The LT34 settings excluding some possible map tweaks

[wieder]

I have just added these and there is not coming any more changes in addition to selecting the parameters for the world map.

-Changed tech cost from 80% to 70% allowing us to use a slightly smaller map
-Restored the original terraforming and terrain alteration options for the workers
-Catapults, cannons, artilleries and howizers are no longer capturable. This had very little effect on LT33 anyway.
-Catapult has an attack value of 5 and is now a citybuster just like any other siege unit. They will get 100% boost when attacking cities
-The siege units can't be built as veterans. This is how it was in LT33 but no change here.
-Islands map: Landmass=30, tilesperplayer=400 but still not as I would like to have it

The problem is that I'm not getting one big island for each player but 3-4 smaller ones for everyone. Does anyone have a good idea how to have bigger islands or should I use plan B and make it easier to terraform and connect the islands once someone has invented explosives? This would allow people to build bigger empires connected with rails.

Once we have this last thing decided we will do the test game (+fix issues if there are some during the test game) and launch LT34 next week.

For the test game I will need to take away the setting that's killing the unhomed units. Units without a home city will die in 10-20 turns. This should prevent people from capturing settlers from idlers and gaining too much advantage that way.

[mmm2]

Hi, you could also consider removing the capture effect from settlers.
Concerning converting ocean to swamp: this seems like a good idea, because then players within the shallow ocean can connect their islands (converting deep ocean doesn't seem to work...).

What do you think about removing the need to have 3 land tiles next to ocean tile you want to transform to be valid? I like the idea of being able to go out to the shallow ocean and make some artificial barriers to prevent boats from passing through . Since you cannot terraform deep ocean anyway, this old restriction of being next to 3 land tiles could be removed (if not much programming or resetting would be needed?).

Btw: I already predict the tactic that some players will build harbors, and then terraform the tiles around city so not accesible to battleships or other ocean units (so they can get benefit of harbor, but safety of inland city)..

[HanduMan]

So why even bother tweaking the map generator parameters when everyone can make their map exactly how they like? Is the Map Editor already included in 2.3?

Just my thoughts :rolleyes:

[wieder]

We don't have anyone to edit the map. Lots of work and I can't do it myself since I'm playing and the map should be unknown to all the players.

The settlers will remain capturable but the idler units will die in 20 turns. All unhomed units will lose hitpoint(s) until the player builds cities or home the start units.

I could add add terraforming for deep ocean but no idea about the 3 tile limit.

[HanduMan]

We don't have anyone to edit the map. Lots of work and I can't do it myself since I'm playing and the map should be unknown to all the players.

I tried to practice sarcasm but failed, sorry.

The settlers will remain capturable but the idler units will die in 20 turns. All unhomed units will lose hitpoint(s) until the player builds cities or home the start units.

Homeless units cannot be homed, so they will always die slowly and painfully. See https://gna.org/bugs/?17737

I could add add terraforming for deep ocean but no idea about the 3 tile limit.

I don't like the idea of making terraforming too easy. We sholud play with the cards we are dealt, not pulling the whole deck from our sleeves.

[mmm2]

The settlers will remain capturable but the idler units will die in 20 turns.

bad, bad idea... 20 turns is more than enough time to find idlers. you might as well enable huts too..

[edrim]

The settlers will remain capturable but the idler units will die in 20 turns.

bad, bad idea... 20 turns is more than enough time to find idlers. you might as well enable huts too..

sure, research map making in first, build triremes, then put army on it and try to find idlers, happy valentines day

[mmm2]

The settlers will remain capturable but the idler units will die in 20 turns.

bad, bad idea... 20 turns is more than enough time to find idlers. you might as well enable huts too..

sure, research map making in first, build triremes, then put army on it and try to find idlers, happy valentines day

Yes Edrim you are right. It's silly to turn first 20 turns into Easter egg hunt. And also it's nice to look at demographics to see how you are doing, but it's going to be meaningless if there are 5 or 6 players with extra island.

[HanduMan]

-Islands map: Landmass=30, tilesperplayer=400 but still not as I would like to have it

The problem is that I'm not getting one big island for each player but 3-4 smaller ones for everyone. Does anyone have a good idea how to have bigger islands or should I use plan B and make it easier to terraform and connect the islands once someone has invented explosives? This would allow people to build bigger empires connected with rails.

