Mapmaker(s):
Number of Territories: around 60 for the idea to work, but can be less
Special Features: victory condition: playing an entire chord tune; starting position with auto-deploy(pick); conditional bombings
What Makes This Map Worthy of Being Made: First of all I like MY idea..
(joking) There's no map about playing an instrument and the general way of play that I imagine, involves making chord-shapes on the fret board and finally playing a famous/classical tune....so if you play it a few times you'll know how a C major looks like on the guitar. Interesting now ha?Updates:
- I've added a rough sketch; see image below; still looking for mapmakers
- if you'd like to give feedback any kind is greatly appreciated; one that I'd greatly appreciate is if you can please contribute with 1-2 classic/famous song examples; those are really useful as they can change significantly the way the map should be designed Thanks!
- Checkout the list of song suggestions and make a contribution!
- added map improvement(hjelp) idea and gameplay suggestion(WingCmdr Ginkapo)
Map Image: Figured that I have to put something here. Hope you don't get blinded by it ...
- Click image to enlarge.
Map design idea/improvement(by hjelp): Dynamic/random loading of the songs in the Song Table where the set of playable songs is generated at random, at game initialisation, from a bigger set of available options. This would involve a base map + a number of images for the song content that get "glued" to the map (? technical possibility in CC ?) --- more about it here
Hello guys!
edited:/Added a rough sketch.....
So if we find this idea good and there's anyone who can help with starting this up graphic-wise, I guess I can do with figuring out the XML backend. Or so I hope.
How the map looks (roughly):
- there's a central map with 2 separate portions/tables: one with song information and playable territories (something like the Vicarious/Praetors/Emperors region from the Conquer Rome map) and another for information regarding the shapes of the chords on the fret-board (how does a Dm look like and how you get it)
- the central map has up top the starting positions of the players: 8 different coloured picks; these are playable (but special) territories
- the main image is that of the neck of a guitar starting with the headstock and 6 tuning keys up to and including the 10th fret; it has all the 6 strings and each note on the fret is a territory
- tuning keys are playable (but special) territories too
- the song table is separate from the main image of the guitar (neck)
- it consists of a number (let's say 4) of basic and widely known songs (this is open to discussion, but let's say for simplicity "The Beatles - Hey Jude"); each song has its chords next to the name and the chords are playable territories (actually, they can only be attacked)
- kind of like: "Hey Jude" D A D G D A D
Gameplay (Victory Condition):
- each players starts from his pick; every other territory on the map: 6 tuning keys, 60 notes , ~20 song chords start neutral
- the goal of the game (victory condition) is to have one of the songs in the table "played" (conquer the chords for that song)
- you can conquer the chords (so the actual territories in the song-table) only via your pick and after you've conquered the required fret-positions on the guitar
- fret position that are part of a chord cannot be directly attacked from the pick (see game-play suggestion here)
example for reaching goal:
- player A starts from his pick and wants to get an open D major chord, as described in the Chord Info Table;
- one-way attacks from pick any fret positions not involved in a playable chord (ex: 4th string-fret 1 or 5th string- fret 1 or 6th string - fret 2....)
- gets 1st string-fret 2, 2nd string-fret3, 3rd string- fret 2 ---> that's a D major
- he now is able to one-way attack from his pick the "D"s in the chord progression for any of the songs in the table (in the Hey Jude example he would have 4 positions to attack)
- each pick can one way assault
- notes on the fret can attack each note on a 2-fret radius (back and forth)
- chords in the song table can only be assaulted by the picks; can't reach each-other
Why the high numbers of fret notes. Well I had in mind that all the songs in the table should be using basic chords, in the A -> G range (with minors) and I thought that it would become a dog fight if you have only one position where you can get a Bm, for example. I only had in mind the open-chord chords and the A/E shaped barre ones.
Bonuses:
I would think it to have the auto on the picks and probably no territory-count bonus. So the bonuses might be for the chords (maybe differentiated based on simplicity and the number of song-chords one has). This is an important issue that is based on how the map would look like (with more or less frets/territories)
Elimination (escalating play):
Ok so now one (who's been particularly interested in my description and reached to this part..
) would wonder what do you do with the tuning keys? Well, I thought about how the game could be played with opponent elimination rather than victory condition (in escalating for example). And I came up with a probably intricate way of doing this. First of all tuning keys should be killer neutrals (let's say 20 each), attackable both from each note position and from picks. And sticking to the guitar concept, when reverting to 20 neutrals after one round, it also reverts to neutrals all the notes on the string.
If you hold 2 tuning keys, you can bomb any pick (well you kind of can play without 1 string, but without 2 is impossible...
). And here comes the concept of elimination: if you lose your pick you get eliminated (you can't achieve victory conditions).Problems?!
Let me write about some problems that I can think of.
First, the territory count. That's a huge number of notes on the fret and given the gameplay I imagined, those 60 notes there aren't really "important". This can be overcome by restricting the number of frets in the main guitar-map (to something less), and making the available chords to take other barre shapes (something like a C-shaped barre on the 2nd fret is a D). And of course, the total number of different chords in the song-table could be made smaller.
Another problem is that of conditionals. So making pick one way attack ONLY the chord based on what your territories are on the fretboard. And then making bombing the pick possible only if 2 (or more) tuning keys are held. But I guess these are kind of distant issues for now.
Thanks for reading! If you've come this far it means you find the idea at least interesting. And if you do, please give some feedback, or more importantly, if you're into Photoshop or the like, might be great if you try it out.
Based on the list I will make a selection (mostly based on how the songs best fit game-play) and maybe cast a vote. Every suggestion is welcomed and all are really important, because based on these, the final draft of the map can be made (the chords of the songs will define how the fretboard looks like and what chords will be included in the map). 
