African colonial map from 1939 (solely Africa or Africa + southern Arabia)

To be played either as a standard game (each colony/country independent of each other)
OR as
An alliance 'type' game where the colonies of EACH individual European power are allied at start (i.e. all British colonies together, all French colonies allied, etc.)

Including accurate 'small' colony 'cities' would be a plus.

Unfortunately, most players do not stick around for long on small maps. The only way to have a decent amount of players for any period of time is larger maps. On the ten player map the winner is usually going to be the one who is still there on day 5!

you know wot would be funny to see, a polandball map of this

How about an entirely non earth based map.. Fictional setting .. Get creative and build a new world?

In a WWII game?

WW4: martian front map!

What? Aliens can't have their own WWII? I think that's a good idea. I've already proposed this idea before, it's not too hard to implement a random map generator that has earth-like qualities but isn't based on the earth's topography.

Ahm, as someone who has written game code, it's a bit harder then you appear to think.

How would you randomly generate the countries, borders, playables, and unplayables?
The movement paths, and intersections?
The capitals, and other buildings?
The resources, so that each player has a 'fair' distribution?

At least one of these can not be accurately reproduced randomly! The others are highly susceptible to coding errors which would require perhaps months of beta testing to resolve. I believe that is why there is a 'support team' to handle these matters, yes?!?!

How about a historical Global map set after WW1, in 1919/1920 something? You would have the Russian, Ottoman Empires still existing, but falling apart. There's the new nations left in the power vacuum of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the independence movement in Ireland, Mongolia, tensions in Africa and South America and an uncertain future for the new Mexican government. It's a wonderful setting for a map.

Well, as someone who also has written some game code, I would start out by creating a table of objectives and use that to create seed values for new maps.

Movement paths and intersections are frequency-based odds with closer potential targets having a better chance of getting linked and the higher number of links getting lower chances of adding more links. I've also coded algorithms for finding suitable paths along patterned radial paths which prevent and deliberately avoid crossing except at intersections. It's not hard to do, it just takes some mathematics and some creativity.

Provincial borders and their shapes would have to be somewhat randomized but having land vs. sea and then random hills and mountain ranges pop up would help pre-define province shapes before they even get created. Then, in like manner of the paths, provinces would each center on an existing and unclaimed intersection (no tiny island may have only one possible port to prevent coding errors, here). Then, the borders between provinces would be randomly created such that they would hug mountains and shore-line curves and such.

Total area for each province would be randomized with greater and smaller areas being the less-likely odds. Terrain types would be added next but to ensure there are sufficient urban provinces, each playable nation's pre-defined random starting point will be surrounded with an appropriate number of urban provinces before the rest of the provinces get defined. Also, each nation would have different total areas, with statistical odds favoring a mean or median level with extremes either in higher and lower province counts and size will be discouraged by reduced odds calculation ranges.

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In this order, then would be the likely construction of the data:

Map objectives (user-defined at map setup) including number of player nations (i.e. few, more, many), size of map (i.e., small, mid, large, jumbo), type of map (i.e., archipelago, continents, balanced, etc.)...similar to civilization concepts, I suppose.

Using the map objectives, the system determines the layout of the map, giving enough land and/or islands to accommodate an approximate number of players based on the settings by the user. Then, land/sea is drawn, mountains and hills are added, paths and intersections are created, national starting points of players is created, surrounding regions are populated with urban provinces and then other provinces.

Those provinces are given roughly approximate numbers of resources (based on common needs of all players and perhaps on additional settings (i.e., barren world, rich world, divided world, etc.). Then, appropriate terrains are added to those resource provinces then other provinces which link them up would have terrains (that are not too variable) fill in the gaps.

After all that is done, remaining land space will be subdivided into random smaller unplayable nations and the same steps as above occur. lesser numbers of urban provinces would get created based on the approximate national size given to each and then filling out the remainder of each nation with a few spartan resources would complete this portion of the process.

Finally, the capital is placed in a randomly-chosen urban province and each urban province receives a factory...basic start. Then, a preset approximate number of units of certain types are placed following general rules of gameplay (i.e., AA only start in urban provinces). Like with all the other statistically-based odds, total force count is approximate to a mean number. Money and Manpower are setup similar to other odds and following along the lines of preexisting maps from CoW. Then users may join randomly (or maybe by choosing on the mini-map).

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You state that such maps would need months of testing. I say it isn't the maps but the map-generating process that would need months of testing. But, so what? That's the nature of the business. Of course beta testers will be needed. The Frontline Pioneers will help with that and I assume Bytro has in-house testers, also. And if the expert coders actually follow responsible development processes (i.e, coordinated work with scrums and process scheduling, well-documented code, keeping data and interface separate from execution and structure, and following established patterns with suitable white and black-box testing) then I don't foresee this being a problem. In fact, I would love to get a job at Bytro doing this very thing. But that's a dream I will likely never see come true.

nemuritor98_ wrote:

It's time to vote!

nemuritor98_ wrote:

It's time to vote!

This might sound like a dumb question...but where do we vote? You said it would be at an external site.

Cool.

Maybe you should have re-posted the link with your prior post announcing the vote.

Start everyone in separate location off of Antarctica (Argentina, Chili, South Africa, Australia) with resources, but no VPs. Antarctica has only VPs but no resources. A "Race to the Pole" map.

And I did mean Chile in case anyone is paying attention. Another Map that shows idea better. Could add UK and New Zealand too.

I voted