Conquer Club

i just quickly change the style of territ name.
With a black bold, it becomes more readable.

One thing you may need to plan for are being able to see 3 888's, or maybe even more. I don't know how they will stand out against the pitch black background.

The colours will not for some of the CB guys. But a thought for you to consider, with looking at the shape of Paris above, it looks almost like a tunnel so maybe the shape can reflect that some more and some detailing onto the black would make it easier to see. Can you see what the river blue will look like when placed onto the river in the legend.

nolefan5311 wrote:One thing you may need to plan for are being able to see 3 888's, or maybe even more. I don't know how they will stand out against the pitch black background.

currently, we see a letter and two numbers. I guess three numbers will take the same place.

koontz1973 wrote:The colours will not for some of the CB guys. But a thought for you to consider, with looking at the shape of Paris above, it looks almost like a tunnel so maybe the shape can reflect that some more and some detailing onto the black would make it easier to see. Can you see what the river blue will look like when placed onto the river in the legend.

Not sure i understand the first part. You say you see a sort of tunnel into the black shape of Paris ? and so, suggest we go in this direction and modify the shape to more 'tunnel' like ? it's more a side effect, and not really our objective.
And i clearly not understand the stuff about the river into the legend...

Sorry for not being clear with you.

Paris (main map) looks almost like a tunnel as it is, so rounding out the sides and top, and flatten out the bottom so it looks like a tunnel might be a nice way to bring the tunnel into the map itself.
As for the legend, on the right, you have the river running through the black, it might be nice to see the same colour as the river in the map brought over to the legend (map instructions).

You are right that with the letter, you already have the 3 digits on the map. The centering of the numbers is done in the middle of the first two numbers (88 or r8). So if you have that centered, it will look nice, but have the numbers centered to the right as you now have, most games will have this odd look of the numbers being to the left of each box. Centre the numbers using the first two digits and the see how far the third one comes into the background.

change all name to a bold black
center the army number

I put the river in the background skyline in blue, but it's weird, it seems not the same blue as in the playground, even with the same hexa code



About the idea of morphing the Paris shape to a tunnel exit shape, we're not agree.
Ok, it's an underground network, and an tunnel exit is in that theme. But as each rail maps, which have different background, depending of their country, we prefer keep Paris shape. Lets try to have different maps and maps background. If someone will make later London subway, he could use London shape, same for Washington DC, Berlin or any other underground network, and not a such common shape.

Remove the blue from the river, it looks awful, but hanks for trying it though.
Understand about the shape and you can keep it as is.
With the playing area, is there any way you can break up the black blob? Not asking for much but can you see if there is any way you can try to make it more interesting.

koontz1973 wrote:The colours will not for some of the CB guys....

Yes that why (most) Rail maps have codes for each line, so that CB players don't have issues with the colours.
Probably too cramped for that here, but you might like to consider it somehow.

Me like this one a lot. Please finish this one of.

Any update to this on the horizon?

We still search a solution for add the line number to the playground, for color blind people (i didn't understand, the first time, that CB means color blind) without fail into an indigestible "gloubi-boulga".

My first idea was adding a small number under each color square of each station

I think your best bet might be to go the way of the rail series. The stations that only have the one colour are easy and can stay as they are. But the main stations that have more than one line, give each line its own territ within the station and have each one able to attack each other. This will increase your territ count by a lot though.

Any word on update. Any update would be fine for now. Please update ASAP.

koontz.

Here some ways



We add the line number into the station square.
Porte Maillot (pMA), a single station, and Etoile (ETO) a triple station.
At Elysée (ELY), we enlarge the white square instead of the color square, so the name is on the white, so more readability (even with a 1* line number)
My own opinion is i prefer the ELY method

On the other hand, with this method, we change the font size from 11px to 10px. And i think some stations will be deleted, for having more place, especially in right side of Paris : MIR & BRS, maybe also CAD


We don't really want create another Rail-like map, but something a bit more different.

[Stickied]

Qyu, good work. Lets leave this one up to the game play mods to guide you.

Will send you up in a couple of days. Just long enough for them to give you the once over.

koontz

Here is your first of what will be many.

Good luck in the main foundry.

koontz

Great Great Great !!!

koontz1973 wrote:
Here is your first of what will be many.

Good luck in the main foundry.

koontz

So

First, an update, with 2 less stations (MIR & BRS), and having more place once we'll add the line number under the station name




If i'm right, it's time now for the gameplay.


The idea is :
. Start :
Each Porte (the surround territories, prefixed by a lower-case P) are starting position, shared between players. There are 24 Portes, so ideal for every number of players (except 7 : 7x3 + 3 neutrals)
Each Gare, railstation (the territories prefixed by a lower-case G : gLZ, gND, gCH, gLY & gMB) started with 6 neutrals.
All other territories start with 2 neutrals.

. Bonus
Metro line offer a bonus of 7 or 6 for the entire line, or 4 or 3 for at least half of the line (doesn't matter the owned territs are contiguous or not)
Portes offers partials bonus : 3 for 7, 5 for 11, 7 for 15, 9 for 19 & 15 for all. It means in 2 or 3 playes, the players also started with respectively a 5 or 3 bonus

. Objective
There is also a winning objective. Holding the 5 railstations for one turn give the victory.

Qyu wrote:Original work base the official RATP map of Paris network subway & equivalent.

do u have permission from the ratp to use the station names on a map of the paris métro, or is the ratp map free for us to use?

