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Map layout unbalanced?!


BeTe
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Northern Island is definitely heavily imbalanced in favor of the person who starts on the other side of it. There's a small number of people who rack up cheap wins (and rating points) in multiplayer games by using it. FWIW, it's not impossible to win from the "bad" position in Northern Island. I've done it before. But it's pretty hard and requires creative planning (or just a much worse player as your opponent).

But I don't really see it as much of a problem to be solved. Just don't join games with an opponent who insists on using it as the map.

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screenshot0072.thumb.png.aa2f0b03fb53256b9214c602aa785473.png

that's the berry patch I'm talking about. That makes 6*200 = 1200 food, + 6 sheep = 1800 food that's explicitly distributed by my algorithm. On the other end, you had 1800 food from animals so the result is equal.

The other 400 food berry trees are what I call straggler berries. They are not taken into account by my food generation. When they are isolated, they are quite irrelevant from my experience, as it often is better to just transition into fields earlier instead of taking them. If they are near another resources, that could lead to some small imbalance.

That is the case here, one tree is close to his hunt, so he can have a good efficient 1 for 2 farmstead. I would argue that makes his map a bit better overall. Not really game deciding but straggler berries could take a change, once I go back to working on that (january or february maybe).

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  On 17/11/2022 at 9:35 PM, BeTe said:

Long-term solution is not "don't play maps x,y,z..." and install 3rd party mod. ;) I just hope we don't lose new players b/c of that.

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Well, arguably it's my responsibility since I'm knowledgeable in that area, not to mention other devs agreed balanced with balanced map changes for when I complete my patch. The problem is, well, development is slow, be it for me or WFG team so the long term is not really a choice here :D

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  On 17/11/2022 at 9:35 PM, BeTe said:

@thephilosopher Long-term solution is not "don't play maps x,y,z..." and install 3rd party mod. ;) I just hope we don't lose new players b/c of that.

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That's fair enough, though ultimately I don't mind having a few imbalanced maps floating around. We have so many good maps available that it shouldn't be too big a deal. One piece of advice I always give new players is to never join a game on a map they haven't already practiced on at least a couple of times. Of course that goes for imbalanced maps like Northern Island. But it also goes for other maps where players can use "fair" terrain to their advantage - Acropolis Bay is a really good example here. It's a totally "fair" map, but there's at least one Acropolis Bay specialist regularly in the multiplayer lobby who can beat almost anyone who's never played the map before.

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I played with norther Island. Some Bot duels and me against a bot.  It does not seem that unbalanced to me. Main issue being in the mountains is placing your buildings. Sure on fast/normal 1x gaming speed this can be disastrous.  I play in low speed, so it was not affecting me that much, nor the bots.

Much more unbalanced is the scenario "Battle for the tiber" when you are playing Rome, starting with zero units, always being in the middle of the fight. This is why I made some modified maps. Some of them presented here:

 

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