Well, this is a very interesting project!

Six years ago, when our game-club existed five years, a friend of mine and I made a map from Arabia to India, Vietnam, Java, Filippines, China, Korea and Japan. Yes, it was a hell of a job, using and old map of the area and drawing all coatlines, rivers etc. etc. And cutting them from different colors of paper, and so on.

We used three sets of trading crads, playing with a total of 22 players!!

Since then, we played parts of that map, depending on how many players (unfortunately, never with 22...)

I haven't compared the arabian/indian parts yet, so I don't know what the differences are.

Oh, and by the way, in donesia and japan have LOTS of vulcanos....!

Do you have an electronic version of that map?
I'd LOVE to see it!
Imho there is to litle sea power in the eastern half of the civproject map, but a map covering Indonesia could be awesome!

If you can't host it on the net, please mail it to jon@severinsson.net (I can recieve up to 2GB large emails, so don't wory about file-size) and I will host it for you if you want.



I've actually never played the CivProject with more than 15 players, and that was with a early version of the credit system, so unbalanced that one player got Engineering for free at round 10! We quit playing round 12, as it wasn't fun when everyone had (virtually) all 51 advances...
The CivProject rules is much better balanced now, but unfortunately then the largest game I've played since was 9 players.
It's hard to get enough players for such a huge game...


No doubt there is lots of differences. Perhaps looking at each other's maps we can both make improvements.


Oh yes, they do...
I hope you only included the larger ones on the map, as an ordinary Earthquake would be unheard of otherwise...

(For the uninitiated, there isn't a single island in indonesia that haven't had an volcano at some point of (pre-)history)

And btw, welcome to the civproject Mirjam!
Seems like this side of the pond is actually taking over here lately...

Well, I THOUGHT some people might be interested...! The only problem is that I spent so much time making this map that I am a bit reluctant to just give it away or post it on the net for free... Does anybody have any ideas on that?

BTW, if you're playing with such a HUGE amount of players you definetely need a game-master, who announces the different phases, keeps track of census, speeds things up at movement, deals trade cards, resolves calamities and reshuffles the decks after buying. We did and it worked well.

We used the triple sets of the usual trade-cards, with the limitation that you cannot exceed the usual maximum. But it is easier to reach that maximum because there are more people offering that last bronze-card you need to complete the set. Trade is still chaos though, and so it should be...!

I don't see where the problem is. In my opinion one of the best things of this project and the main which engaged me it's that this is an altruistic and fantastic work for civilization fans. Lots of people working for free with the unique objective of improving generously a fantastic game!.
Best regards and merry christmas !!

Jon G.
http://www.civiboard.com/hellas/index.html

Well, there is quite a lot of people who has put (many) hundreds of hours into civproject, and is freely sharing the result:
Velusion, who did everything up two about two years ago.
Martin, who has done the entire new map himself.
Myself, who has done basicly everything else the last two years.
Jon.G, who has created Hellenization (http://www.civiboard.com/hellas).

We are in no way forcing you to share your map with the community, but you have to understand why we don't think "It was a lot of work" is a very good reason not to.


Well, our 15 players game worked quite well with just two "playing GM" (eg. players with extra responsibility), but I can beleave that larger games can use a full-time GM.


Using the civproject extra sets of commodities, that shouldn't be nessesary. Doing so a 22 players game would have 2.51 times as many cards and 2.75 times as many players, which might be tight, but doable.
And I thought trade was chaos in our 15 players game. I don't want to thingk of a 22 player one .

- Jonno

Ok, I'll think about sharing it. But first I want to compare the maps (I've been very busy, so haven't done that yet) and get the originals from my gaming club so I can scan them (it was only paper-and-scissors work, no photoshop available in 1999!). I used the original map, with extra panels. The problem of the curvature of the map was solved by omitting the central part of Asia, so there is the horizontal part (Persia, India) and a vertical part (Japan, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Filippines).

BTW, isn't trade even more chaotic and frustrating when you use four or five different commodities per number?

I'm eager to try your version, though it might be hard to find 15 people...