Qyu wrote:We colored each station, depending of which line go through them.

there are 14 lines, so the colours of some look very similar to those of others. the little coloured boxes under each station name which show the line numbers are an excellent addition to make the map playable for the colour-blind. my favourite is the method used for the ELY station, with a white background for the station name.

remove the +3 for 7 portes bonus because player 1 will always have the advantage of starting with this bonus in 2-player and 3-player games.

the hold half line bonus is ambiguous. change it to, for example, hold 9 stations on same line.

i like the rail station bonus a lot because it gives an incentive to cross the river and hold the middle instead of constantly targetting the periphery. try increasing the bonus values for holding rail stations.

ian.

iancanton wrote:

Qyu wrote:Original work base the official RATP map of Paris network subway & equivalent.

do u have permission from the ratp to use the station names on a map of the paris métro, or is the ratp map free for us to use?

excellent question, and actually, RATP released all the data the last july 31st this year : map shape, colors, logos, etc... (even the air quality of each station). The goal is to let third party devellopers to create tool for customers of Paris underground. Only the schedule is not free to use.
Here, we use the same colors, but not the shapes or the logo.

iancanton wrote:

Qyu wrote:We colored each station, depending of which line go through them.

there are 14 lines, so the colours of some look very similar to those of others. the little coloured boxes under each station name which show the line numbers are an excellent addition to make the map playable for the colour-blind. my favourite is the method used for the ELY station, with a white background for the station name.

Excellent, it's also our prefered

iancanton wrote:remove the +3 for 7 portes bonus because player 1 will always have the advantage of starting with this bonus in 2-player and 3-player games.

the hold half line bonus is ambiguous. change it to, for example, hold 9 stations on same line.

i like the rail station bonus a lot because it gives an incentive to cross the river and hold the middle instead of constantly targetting the periphery. try increasing the bonus values for holding rail stations.

For the +3 for 7 portes, ok. But with 2 players, we will also have the same problem for 11 portes. There are 24 portes, so 12 for each. We may put the first bonus at 13 : +5, and keep the next bonuses.

About the hold half line, the problem is each line doesn't have the same amount of stations :
line 9 : 14
line 6, 7 : 13
line 1, 2, 4, 12 : 12
line 3, 10 : 11
line 8, 13 : 10
line 5 : 9
line 14 : 7
line 11 : 6
So, the threshold should be different for each group : 7 for the first, 5 for the second.


For the Rail station bonus, once we thought about having them as an objective, we also thought the holding bonus wasn't more apposite. It's still in the picture, as we prefer finish the gameplay before rethink the legend presentation. At least, we may have an autodeploy bonus on them.

Qyu wrote:

iancanton wrote:do u have permission from the ratp to use the station names on a map of the paris métro, or is the ratp map free for us to use?

excellent question, and actually, RATP released all the data the last july 31st this year : map shape, colors, logos, etc... (even the air quality of each station). The goal is to let third party devellopers to create tool for customers of Paris underground.

that is very good news!

Qyu wrote:For the +3 for 7 portes, ok. But with 2 players, we will also have the same problem for 11 portes. There are 24 portes, so 12 for each. We may put the first bonus at 13 : +5, and keep the next bonuses.

that is a logical move.

Qyu wrote:About the hold half line, the problem is each line doesn't have the same amount of stations :
line 9 : 14
line 6, 7 : 13
line 1, 2, 4, 12 : 12
line 3, 10 : 11
line 8, 13 : 10
line 5 : 9
line 14 : 7
line 11 : 6
So, the threshold should be different for each group : 7 for the first, 5 for the second.

a different threshold for each group is good. holding a complete line is much more than twice as difficult than holding a half-line, therefore the bonus for a complete line ought to more than twice the bonus for a half-line: does 3 times sound suitable?

Qyu wrote:For the Rail station bonus, once we thought about having them as an objective, we also thought the holding bonus wasn't more apposite. It's still in the picture, as we prefer finish the gameplay before rethink the legend presentation. At least, we may have an autodeploy bonus on them.

auto-deploy is nice. reduce the neutrals too, perhaps to 3 starting neutral troops each.

at the moment, it's possible that many games will have players attacking round the periphery only (because they like to attack other players and not attack neutrals), ignoring the city centre. all of the changes above will help to bring some play into the city centre.

ian.

We imagine another path for the territ

Look at CCD territ

We estimate this more readable, and more clean. Also, for the few stations with only one line, we can put the color square on the same line than the name, and so, save some place.

Agree for reduce the starting amount of army for Rail Stations to 3. In fact, we also thought about reduce the starting amount for single line stations to only one : EIF, ALM, AN, SOR, ND, VGR, FXF, CAD, RLN & CHE

About the bonus, we used the Map Bonus Calculator and it gives us bigger bonus than we thought :
line 6 : 16
line 9 : 15
line 1,7,8 : 14
line 2,4 : 13
line 12 : 12
line 3,10 : 11
line 5 : 10
line 13,14 : 9
line 11 : 8
we have 2 groups :
13 and above : 1,2,4,6,7,8,9, for a bonus of 14, and 5 territs for an half bonus of 5. Each of those line have between 10 and 14 territs, so, that mean two players may hold an half bonus at the same time
12 and lower : 3,5,10,11,12,13,14, for a bonus of 11, and 4 territs for an half bonus of 4. Same comment as above : two players may hold an half bonus at the same time for most of them, except for the line 12 where we could have 3 players for the half (unless we delete VGR station)

I like the idea of the CCD territ more than the way you have MDL. But two things, that white is very bright so a softer grey may look nicer. Also, the line number in black on the dark green is hard to read. Find a lighter colour for the darker line numbers maybe.

I was looking at this map and what i first came up with is that the black, while i understand for contrast on the rail lines, and draws the eye but also aesthetically looks reeaally jagged to the nice background. Unfortunately the only suggestion that i can come up with is perhaps using a transition (maybe a darker shade of what you have in the background) and pop the rail line tones a few shades darker as well. But if it doesn't work thats ok. The jagged black just really disturbs me right now.