Some people have been asking for feedback on the maps they submitted for the ECL competition. We had overlooked giving public feedback when we first started judging, so we don't have explicit suggestions for all of the 100+ maps that were submitted across the various regions. I've been thinking about what type of feedback would be useful to give, so I figured that I would discuss some of the changes that were made to the maps that did win. I talked with several of the map authors about changing some aspects of their maps, and here I'll give several points that were addressed when reworking the maps to create the final versions.
In the future hopefully we can come up with a better way of giving direct feedback to the map authors about their submissions. Please let me know if there's anything specific about the maps that you want feedback about, and I'll be happy to try and answer.
Keep Fish Locations Fair
Fish distribution needs to be fair for water maps. This is especially true for maps such as Rift Island, where players have access to fish outside of a center continent.
An example of a map that doesn't have fair fish is the USA Cup version of El Dorado. The player on the right side of the map almost always has shore fish but no deep fish.
Whereas the opposite happens for the player on the left side of the map: deep fish but no shore fish.
To fix these issues, play around with the land border sizes to ensure there is enough room for fish around the edges of the map. Then adjust temp_min_distance_group_placement and min_distance_group_placement for the fish objects. You can also play around with max_distance_to_other_zones and sometimes even terrain_to_place_on to force fish to spawn only in shallow or deep water.
Make the Water Pretty
The original maps from Ensemble Studios do a great job of using the various water terrains, mixing patches of shallow, medium, and deep water throughout the bodies of water. But I've seen some custom maps instead just use only medium water in combination with terrain_to_place_on for fish in order to keep the fish away from the shore. But by playing around more with the fish positioning as described previously, you generally can achieve the same fairness in fish distribution while at the same time making the maps much more pleasing to look at.
Beware of Towers
Towers are enough of a problem on Arabia, but custom maps have the potential to make tower strategies even stronger. Perhaps the worst example is from an old tournament when I forgot to remove the starting Dark Age tower on Regicide Socotra. A contest to build the first tower isn't a fun gameplay experience.
There are two main causes I see in maps that encourage towers:
* Placing players extremely close together.
* Give players only scarce starting resources.
Be very careful if designing a map with either of these features.
Wood Should be THICC
Following the previous point, lack of wood often means that towers become exceptionally powerful, and a single tower can end the game. Some late game situations end up being won by the team that just happens to have more wood on their side of the map. Less overall wood means that the map runs out of wood sooner, and these situations are more likely to occur.
For example, on the original Mesas map, the map's wood was limited to the outside cliffs, and these cliffs could randomly extend far in land. This random extension made the map difficult to navigate and some players more access to wood than others. The map was revised to keep the cliffs out of the middle and instead include more wood there.
Use Standard Map Resource Distributions as Examples
There are maps like Scandinavia that don't use the "standard" starting resource distribution. Look at this map if you want also to change the starting resources. For example, the Frisia map was edited to use the same starting resources as Scandi, rather than just making a few manual changes. These resources provide a consistent experience for players who are already accustomed to those alternative starts and are already well-tested and well-balanced.
If you want to do something even more custom, look at maps like Serengeti or Bog Islands, where the starting resources are drastically different but still similar to the standard resources.
It's possible to implement very non-standard starts successfully, such as Migration, Decentring, or Houseboat. But if the special start is not the main feature of the map, make sure to refer to the standard maps for examples of fair resource distributions.
Be Careful with Different "Versions" of a Map
There are several maps that have different versions, e.g. Summer and Winter. If these versions have different resource distributions, then be careful to make sure they are similar. Since civ picks are used in most of the maps, different starting resources could drastically change between favoring one civ over another. For example, if the Summer version has 150 food cows instead of the sheep, then the winter version has extra deer instead of berries, then there is a large random factor that affects Britons and Mongols. Large differences such as these risk making the civ draft more luck based than strategy based.
Don't Place Fish in Mangrove Shallows
If a fish is placed directly inside the Mangrove Shallows terrain (or even the beach terrain like in El Dorado), then it can be deleted by placing a palisade wall or building foundation over it, just like a straggler tree. Even if there is a rule about players not laming fish, players might accidentally delete their own fish by placing buildings, or be forced to delete them when walling.
The Water Nomad map gives one solution to avoid this problem. Instead of placing the fish directly in the shallows, create small islands of beach terrain throughout the shallows.
Then replace the inside of these beach islands with water, where you can place fish.
Test Many Generations of Your Map
In the first version of Eastern Coastline, there was a rather significant bug where sometimes the islands would spawn attached to the mainland. And in an early version of El Dorado, occasionally the water would create a Baltic in the middle of the map instead of a ring around the outside. These bugs would result in either weird/unfair matches or lots of admin restarts. Many issues like these can be fixed, but it can take several dozen map generations before you find a seed that exhibits the bug.
