Best Map Size?

[yuzhonglu]

Big maps are boring because the nations have no interactions with each other for like 80 turns due to city limit. But small maps are waaaaaay too crowded. What is best map setting?

[アンジェル]

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

Best Map Size?
Big maps are boring because the nations have no interactions with each other for like 80 turns due to city limit. But small maps are waaaaaay too crowded. What is best map setting?

Four rulers, far distance.

[ayrtep]

I go for 12 opponents and massive apart, also massive underground. This should give the largest paying area.

If you want somewhere in the middle sized map then it depends on what size map you want.

[yuzhonglu]

How do you get 12 opponents? Max is 9.

[CrUsHeR]

In AOW3, my favorite map setting is around 4+ players, at least very large size (or larger via mod), and continents with slight variations. Example changing the amount of water coverage can have drastic effects of the ocean size.

That way you rarely even encounter other players before let's say turn 50. Meaning half the game is exploration and empire building, the other half is war where everyone has large armies of all tiers. IMHO the ulimately epic way to play.




Now if anyone wants to have this in AOW4 - i'd say don't buy the game. Map generation is very bad, without mods it feels cramped like rush hour in the toyko subway.
The proverbial sardines packed in a can come to mind.

If you use mods for a larger start distance, the landscape even with few players is not only vast, but entirely repetitive. Normally you would be looking for a good concentration of resource nodes, for a high quality fast growing city. And put some peripheral cities around it. But these concentrated resources are everywhere, there's no real distinction from one place to another, every screen is completely overloaded with treasure and resource nodes.

And there's the other problem - you can at most have a handful of cities in this game; while you can found vassals instead and get a partial refund of the Imperium investment, these are barely glorified Watch Tower outposts. It takes forever for them to grow and produce anything resembling a contribution, they do not help in wars or function for anything else beyond providing their strategic resource access and recruitable heroes.

And there's also the next problem, since heroes are tied to the number of owned cities, you have so few of them anyways. At least until you reach a certain threshold where your gold income outgrows your expenses, then you can consider hiring more just as army leaders.

[Quvano]

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

How do you get 12 opponents? Max is 9.

Mod

[アンジェル]

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

How do you get 12 opponents? Max is 9.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2970473841&searchtext=massive

[CrUsHeR]

Originally posted by アンジェル:

Originally posted by yuzhonglu:

How do you get 12 opponents? Max is 9.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2970473841&searchtext=massive

That is the official mod, don't use that.

What it does is to generate titanically large maps, where the players are mostly clumped up in the middle. Just the land towards the map borders is near-infinite and can never be used for anything.


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2974322650

Don't know if this mod also allows more than 9 players, but it fixes the distance / map size problem.


Also neither mod currently fixes the problem of underground player starts ignoring the starting distance parameters.

[yuzhonglu]

I actually want a more crowded map because as Crusher mentioned above, maps too big = just empty space. But I don't want it so crowded factions can't found their third city without greivances.