dolomite13 wrote:Just a quick thought about game-play.
When someone uses the forbidden lands to take out your kingdom space (think of it as closing your portal back to your home kingdom) you will loose your favored territory and adjacent to favored bonuses. So you go from a potential of +19 if you held every basic land territory down to a potential +10 (as all basic lands are now "not adjacent to favored") and you will also lose your +3 autodeploy. By this point you are probably already in trouble but this could also happen via "nukes" and because you cannot retake a kingdom this will severely cripple you if it happens early. My second game-play concern is about forbidden lands and nukes taking out special features on the right side. It will be possible to lose your special feature(s) which amount to some tactics such as dwellers movement options and up to +8 bonuses.
Anyway ... I'm just rambling because I'm bored at work ... I don't plan to change how the map is currently designed unless it seems like losing your kingdom/feature to a nuke early on absolutely spells defeat. As the map moves into beta I would love to hear peoples thoughts about it.
We ran into similar concerns with Research and Conquer once we took nukes into account. Luckily we were able to figure out a work around, though it wasn't optimal, since there were multiple territories within the separated areas (in this case the research section). Unfortunately I don't think there's any way to figure out a work around for this map that won't damage the gameplay more than it will fix it. Sometimes you just can't accommodate all the different gameplay settings and most maps have their optimal settings and their bad settings. Nukes on this map clearly could mess with gameplay substantially, but that's part of the fun of nukes, they add a large variable to the game and can seriously mess with the outcome of a game. I'd be pretty annoyed if someone nuked my starting spot, but at the same time, I'd think it was great fun to nuke someone else's starting spot too.
I think the great thing with this map is that it just forces someone to focus on their special territory places instead or, if they lose a special territory space, to focus more on their personal continent bonus instead. Either way there'll still be options open to someone who loses a bonus type and it will change how the game plays out since they won't be going after the same territories they would have otherwise, which could be seen as a feature
Personally I say just keep it as it is. Really, anyone selecting nuclear spoils knows what they're getting themselves into, so I don't think you should need to adjust the gameplay for the map at all to minimize the impact.
As far as Forbidden Lands being able to take out special abilities, I think I mentioned that at some other point but I like the explanation you came up with. I'd like to see it stay the way it is for now and see how the gameplay works out through Beta. If it really distrupts the game, then it can always be changed. I think players could choose to place a few extra troops in their special ability areas if they want to minimize the risk of someone using Forbidden Lands to remove their special abilities.