Acually, photoshop was first releast 1990, but I do get your point. A computer guy like me can't realy understand how one even considered doing such a work by hand, but on the other hand I can't see how one ever was able to write a letter without a computer either...


Not realy, since they are divided into east and west.


I know, and the full game requires 18...

After some mail conversations with Mirjam I finally got the first scans yesterday.
They are great!
So far I've mostly got the same areas that the CivProject map covers, but more will surely come! If someone is interested in comparing maps you can find my first try at jigsawing them together at http://jon.severinsson.net/civproject/c ... d/asiamap/

Larger extent and better jigsawing will come as Mirjam scans and I puzzle.

Just curious, does anyone know what the largest number of people in a game so far has been?

I don't know, but it's at least 18 (Apollo 18). I don't think it's any more though, as this is the first map I've heard of to accommodate more players.

Anyway, I have done a second try att the jigsaw of the southwestern part of the map, now integrating much better with the original map. Still lots of edges that needs to be cleaned up though.
Thanks to McBeth who gave me the source file for the map he's using in Zeno's Painted Porch. Without it I couldn't have made the integration as nice.
I've also made a first, very quick, jigsaw of the northeastern part of the map. It isn't playable yet, but if you're interested you can at least look at it. That's all you are going to get for a while though, as I'm going to finish the southwestern map first.

And BTW, this means that the in-progress commodities/calamities update is on a halt until I'm satisfied with the map.

After some email discussions with Mirjam I have made up some statistics for the map. I have divided it into 3 parts (The original map with western expansion, the rest of mapboard 1 and mapboard 2).

	AdvCiv	AdvCiv / Player	Mapboard 1	Map 1 / Player	Mapboard 2	Map 2 / Player
Players	8		5		8
City Sites	61	7,625	41	8,2	66	8,25
(1)-pop	57	7,125	22	4,40	47	5,875
(2)-pop	51	6,375	28	5,60	66	8,25
(3)-pop	29	3,625	27	5,40	28	3,50
(4)-pop	6	0,75	3	0,60	4	0,50
(5)-pop	3	0,375	3	0,60	0	0,00
Areas	146	18,25	83	16,6	150	18,75
Pop w/o A	285	35,625	186	37,2	279	34,875
Pop w. A	430	53,75	269	53,8	429	53,625
Expansion	235	29.375	144	28.8	253	31.625
	Pop figures includes areas with city sites. If a player has 8 cities (normal or wilderness), 4 on (1), 3 on (2) and 1 on (3) "Pop w/o A" is reduced by 13, "Pop w. A" is reduced by 21 and "Expansion" is reduced by 12.

In short Mirjam's map is matching population with agriculture perfectly, but has far to many city sites. Mapboard 1 has also far to few, far to large areas, and mapboard 2 has slightly to many (2)-pop, and to few of (1), (4) and (5).

A note about the amount of players: 8 + 5 + 8 = 21, not 22. That's because you'll only get 22 players if using all the original 9 civilizations, which isn't feasible. Mirjam didn't include Asia, and neither will I in my upcomming PBEM "The Far East" (TFE).

Those of you reading both these forums and the redscape.com ones might have read that I was thinking of adding an additional nation in the east for TFE to make them 22. That won't happen, I'll remove some city sites instead. I'll also do some area splitting on mapboard 1, and perhaps change some poplimits on mapboard 2.

I'm now done jigsawing.
Final result can be found at jon.severinsson.net/civproject/contributed/asiamap/.
Now it's time for area naming, removal of some city sites, and some pop-limit adjustments and I'm ready for PBEM.

I've now done some pop-balancing of the maps, and started to name areas. Any help is appreciated, especially with area names!
Current map is available at jon.severinsson.net/civproject/contributed/asiamap/, but it's still not the final product. Borders should be reasonably fixed by now though, so that's no barrier to naming areas.

Ok, I went ahead and tried to vectorize some.

I think the best would be to work in two steps; first to expand the current map eastwards, "Indochina", second to work from there northwards, "China".

The first part could look something like this:

http://users.severinsson.net/~civproject/indochina.pdf

I think that it´s a good idea to keep the land borders as they are on the originals while adjusting the water areas to fit the current ones in the project. What say everybody?