Capitol City Placement

[KGB]

How are the capitol cities assigned?

Is it by the map designer or are they randomly selected at game time?

I only ask because I just started a 4 player game on Riverwalk and the capitols are not even close to being evenly distributed. The 4 of them in my game are basically in the upper left corner of the map leaving 2 sides with half the map to themselves and the other 2 sides cramped in a corner and forced to go through or far around their opponents to reach 1/2 of the map.

KGB

[SnotlinG]

The mapcreator place a one (or more) starting cities for each player, and then at mapinitialisation the system will randomize which players to use in this game, and then randomizes which dedicated startingcity each player get. So its a bit random, but you cant get any city.
I guess the issue in your 4 player game is that its a 8 player map, so it has 8 valid playerstarts (which has a few possible diffrent starting locations each).

[piranha]

When making the map you set which cities 1 force can start from. On this map there are 12 areas I think where you can start. So its randomly selected from a bunch of possible cities. Which is why you happened to start like that.

It works with 8 players. Having maps made for 2, 4, 6 players would be pretty good.

[KGB]

Thanks for the info on capitol city placement.

When I did the Warlords 4 patches I changed the capitol city placement to maximize distances between players so that regardless of how many players were in a game it placed the players as far apart as possible.

I did it by breaking the map into a 3x3 grid that looks like:

123
456
789

1) Randomly selecting a side and placing it on the map. For a 2, 4, 6-8 player game that initial placement was in a corner (area 1,3, 7 or 9 in my grid). For a 3 or 5 player game it was the middle of one of the sides (area 2,4,6, or 8 in my grid) so that the final placement of all sides would be a triangle/pentagram.
2) Randomly selecting the next side and placing it as far away as possible. For a 2,4, 6-8 player game it means the diagonal opposite corner. For a 3 or 5 player games it means a triangle corner (so if 1st player was in area 2, next player would be in area 7).
3) Randomly selecting the next side and placing it as far away as possible from the other TWO sides already placed.
4) Repeat step 3 until all sides placed.

2 player example:
Player 1 gets selected to grid area 9. Player 2 gets put in grid area 1.

3 player example:
Player 1 gets selected to grid area 4. Player 2 gets selected to grid area 3. Player 3 gets selected to grid area 9.

4 player example:
The 4 corners 1,3,6,9.

5 player example:
Player 1 gets selected to area 6. The other players would end up in 1,2,7,8.

Even though you have 'set' capitol cities (compared to random ones in Warlords 4) you could apply the same logic when selecting initial starting cities. That way even on the Riverwar map you could play 2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8 player games with players equally spaced out.

As it is now, 2 of the sides in my 4 player game have huge advantages in initial starting position.

KGB