snoopy55 wrote:stormfather - just playing it and I noticed a couple of things - All the start points seem to be situated near New York. The AIs are all rushing to get there and you get choked. I set it up taking Reading and Port Jervis off start and added Rochester, Burlington and Syracuse. One further north might help also. I also noticed that you included Fish with Grain to make Food. As I notice you plan on playing with the graphics that you plan on changing the icon for this. Until then you might want to add the Cannery. The last thing I saw, or didn't see, was Hospitals. A person should be able to place those as one of his chosen Empty Lot fillers.
Don't get me wrong, this is a great map and I enjoyed playing it.
One last thing, you might consider making this a Beta and having Falconer moving it to Maps then put the download on first post.
I chose starting cities based on historic railroads: New York Central, The Pennsylvania Railroad, The Hartford-New Haven-New York Railroad, and... the last one's name eludes me, they went from a tiny village on the hudson in northern Rockland County (south of Newburgh) to Dunkirk, but I approximated them to Pt. Jervis. I recently deleted Reading as a start location, it crowds out the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was historically much larger than the puny Reading Railroad.
In the end, I'll probably release a scenario, with the historic start locations, along with a few more optional XML files that will have more evenly distributed start locations (such as the ones you mentioned) and random industry placement for a true 'random map.' Come to think of it, it would probably make a lot more sense to make the random map priority number one; I can worry about the 'historic' scenario once the random map is playable.
Reading is already dropped, Burlington, as capitol of Vermont, is a shoe-in for a replacement. Perhaps I should add Buffalo or Dunkirk in the west, and Toronto or Ottawa up north for the Canadians? Ottawa might be better, since it's close to both Kingston, Canada and that Quebec city whose name eludes me at the moment. By the way, I also dragged that city a bit south, as it's original position was literally off the routing screen (A rude surprise for me, after shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to connect it.)
How is the random placement of resources working? Are the edges of the map resource starved? Should this be taken into consideration for starting cities?
I left out the cannery because I hate playing the Northwest or Britain and having canneries hundreds of miles inland. I figured that 'Food Factory' was generic enough, and could serve a dual purpose. I know that the icon for food factory doesn't show fish, once I get the internet again (I just returned to college and don't have a connection on my home PC yet) I'll dl the santa map as a guide, get another .tga editor and fix up some of those icons.
I left out hospitals on purpose. You can only have 8 (or is it 10?) in-city industries, any more than that and the buttons will run off the screen and you can't build a few of them. I deleted the Hospital when I was trimming down the number of industries (I think that the cannery fell under axe at this point, too.) Metros demand medicine automatically. I can't think of a metropolis that doesn't have a handful of hospitals, so I didn't re-implement it.
But the fact stands that I have one industry slot open. I was considering a war factory, it would accept steel and nitrates and wouldn't produce anything (there are too many goods as is); however it would be involved in some of the victory conditions (world war II specifically.)
I'm
almost happy with the map I've got on my home computer. I'll probably upload it as a beta in a few days, once I:
1. evade my girlfriend, job, and schoolwork enough to bring it up to beta status,
and 2. get the internet working so I can upload it.
Thanks for the input, do you think that a food factory with an updated icon showing both fish and grain turning into food will be sufficient? (and, on that note, I'll have to add an iron ore icon, update the steel mill icon, etc. - I'll be busy this weekend.) What do you think I should add as the final in-city industry? Cannery, Hospital, War Factory, something else, leave it blank...? I'll also make sure to clarify all of this in the readme that will go out with the map.
I'm not sure if I should really split Iron and Coal. Eventually, the iron icon will be silver and red (like hematite) and will hopefully look way different than the coal icon, and both coal mining, and to a lesser extent, iron mining, were important to the region's industrial history, but do you think having both will be confusing to players? Do the mines look too similar? Should I just relace both iron and coal with a generic 'Ore' that can fuel both steel mills and power plants?
If I keep both of them, I was also thkinking of letting steel mills accept coal (although this wouldn't produce steel, you'd need iron for that.) This way, there would be somewhere else to sell your coal, other than power plants. What do you think? I'm actually leaning towards a generic 'Ore' at the moment, it'll also drop the number of goods in the game (as is, there are 1 or 2 too many and they all don't appear too well on the 'goods' screen.)
Do you have the version of my map that has the extra trains? The Jervis, the 6 Coupled, the Hudson, Niagara, and Mohawk? I can't remember if I added them before or after I uploaded the map.
Thanks again for the input and playtesting, I appreciate your interest in this map.