family vs family, the rematch

[Alneyan]

What sort of manual placement would you like? The two teams starting near each other, several provinces away from the other side? The four capitals making a sort of square? (X provinces between all four capitals)

I can also keep the .map file a secret, so you wouldn't know where the enemy capitals are located, though you could expect them to be at the other end of the map. But with a warparound map, they could come from any direction, so you would still have to watch out for the other team.

[Zooko]

Hm. A wrap-around map is a torus. I.e., a donut. I'm picturing a donut in my head and trying to think of a fair way to place two teams of two. One way is to put them all in a row, i.e. all four capitols lie in a single line which is either horizontal or vertical. The order wouldn't matter as long as all four were in the same line.

The other would be, as you say, a square with a capitol at each corner. Again, which capitol was at which corner wouldn't make any difference.

Is that right?

[Zooko]

P.S. In both of these cases, the order doesn't matter but the spacing does! The line is fair as long as every capitol is equidistant from its two neighbors. The square is fair as long as the distance from each capitol to each of its two neighbors is equal to half of the length of the world.

Unless I'm confused.

[Alneyan]

Now that I have checked Chandrea, it appears that doing a balanced manual placement would be nigh impossible: there is one main island and a few isles, so everyone would probably have to start on the main island. Do you have any idea about how to put the players with this sort of map?

The square is probably the best (a line could be a problem, as you could only reach two capitals, and not the three of them), though I do not see how to make it work on Chandrea (it works well on a map like Inland though, but Inland has 150 provinces). Perhaps I could remove some of the provinces of Inland... Hmm.

[Zooko]

If it were in a line and partners were not adjacent to one another, then each person would be adjacent to his enemies and not to his partner, which would be fine.

If partners *were* adjacent to each other, then each person would be adjacent to his partner and to one of his enemies. That would be interesting, too.

Maybe some of us will play water nations? :-)

--Z

[The_Tauren13]

Looks like a cool map.

So, I was thinking that for choosing nations, we could have one team randomly get the first pick, and then the next team picks both of theirs, and then finally the first team picks again. I think that would be quite fair no matter who gets the first pick.

[Alneyan]

Hmm, a row might work out on that map, but I think everyone would have to start on the main island for it to work, so you would start very close to the other team. Then again, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

If nation waters are used (one per team I gather?), it may be easier to set up manual placement: the land player on the mainland, the water player in the sea, and half the land/sea away from the other team.

[The_Tauren13]

Jotunheim

[Zooko]

Which Zen's balance mods are we using, again? I just looked at his site:

http://www.techno-mage.com/~zen

and it looks like the current ones are:

Pretender Gods 2.0
Spells 1.8
Scales 1.2

[The_Tauren13]

Well??? Are we going to actually play this game or just talk about it?