Neutral city production wrong again?

[KGB]

Is there a bug or am I once again confused about neutral city production settings.

Game Kathago II (5882) on Bullrun. I have marked Irish's Castle as a 'good' city in the editor. But the city has a Red Archon in it which is supposed to be 'powerful'. Also Reknoys Reach was marked Normal and had an Elemental which I would have thought was 'good'.

Also in another game Kathago (5876) it's a 1v1 game. I expected us to start in opposite corners on the map (West Illuria). However we didn't and instead started close to each other.

KGB

[KGB]

Are you guys looking into this as I am still waiting for an answer on both games (which have completed but are still active for a while longer).

It appears the starting algorithm isn't working nor is the random city production working as I see most of the Bullrun cities are producing armies that are Powerful instead of Good. West Illuria I don't know as well but it too was littered with Powerful cities (Dragons, Devils, Archons) and I don't recall it being that way.

KGB

[piranha]

Yes I noticed that too. I added it to snotlings todo -

[SnotlinG]

Ok finally got around to fix this issue. It should now work like:

poor city: level 1 unit
normal city: level 1-2 unit
good city: level 2-3 unit
powerful city: level 3-4 unit

random city (for detailed cities which does not specify production): level 1-3 unit (this will be updated with better options in beta6)

[KGB]

The Starting positions part of this bug is still not fixed.

I played a 4 player Mirror Map game and instead of starting at opposite sides, we started next to each other.

This is a major issue in games where players expect to start at opposite sides and suddenly find themselves next to each other instead.

KGB

[SnotlinG]

Its actually a change made in beta5.
On maps with as many players as there are starting positions there will be randomized starts, i.e. not as far away as possible. This to increase the variety of the games

[LPhillips]

It only works if the map is designed to accommodate that. Most maps are not. Again, mapmakers need the ability to set specific spawn scenarios as possible or impossible. Maybe it's not prioritized for Beta6, but it should be near the top of the list imo.

[SnotlinG]

Lphilips,

Yes thats something I plan to look into.

As for the random starts compared to as far away as possible starts, Im not sure in what scenario it would be bad to let them be random.
Currently they are random for teamgames where you have exactly the same number of players as the map can hold, which I think should be a pretty good rule, since if you want to specify exactly where teams should start you can do this if you create a scenariomap.
Let me know an example where the random approach is bad for these circumstances?

[LPhillips]

The Waste is an excellent example, as described in the other article where we discussed this.

If the random starts are not symmetrically equivalent, then some players end up sandwiched between enemies. KGB, Piranha, and I are playing a game where I was placed in a non-equivalent start between two players (the weakest position out of 3 on each side), while the strong positions to my left and right were occupied by enemies. On the other side of the map, my ally had the weakest position of the 3 as well, and my other ally was to his left. So my team occupied 2/2 of the weak positions, the other team occupied 3/4 of the strong positions, and I was sandwiched between two enemies on the other side of the map, while none of them were in a similar position.

It looked like this:
T1 t2 T1

T2 t2 T1

With the t's representing weak or strong spots, and the number representing the team affiliation. We're still playing, game 5962 if you want to have a look.

[KGB]

SnotlinG,

I originally saw this placement error in 2 players games where there are many more than 2 start positions. For example on BullRun there are 8 spots.

123
4X5
678

In one game I started in position 8 and my opponent in position 3.

On Stratego there are 4 spots.

X1X
2X3
X4X

In one game I started in position 4 and my opponent in position 4.

Neither of those seems right.

KGB