Be Aware of Accessibility Concerns
When making a ZR map, be sure to provide a version with grids and a version without grids. Some players have eyesight problems that make it difficult for them to see maps with grids, so a version without grids is a necessity.
And UP 1.5 weather effects are nice for custom scenarios and some single player maps. But they are at best exceedingly distracting for competitive maps, and you should avoid using them here.
In the future hopefully we can come up with a better way of giving direct feedback to the map authors about their submissions. Please let me know if there's anything specific about the maps that you want feedback about, and I'll be happy to try and answer.
Keep Fish Locations Fair
Fish distribution needs to be fair for water maps. This is especially true for maps such as Rift Island, where players have access to fish outside of a center continent.
An example of a map that doesn't have fair fish is the USA Cup version of El Dorado. The player on the right side of the map almost always has shore fish but no deep fish.
To fix these issues, play around with the land border sizes to ensure there is enough room for fish around the edges of the map. Then adjust temp_min_distance_group_placement and min_distance_group_placement for the fish objects. You can also play around with max_distance_to_other_zones and sometimes even terrain_to_place_on to force fish to spawn only in shallow or deep water.
Make the Water Pretty
The original maps from Ensemble Studios do a great job of using the various water terrains, mixing patches of shallow, medium, and deep water throughout the bodies of water. But I've seen some custom maps instead just use only medium water in combination with terrain_to_place_on for fish in order to keep the fish away from the shore. But by playing around more with the fish positioning as described previously, you generally can achieve the same fairness in fish distribution while at the same time making the maps much more pleasing to look at.
Beware of Towers
Towers are enough of a problem on Arabia, but custom maps have the potential to make tower strategies even stronger. Perhaps the worst example is from an old tournament when I forgot to remove the starting Dark Age tower on Regicide Socotra. A contest to build the first tower isn't a fun gameplay experience.
There are two main causes I see in maps that encourage towers:
* Placing players extremely close together.
* Give players only scarce starting resources.
Be very careful if designing a map with either of these features.
Wood Should be THICC
Following the previous point, lack of wood often means that towers become exceptionally powerful, and a single tower can end the game. Some late game situations end up being won by the team that just happens to have more wood on their side of the map. Less overall wood means that the map runs out of wood sooner, and these situations are more likely to occur.
For example, on the original Mesas map, the map's wood was limited to the outside cliffs, and these cliffs could randomly extend far in land. This random extension made the map difficult to navigate and some players more access to wood than others. The map was revised to keep the cliffs out of the middle and instead include more wood there.
Use Standard Map Resource Distributions as Examples
There are maps like Scandinavia that don't use the "standard" starting resource distribution. Look at this map if you want also to change the starting resources. For example, the Frisia map was edited to use the same starting resources as Scandi, rather than just making a few manual changes. These resources provide a consistent experience for players who are already accustomed to those alternative starts and are already well-tested and well-balanced.
If you want to do something even more custom, look at maps like Serengeti or Bog Islands, where the starting resources are drastically different but still similar to the standard resources.
It's possible to implement very non-standard starts successfully, such as Migration, Decentring, or Houseboat. But if the special start is not the main feature of the map, make sure to refer to the standard maps for examples of fair resource distributions.
Be Careful with Different "Versions" of a Map
There are several maps that have different versions, e.g. Summer and Winter. If these versions have different resource distributions, then be careful to make sure they are similar. Since civ picks are used in most of the maps, different starting resources could drastically change between favoring one civ over another. For example, if the Summer version has 150 food cows instead of the sheep, then the winter version has extra deer instead of berries, then there is a large random factor that affects Britons and Mongols. Large differences such as these risk making the civ draft more luck based than strategy based.
Don't Place Fish in Mangrove Shallows
If a fish is placed directly inside the Mangrove Shallows terrain (or even the beach terrain like in El Dorado), then it can be deleted by placing a palisade wall or building foundation over it, just like a straggler tree. Even if there is a rule about players not laming fish, players might accidentally delete their own fish by placing buildings, or be forced to delete them when walling.
The Water Nomad map gives one solution to avoid this problem. Instead of placing the fish directly in the shallows, create small islands of beach terrain throughout the shallows.
Then replace the inside of these beach islands with water, where you can place fish.
Test Many Generations of Your Map
In the first version of Eastern Coastline, there was a rather significant bug where sometimes the islands would spawn attached to the mainland. And in an early version of El Dorado, occasionally the water would create a Baltic in the middle of the map instead of a ring around the outside. These bugs would result in either weird/unfair matches or lots of admin restarts. Many issues like these can be fixed, but it can take several dozen map generations before you find a seed that exhibits the bug.
Be Aware of Accessibility Concerns
When making a ZR map, be sure to provide a version with grids and a version without grids. Some players have eyesight problems that make it difficult for them to see maps with grids, so a version without grids is a necessity.
And UP 1.5 weather effects are nice for custom scenarios and some single player maps. But they are at best exceedingly distracting for competitive maps, and you should avoid using them here.