wonderland!

Moar Food for the Hives

Our new game, Moar Food for the Hives, has gotten underway. Some critical technical lessons were learned with Seeds of Luv:

- Large sized worlds become progressively slower to play as the game goes on
- Large sized worlds are more prone to network errors
- Hamachi, the peer-to-peer VPN service, is the best way to play Civ with friends online

With all this in mind, we're playing a 6 player, 1 AI standard game with the Hemispheres configuration for the map: 3 continents of varied sizes, plus a good smattering of islands. Based on this excellent post at Civ Fanatics, this appears to be the kind of map we want to play. No more getting stuck with Ice and Desert in the south, etc.

I did like having more AIs to beat up on in the large world; but with six players in this new Hive, I'd think the Food should be ample.

Seeds of Luv: Post-mortem

It has been noted by Milo that MAD doesn't work in Civ. He may be right. The Caliphate, invaded for no reason other than religious hatred, set itself on a fateful course after defeating the Crusader's invading army. Offered a cease-fire, we declined in the interests of making as many nukes as possible and delivering them by ICBM to the Crusader's homeland.

The problem with this was that, while Mike was attempting to recover from the stark violence visited upon his lands, the Portugese AI got into the mix again, invaded Mike, took a city, dropped some nukes... it wasn't pretty. Sure, we got our thermonuclear revenge - and oh, it was sweet, to be sure - but the AI in BTS is more opportunistic than ever before, and if it sees a chance (like a capital city with two units in it - Mike had stripped his rear areas clean to defeat the Crusader army) it will take it.

If not for Joao II getting all jiggy with some tac nukes, we might have stood a chance. But it was not to be.

Permanent Alliances certainly seem to make things a foregone conclusion most of the time. It's easy to either bully your neighbor into submission or, as I tend to do, be a good neighbor and see value in a combined future. Our new game, in which Food is being provided for the Hives, does not have PAs enabled. So one of us is going to have to win, or at the very least, be the last one standing.

I wonder if we'll ever actually have a space race in multiplayer. We may simply be too bloodthirsty.

Apostolic War

I just wanted to share my crowning achievement of the plague-like spread J'eebuzism (click for a readable version).

We eagerly await the First Crusade in the lands of ForMike-a.