[Abandoned] - Scandinavia

[CoolC]

Doesn't seem like there will be any further feedback so here's a new revision with updated bonus-scheme. I've done my best to re-balance the bonuses. Also removed abbreviations as suggested by edocsil. Kept a shorter clarification for Finland.

The map;

Click image to enlarge.

The numbers;

Code: Select all

Name              Areas        Defend       Bonus

Sweden            25            8             24 (+8)
N Sweden          7             4             5
C Sweden          8             4             5
S Sweden          10            4             6

Norway            16            4             15 (+4)
N Norway          5             3             3
SW Norway         5             3             3
SE Norway         6             4             5

Finland           13            3             8 (+1)
W Finland	      6             5             4
E Finland         6             3             3

Denmark           7             3             5 (+2)
C Denmark         3             2             1
I Denmark         4             3             2

Baltic Islands    4             4             5
Laponia           3             3             3

[natty dread]

Ok... here's what I think...

Denmark: 7 territories with 3 borders gets a +5? That's too much... 7 territories is easy to take, and 3 borders to defend - not to mention you can take Skåne and reduce the borders to 2 - I'd give it a +4 at most...

Baltic sea islands: there you have 4 territories, although scattered, but why do they give a +5? They'll be easy to combine with other bonuses, so I'd drop them to +3.

Finland as a whole looks ok, although frankly I don't understand why you divided it into west and east...

Oops, it's getting late, I'll try to comment more in detail later... just briefly I have to say, about the Sweden bonus... who'd ever even hold it? It's almost half of the map, in territories... funny... but still, good job with the map, I look forward to playing it

[CoolC]

Denmark: 7 territories with 3 borders gets a +5? That's too much... 7 territories is easy to take, and 3 borders to defend - not to mention you can take Skåne and reduce the borders to 2 - I'd give it a +4 at most...

Yeah, I think I agree with you. I'll lower it one more unless there are others who object.

Baltic sea islands: there you have 4 territories, although scattered, but why do they give a +5? They'll be easy to combine with other bonuses, so I'd drop them to +3.

I decided to set this quite high since they are indeed very scattered and also very contested areas. I would say they aren't easy at all to combine with other bonuses, except maybe central and southen sweden. I agree that 5 is a bit high though now that almost all others was lowered. I will lower it to 4 pending other input.

Finland as a whole looks ok, although frankly I don't understand why you divided it into west and east...

Because having a 13 area bonus is a bit much and splitting it created more diversity, especially since it was done before I split up norway further. There is still several large countries in sweden. Maybe it would be a good idea though to make west larger and east smaller, or change it into north/south, but I think it's hardly worth it. One could of course also remove some areas to create a more reasonably sized single country but I've already stated I won't do that since accurate real regions are a theme of the map.

Thanks for the feedback

[natty dread]

Yeah I get finland has to be split but I don't get why you split it west/east... North/south would make more sense, all things considered... There's not that big a difference culturally when you compare west and east finland but there's a huge cultural difference between north and south. The west/east division might have some historical significance, but in a modern day scandinavia map I don't see how that should matter...

Well anyway, it's your map, so don't worry about it. In my personal opinion the north/south division would make more sense but it's not going to ruin the map if you want to keep it as is.

[CoolC]

Yeah I get finland has to be split but I don't get why you split it west/east...

I didn't consider any cultural difference actually... with Finland I just thought that the geography made a east / west split more natural. It's the "peninsula" in the sea and the continent. The split is continuing the border to sweden further north and also following the largest of the lakes.

I suppose it wouldn't be very difficult to make a north / south arrangement instead, but I don't see any compelling reason either. I like the east / west split for above reasons and it also make a nice contrast to the other countries alignment. Would be great to hear from some finnish people on the subject though.

[natty dread]

Would be great to hear from some finnish people on the subject though.

*Ahem*

[CoolC]

Oh... I see

Well, do you have a suggestion where the split would be then? Which territories would belong to north and which to south?

[iancanton]

Denmark: 7 territories with 3 borders gets a +5? That's too much... 7 territories is easy to take, and 3 borders to defend - not to mention you can take Skåne and reduce the borders to 2 - I'd give it a +4 at most...

Yeah, I think I agree with you. I'll lower it one more unless there are others who object.

all of the nations are overvalued if u regard them as single bonus zones. +5 for denmark keeps this consistent. instead of continental denmark, is danish jutland a more appropriate description of that bonus zone, to match the danish islands zone name?

Baltic sea islands: there you have 4 territories, although scattered, but why do they give a +5? They'll be easy to combine with other bonuses, so I'd drop them to +3.

I decided to set this quite high since they are indeed very scattered and also very contested areas. I would say they aren't easy at all to combine with other bonuses, except maybe central and southen sweden. I agree that 5 is a bit high though now that almost all others was lowered. I will lower it to 4 pending other input.

+4 sounds good.

ian.

[natty dread]

Oh... I see

Well, do you have a suggestion where the split would be then? Which territories would belong to north and which to south?

Well if you want to do how I would do it just take a look at the Nordic map...

There I just divided it into Lapland and the rest - but that wouldn't work here since you have Lapland as a single territory. Personally I think the area is too big to be represented by a single territory, but if that's how you want to do it I guess it's fine... What I actually tried to do on Nordic (but changed it due to gameplay reasons) was to divide Finland to 3 parts: Lapland, Central & South.

