Conquer Club

Balsiefen wrote:I think i'll recreate ayrshire to bring us down to 36 again

merging borders and lothian would help

the above ideas sound good though, rather than merging north and south ayrshire, i suggest that creating caithness & sutherland (which was a single administrative district council in the 1980s) as one territory is better for gameplay. this is because ross & cromarty to sutherland to caithness to orkney is a bit of a "monorail".

the islands region has about the right amount of connectivity. the sea routes are pretty clear. putting in a bridge to west inverness-shire would make both the highlands and islands too hard to hold. u could even remove the link between mull and argyll to make the islands more of a fortress (not quite an australia, as the latter has only one exit).

the bonuses here look rather large for map that is smaller than classic. 7 for strathclyde is perfectly justified, as it occupies a pivotal position and is under attack from all directions. i think dumfries & galloway can be reduced to a bonus of 1, since it has only three territories (so someone could start off holding it from the drop) and is well-protected. if u merge caithness with sutherland, then u can reduce the highlands bonus to 4. i assume that u'll simply add lothian to borders (and remove most of the pentland hills) to give a 5 bonus.

taken together, these changes will increase the significance of the areas with which most scots are familiar (the central lowlands), thus helping to popularise the map.

ian.

balsiefen

in a previous post, u mentioned putting in the skye bridge. this connects skye with west inverness-shire. if u do this in conjunction with my suggested changes above, and remove the skye to ross & cromarty sea route, then the islands player can become more secure with only two points of attack, without the side-effect of making him 100% dependent on the ross & cromarty bottleneck.

ian.

/r/ the gaelic names for the islands

oaktown wrote:Somebody once came up with a formula for how to assign a bonus... (# terits + # boders) / x = y, that sort of thing. Does anybody know where that is?

Here are links to WidowMaker's Continent Bonus spreadsheet and Cairnswk's Continent Bonus Spreadsheet

Both in the Map Making Tools (stickied at the top of the Map Foundry forum) thread. Not sure if Coleman uses one of these or if he has his own.

Strathclyde gives a 7 bonus but only has 4 borders and isn't that big anyway. I think it should be taken down to 4 or maybe 5 but no more.

since this was already bumped I'll take the opportunity to ask if this map is dead... ??

oh god please change lewis to AT LEAST "Lewis and Harris"

god damn leòdhasaich

Wow, sorry about that, i was planning to get photoshop so i didn't make the updates, then the photoshop thing didnt work out and i forgot about it.

Anyway, i'll have a little look at whare i've got to and see if i should put it on vacation.

Balsiefen wrote:Wow, sorry about that, i was planning to get photoshop so i didn't make the updates, then the photoshop thing didnt work out and i forgot about it.

Anyway, i'll have a little look at whare i've got to and see if i should put it on vacation.

I'll have a crack at it in photoshop unless you object. There's not much to do right now on my other map, and I'm itching to test drive the new Mac i just bought.

Hey, thanks

This not dead yet then??... Aaaaw... I was going to put a quote from one of my favorit films on (the spark of his life is smuthered in s***, his spirit is gone but his stench remains... dose that answer you question..)



AAaaw well... I got to put it on anyway

It would actualy be nice to see this get done.

I think it would be better if you had firth of forth on. Or any firth really.

I made a list of all the sugestions and it took up an A4 page in word. I got a lot of work to do...

Right, first problem Bonuses & territories.
As it stands, the bonuses are:
Highlands:5
Islands:3
Grampian:3
Strathclyde:7
Central:3
Lothian:2
Dum & Gall:2
Boarders:3

The excel help thingy sais the bonuses should be:
Highlands:5.92
Islands:4.17
Grampian:3.83
Strathclyde:6.08
Central:4.08
Lothian:3.00
Dum & Gall:2.58
Boarders:3.75

I'm not sure what to think of those, i might have to change the options a bit.

Anyway, more importantly, we currently have 37terr. We need to add or take of 1 terr. Two sugestions so fr have been:
-Re-merge ayr
-Merge sutherland & caithness

What do people think?

Balsiefen wrote:Right, first problem Bonuses & territories.

I agree. I am still troubled by how big and hard to hold both the Islands and Highlands will be, creating a dead zone in the north of the map as everybody scrambles for the little bonuses in the south. Some ideas:

• Can the Orkneys and Shetlands be a part of the Highlands region? Then the other four islands can be called the "Western Isles" (I've seen them grouped in this way on maps), making them a more attractive start. You could lose the odd attack route between Lewis and the Orkneys, and the Western Isles would then be an attractive four territory region with two borders, a la South America in classic.

• What are the odds of merging two of the southern bonuses? I don't know Scotland well enough to know if that's something that would upset folks - I'd like to keep distinct geographic regions separate.