I played around with tilesperplayer and landmass settings and came to conclusion that the island generator always produces islands about the same size. If you decrease the tilesperplayer there will be less of those size X islands in a smaller map (which ís good IMO). If you decrease the landmass there wil be less of those size X islands but the map size is not affected. So, there will be more sea between the islands, and that increases the risk of someone being isolated on a single island fully surrounded by deep ocean. I got those a few times with landmass=30. If you increase the landmass there will be more size X islands, and when the map size stays the same, the islands are closer to each other. And that makes it easier to combine them (less ocean to terraform inbetween). It cannot be incearsed too much though since when it hits a big enough value there is no room for all the X size islands the generator would like to make, so it starts scatttering a lot of really small islands inbetween the size X's and the map gets messy. This happens around landmass=50 or so. And if it is set even bigger, like 60, it gets impossible to put every player on their private island so there will be more than one player starting on the same island/continent).

The image below shows a minimap from a game with 54 players, 400 tiles per player and landmass set to 45.

(I tweaked the minimap colours abit to highlight the starting positions better.)
The islands are really close to each other but there is still some deep ocean tiles on the map. I think there are plenty of uninhabited islands (maybe even more than enough for speed tuned game) for all to explore and settle.
I would not touch the terraforming rules, especially the deep ocean sholud be kept as it is. With these settings there is not much of it anyway.

As a conclusion, my proposal for these settings are:
- tilesperplayer=300
- landmass=44

Looks like this:

[HanduMan]

The settlers will remain capturable but the idler units will die in 20 turns.

bad, bad idea... 20 turns is more than enough time to find idlers. you might as well enable huts too..

With current setting (killunhomed=8) they will die around turn 12.

Homeless units loose killunhomed % of their full HP each turn.
100 % would be consumed in 12,5 turns if freeciv used standard mathematics.
Most likely the remaining HP value gets truncated and/or rounded during the calculations so this is not accurate but close enough.

[mmm2]

-Islands map: Landmass=30, tilesperplayer=400 but still not as I would like to have it

The problem is that I'm not getting one big island for each player but 3-4 smaller ones for everyone. Does anyone have a good idea how to have bigger islands or should I use plan B and make it easier to terraform and connect the islands once someone has invented explosives? This would allow people to build bigger empires connected with rails.

I played around with tilesperplayer and landmass settings and came to conclusion that the island generator always produces islands about the same size. If you decrease the tilesperplayer there will be less of those size X islands in a smaller map (which ís good IMO). If you decrease the landmass there wil be less of those size X islands but the map size is not affected. So, there will be more sea between the islands, and that increases the risk of someone being isolated on a single island fully surrounded by deep ocean. I got those a few times with landmass=30. If you increase the landmass there will be more size X islands, and when the map size stays the same, the islands are closer to each other. And that makes it easier to combine them (less ocean to terraform inbetween). It cannot be incearsed too much though since when it hits a big enough value there is no room for all the X size islands the generator would like to make, so it starts scatttering a lot of really small islands inbetween the size X's and the map gets messy. This happens around landmass=50 or so. And if it is set even bigger, like 60, it gets impossible to put every player on their private island so there will be more than one player starting on the same island/continent).

The image below shows a minimap from a game with 54 players, 400 tiles per player and landmass set to 45.
http://www.telemail.fi/handuman/freeciv ... ass_45.PNG
(I tweaked the minimap colours abit to highlight the starting positions better.)
The islands are really close to each other but there is still some deep ocean tiles on the map. I think there are plenty of uninhabited islands (maybe even more than enough for speed tuned game) for all to explore and settle.
I would not touch the terraforming rules, especially the deep ocean sholud be kept as it is. With these settings there is not much of it anyway.

As a conclusion, my proposal for these settings are:
- tilesperplayer=300
- landmass=44

Looks like this:
http://www.telemail.fi/handuman/freeciv ... ass_44.PNG

These are very bad maps.

Best suggestion: download 2.5X and use the new fair island generator to generate a map, it just generates a text file and should be compatible with 2.3 I am guessing. Someone will just have to manually enter in the names of all 50 players and then toggle them from AI to human.

[wieder]

Here is a map with landmass 40 and 400 tiles / player. It's about 11% less tiles then we have usually had.



I removed killinf the unhomed units. The settlers would have died in 20 turns and 10hp units in 10 turns. Now we need to remove the unist some other way once we know the idlers.

The maps should be actually more interesting because I also changed the cost of terraforming ocean into land from 36 to 12. That should make it tempting to block sea routes with land and also connecting those islands. I haven't seen that kind of maps for any LT game.

We should be ready to proceed with a test game with few minute turns and then see how it will go from there.

[mmm2]

here is 30 player map with 220 tiles per island (using fair island generator).. as you can see, there is big island for each player and many smaller land bridge islands surrounding bigger islands, with an even mix of islands near or far away... don't you agree that this is much better?

[mmm2]

player/programmer pepeto spent much time perfecting this generator, and it is put into 2.5X.. It would be worth it to at least research it before cancelling it out as an option...