The problem is you have so few territories on the north side of Finland. Now if this is meant to represent the differences in population density then I kinda understand it - but it makes dividing the country in half... Considering your territory divisions the most logical solution I could see would be making Lappi, Pohjois-pohjanmaa & Kainuu one bonus area, and the rest... well, the rest could either be one big bonus area or divided in west and east parts... the west and east division is more prominent in the southern part of Finland so it would kinda make sense... Only problem would be Uusimaa which isn't really considered to belong to neither.

If you want to keep Finland as 2 bonus areas, then the current scheme may actually be the best for the gameplay. But if you'd like to divide it into 3 smaller ones, then the North/West/East division would be cool. If you can only decide where to stick Uusimaa

[CoolC]

After much thinking, measuring, consulting oracles and reading the omens I've decided not to change Finland. It's quite a large change for little or no gain, it may even be worse gameplay-wise. I'll go with iancanton and keep Denmark at +5. I have lowered the islands and changed the name of Continental Denmark. Here's an updated map and stats-table;

The map;

Click image to enlarge.

The numbers;

Code: Select all

Name              Areas        Defend       Bonus

Sweden            25            8             24 (+8)
N Sweden          7             4             5
C Sweden          8             4             5
S Sweden          10            5             6

Norway            16            4             15 (+4)
N Norway          5             3             3
SW Norway         5             3             3
SE Norway         6             4             5

Finland           13            3             8 (+1)
W Finland	      6             5             4
E Finland         6             3             3

Denmark           7             3             5 (+2)
C Denmark         3             2             1
I Denmark         4             3             2

Baltic Islands    4             4             4
Laponia           3             3             3

I think it looks good now, it's probably not possible to tweak it further. Unless further people pitch in and vote to lower denmark perhaps it's time to freeze the gameplay and move to graphics workshop?

[Evil DIMwit]

I think it might be better if Bornholm and Blekinge connected, to reduce the possibility of Denmark being abused. The map can probably pass without that, though.

[natty dread]

I agree. Currently it's too easy to take Skåne and reduce denmark to 2 borders. If Bornholm connects to Blekinge it wouldn't be possible to do so.

[CoolC]

I think it might be better if Bornholm and Blekinge connected

Hmm, it's all fine and dandy for Denmark but it also add another area to defend for Southern Sweden. 10 areas to take and 5 to defend? That's not going to be easy... which is why i decided against it earlier. So if I make the change shall I keep S.S at +6 or maybe increase to +7?

I feel that +7 on the other hand get too close to the finland bonus..

[Evil DIMwit]

Well, not every continent has to be a fortress. Southern Sweden has great expansion potential, though -- if you can hold it for even one turn, you have a good shot of taking one or both of the Danish bonuses as well, and that's worth at least as much as an extra troop.

[CoolC]

Alright, that's all convincing I need... I've updated previous revision (and the number table above) since it didn't seem enough to make a new out of.

[Evil DIMwit]

Well, that's all my complaints so I'll just sticky this.

[Evil DIMwit]

...And it looks like that's everybody's complaints. Congrats!

[CoolC]

Thanks!

Todo for next version:

- area colored edges on army circles
- slight adjustments of text positions
- proper shadows on text
- slight adjustment to danish flag

Two questions I've been pondering:

- Keep straight sea-routes or do "curved dot routes" like many other maps?
- Keep the legend or do a mini-map?

[natty dread]

Curved sea routes would look better.

[CoolC]

Hello folks. Next update will be slightly delayed due to the fact my main harddrive died on me last night.

I think it was just the system drive and not my home drive (have my files on separate device mounted as /home) so no essential files should be lost. I will get the next update out sometime in the next week when i've got a new drive and finished all the reinstalls...

[MrBenn]

Hope your computer is alright - I had trouble with mine a little while back; it's not a pleasant experience!

I'm looking forward to seeing this map progress, so hopefully your down-time won't be that long

[CoolC]

Damn, this was/is horrible. The nasty harddrive gave the impression of working again when I tested it some time later, so I got my hopes up that maybe I could backup some data from it after all... maybe even clone the whole drive to avoid reinstalling! But of course, according to Murpheys law, this was just an illusion. Perhaps specifically designed by the computer gods to crush my hope like an employee in the corporate machinery. After seemingly working for a while even BIOS stopped recognizing it as a drive.

I have by now finished base installation of all three OS's and is well on my way on the detailed config and setup of my main one (slackware). That's the downside of having a highly customized system - it takes a loooong time to set everything up again after unexpectedly losing everything. I can tell you my backup procedures will be drastically changed after all this

Hopefully I will finish it tonight after work and maybe even get the next version of the map out before it's time for sleep (that's optimistic though). At the latest I should have the next version ready on tuesday.

[MrBenn]

I'm looking forward to seeing this map progress, so hopefully your down-time won't be that long

[CoolC]

Alright, next version is out... and I missed my target by only two days. Not too bad

Without new sea borders though since I couldn't figure out a better way to do the short ones around denmark, and having two different kinds of borders would be worse. So I kept the old ones for the time being. It may be that I keep straight borders, but of course improved/new ones in that case.

I'm going on vacation tomorrow but it shouldn't matter much (at all) for the map. It's usually a couple of weeks between updates anyway, and simpler things like above mentioned sea borders I may even do on the laptop. I'll bring the source files along just in case.

[MrBenn]

Where's the update?

(Please can you post updates to the end of the thread as well as to the first post of the thread)