Balsiefen wrote:we currently have 37terr. We need to add or take of 1 terr. Two sugestions so fr have been:
-Re-merge ayr
-Merge sutherland & caithness
What do people think?

Sutherland and Caithness would be good because right now there's something of a dead end from Sutherland-Caithness-Orkneys-Shetlands. Alternatively you could merge the Orkneys and Shetlands, especially if you approve of making them a part of the highlands bonus. Either way I'd suggest an additional attack route from the mainland to the Orkneys... Aberdeen would make sense as it is a major port and ferry hub, right?

From a graphics/readability point of view it would certainly be easier if you could merge two territories that are already tightly squeezed together, but again I don't know the country well enough to know what makes sense politically/geographically.

OK Balsiefen, I gave this map a couple of hours of my time today, and here's an early draft. Most of my time so far has been spent just putting everything in the right place - now we can hash out what you want it to look like. The regions are the same as your last draft with the exception that I've lumped the northern islands in with the Highlands region - this can change back of course. I've also kept the same color scheme that you had going, though these lighter colors will need some work. I may still play around with the tartan idea. I haven't bothered with territory borders, as it sounds like they are still in flux, and I have yet to fuss around with making mountains for the unpassables borders... just wanted to get something up to show that I'm serious about helping out on this one.

Current map size: 602x790
I'm concerned about what will happen to the smaller territories on the small map.

sorry oaktown but it doesnt feel scottish:

i vote we make a map out of tartan.

or have it drawn on the front of the kilt with a pen.

Wow, thank you oaktown, i love the map!

As for your ideas i'm afraid its a little early in the morning for me to make an intelegent responce to them but they sound pretty good to me. I think adding ork and shet to highlands would work out quite well anyway.

As for gimil and telvanias scottishness, i'm sure that will work. I think it looks very scottish already but a few additions would be good. again, too early in the morning

Anyway, i'll get back a little later

Telvannia wrote:i vote we make a map out of tartan.

or have it drawn on the front of the kilt with a pen.

A tartan map has already been tryed if you look at the previos pages... it didn't look so good

gimil wrote:sorry oaktown but it doesnt feel scottish

Give oaktown a chance... it's only just started to be redrawn.

Okay, i'm a little more wokwn up now. I might have to leave before the post is finished though.

oaktown wrote:

Balsiefen wrote:Right, first problem Bonuses & territories.

I agree. I am still troubled by how big and hard to hold both the Islands and Highlands will be, creating a dead zone in the north of the map as everybody scrambles for the little bonuses in the south. Some ideas:

• Can the Orkneys and Shetlands be a part of the Highlands region? Then the other four islands can be called the "Western Isles" (I've seen them grouped in this way on maps), making them a more attractive start. You could lose the odd attack route between Lewis and the Orkneys, and the Western Isles would then be an attractive four territory region with two borders, a la South America in classic.

I think that would work well, it could actually make it a much more circular map

• What are the odds of merging two of the southern bonuses? I don't know Scotland well enough to know if that's something that would upset folks - I'd like to keep distinct geographic regions separate.

lothian with borders would proberbley work best, especially as it could solve the space shortage there.

Balsiefen wrote:we currently have 37terr. We need to add or take of 1 terr. Two sugestions so fr have been:
-Re-merge ayr
-Merge sutherland & caithness
What do people think?

Sutherland and Caithness would be good because right now there's something of a dead end from Sutherland-Caithness-Orkneys-Shetlands. Alternatively you could merge the Orkneys and Shetlands, especially if you approve of making them a part of the highlands bonus. Either way I'd suggest an additional attack route from the mainland to the Orkneys... Aberdeen would make sense as it is a major port and ferry hub, right?

Sutherland and caithness would be best for that, shetland and orkney are a long way from each other.

From a graphics/readability point of view it would certainly be easier if you could merge two territories that are already tightly squeezed together, but again I don't know the country well enough to know what makes sense politically/geographically.

I've been toying with the idea of, if we merge loth with boarders we could merge the lohians into two, what would people think.

Anyway, tonight i'll have a go with producing a little test map with some of these ideas.

The font should be less gothic and more gaelic.

Let's see... doesn't look scottish yet, font's too gothic, etc... I'll agree with all of the comments so far, and just say again that the time I've put into it so far was just getting everything in the right place. This is my first draft, so consider it as such. I've got the basic building blocks created in Photoshop, so now we can have fun with it!

I would like to take a stab at using tartans for background colors. The one that was posted a few pages back was done in about five minutes by mashing up some jpegs I found, so I have confidence that a more concentrated effort will produce better results.

So now we're got two distinct needs in this thread:
• Balsiefen needs feedback now on where to break up territories and bonus regions,
• I'll need feedback as things progress about the look. Right now I have to make it more scottish/celtic and work the tartans in. That should keep me busy.

the font is spot on. considering the celts orginally orginated from Scotland i.e, celtic FC!!