[HanduMan]

mmm2: we will be playing on 2.3 so I don't think 2.5 generator is an option even though it produces by far a better map than 2.3 one. wieder decides ofc.

wieder: all homeless units would have survived the same amount of turns regardless of their total HP. killunhomed is a percentage thing. If it is set to 10 then 10 HP units loose 1 HP per turn and 20 HP units loose 2.

[mmm2]

The map I put pic of is actually from warserver generator. We can't use warserver generator, because that version has max 30 players.

player/programmer pepeto spent much time perfecting this generator, and it is put into 2.5X.. It would be worth it to at least research it before cancelling it out as an option...

I guess this is probably untrue. Although it shares name with Pepeto's generator, it seems to be completely different or misconfigured. I was wrong to state on this topic and other threads, that the "fair island" generator would be of use to us for longturn.

http://longturn.org/game/LT31/

Wieder/Handu: Lt31 configuration for generator might be good option to go back to? In that game, there were no vacant islands, besides those from idlers.

[HanduMan]

Wieder/Handu: Lt31 configuration for generator might be good option to go back to? In that game, there were no vacant islands, besides those from idlers.

Sorry. It's the same, only bigger map (because of 900 tiles per player) and islands further apart (because landmass 30). And because of the latter:

That player could have felt a little bit disappointed. :p

[mmm2]

Maybe I should have been less ambiguous. What I meant to say is that by comparing the maps you and Wieder generated to the Lt31 game map, your maps seem to have 3 times more vacant big islands (while the Lt31 map has no vacant islands). I thought you might be able to copy the settings from Lt31. There were tons of pre-game votes for every small detail from landmass to steepness. They spent much time to make best generator for that game. You might at least take a few configuration settings like landmass and tilesperplayer, steepness, etc...

[mmm2]

http://www.telemail.fi/handuman/freeciv ... ttings.PNG

Is this a screenshot from one of the maps you generated?
Just look at the Lt31 summary page. You will see that everyone started on big islands, there were no empty big islands, and no player started on anomalous tiny islands like in your screenshot either....

[edrim]

Why dont you make map with 50 islands by reducing number of players, then use this map (by SID) to start a game with 50 players?

[wieder]

"Wieder/Handu: Lt31 configuration for generator might be good option to go back to?"

LT31 settings will generate a similar map but with more ocean between the islands. I don't have any idea about how to change the size of the islands.

"Why dont you make map with 50 islands by reducing number of players, then use this map (by SID) to start a game with 50 players?"

How could I do that?

[HanduMan]

I thought you might be able to copy the settings from Lt31.

Did exactly that. Started a game with L31.serv. Loads of size X islands as in images I previously linked. So, loads of vacant islands, really. And at least one of starting positions was on totally separated island.

EDIT: OK I checked the replay on LT31 game page. That map was not generated by the settings in what is stored in GitHub. I have no idea about what map you were playing. Maybe the game admin (akfaew) could give an explanation on that?

[mmm2]

handu, what/who is your avatar??? I see what you meant by not being able to make map without vacant islands. I did try to run game with Lt31 ruleset and the islands looked no different than LT34 (about 150 vacant islands + 50 inhabited islands)..


btw: here is how to setup if you are on linux:
Download from https://github.com/longturn/games/tree/master/LT34
su
find / -name freeciv
cd /usr/share/games/freeciv
mkdir LT34
cp /home/_.._/Downloads/games-master/LT34/* /usr/share/games/freeciv/LT34
cp /home/_.._/Downloads/games-master/LT34/LT34.sh /usr/share/games/freeciv/LT34.sh
cp /home/_.._/Downloads/games-master/LT34/LT34.serv /usr/share/games/freeciv/LT34/LT34.serv
gedit /usr/share/games/freeciv/LT34/LT34.serv
(edit settings)
gunzip /usr/share/games/freeciv/scenario/earth-160x90-v2.sav.gz
gedit /usr/share/games/freeciv/scenario/earth-160x90-v2.sav
(change the ruleset from "default" to "LT34")
open freeciv, start new game, type "/load /usr/share/games/freeciv/scenario/earth-160x90-v2.sav"

I lost patience with trying to make generated Island, so I ran my test game on large earth map instead

With tiny islands it will be quite challenging to decide when to build marco polo's embassy . It takes very long time to build especially with slow moving caravans..

[wieder]

I guess we are going to do it with these small islands if someone can't figure out how to generate the LT31 islands. There was some talk about it but no one remembers how it was done and I can't find that thread. Maybe it was on irc.

If someone wants to suggest some changes to compensate the islands, now is the last moment to do that. We will test very soon and then plan only to fix possible errors but nothing more.

[HanduMan]

I also changed the cost of terraforming ocean into land from 36 to 12.

So an experienced (veteran 3 or higher) engineer unit can turn an ocean tile to swamp in just one turn. Really?