Small version for .44. The only significant change still to come is that I may want to make all of the army blobs a big bigger - once I get the coordinates done and play with them I'll have a better sense of whether or not they will work as-is.
iancanton wrote:as a matter of good form, can u put a gp in the title and something about the start positions in the first post? putting n3 on babylon to mark the position of the fixed starting neutral on each future update will also be helpful for anyone who hasn't been following this thread closely.
First post amended. I was putting the neutral and start info on past versions, but once the gameplay seemed to finally check out I was posting clean versions for the graphics people.
In adding info to the first post it occurred to me that I crunched the numbers wrong and as the map currently stands there will be 15 territories per player in 1v1 games... this is because the third starting postion goes back into the mix, leaving 29 territories to be split between Player 1, Player 2, and Mr. Neutral. 39 Ć· 3 = 13 + 2 = 15. This is easily fixed by adding another pre-set neutral to the code, and another preset neutral doesn't effect any other game type since 43 isn't divisible by anything anyway.
Since we were going to start every game type with a neutral, this just allows us to put it in what we consider to be the least offensive place on the map... I was thinking Nagar, Tuttul, or Harran, since that region is likely to fall later than most anyway. It reduces the odds that somebody will have to slog through a neutral early to earn a bonus.
Another option would be to restore the 6th city in Karkemish (or elsewhere in Subartu) and make it the neutral. We could make the bonuses +2 for four cities and +4 for 6, and it would restore the balance of 3 cities in each of the large central regions. Since two are starting neutral it would remain impossible for somebody to pick up all four to begin 2 or 3 player games.