Special/Experimental PBEM, Huge map, minimizing micromanagement

[Mart]

Kirov?
Kindem?

your faction choices?

Gaians and Peacekeepers are taken.

Now, the difficult part... finding CMN.

[Buster's Uncle]

Shall I try to get sisko and/or t_ras interested in CMNing?

-It won't work, but I can at least get their attention...

[Mart]

What would be sufficient, is starting a game and doing 2 things only:
- check if players are far away enough
- set difficulty for all 7 factions

This is minimal, that is required. Passwords could be set by players themselves, but then they could be sent to someone for keeping them.
So maybe someone else could try to set up such game.

[Mart]

Ok, the new pbem game "January Game" seems to do fine with just generic start. How about we do the same? We could default the difficulty at librarian (no tweaking in scenario editor needed in that case).
Any opinions?

[Misotu]

Yes. As a victim of the "January Game" random start, I'm totally ok with it *except* that I insist on having ONE SQUARE worth 2 food. Just one. It's not a lot to ask ... I could want a special, or a monolith. But hey, I'm ok with pain. 

[Mart]

We can select at least medium erosion and dense cloud cover. This would produce moist environment.

[Misotu]

Sure. I don't want to overdo it, but when your best square in your HQ is 1 food 1 min things move on very, very slowly!

OTOH I've played plenty of random starts in SP and a start this bad is pretty rare, it has to be said.

[Mart]

In civ, there was this event: a friendly tribe. In Master of Orion 2, there was also like: lost colony, which were giving a city/colony, or actually settler/colony instantly.
In such cases, it seems that exploration and counting on nutrient bonus or monolith from unity pod is the way to go. And since not many colony pods can be made quickly, exploration can be enhanced. I use this strategy for such a case.
Weather Paradigm seems a must.

[Kirov]

Gimme Data Angels and I'm good to go!  Sorry for not looking at this thread for a while.

[Mart]

I have just received a message from Kindem, and he will not participate in this game. So there is 4 of us. I also choose the faction:

Kurvivor   Gaians
Misotu     Peacekeepers
Kirov       Data Angels
Mart        Believers

I think we can try to start the game the same as in "January Game"
And in Yitzi 3.4, but I will modify alphax.txt, so that we have vanila settings:
drone rule 0
copter reactor move points increase 2

There is a way to enforce proper scenario alphax.txt loading by the game on several different players computers, as long as all players have this folder structure:
 /scenarios/{scenarioname}
We will have the same folder {scenarioname} so it should work. I will add some txt file with label, so with CTRL+F4 we will be able to check, if the game recognizes this properly.
Anyway, this is just a way of convenient having specially assigned alphax.txt for a specific game without need for manually replacing it each time one is playing.

3 AI factions?
How about this:
- Hive
- University
- Cybernetic Consciousness

[Misotu]

Looks fine to me ...

[Mart]

I just tested generating a game.
3 factions started on small continents/islands, size for several bases not overlaping much, although one of them was connected to southern polar cap land and got no unity foil. Two factions got unity foils.

Do we want to try this?

Also, I will turn off commlink for human factions before contact. Is it ok?

[Mart]

One more thing:
how about we play on librarian? There would be no difficulty setting needed.

[Kurvivor]

I am OK with that

[Misotu]

Of course, we just had a bit of a disaster over at January   

Can I just ask:  Map size, you said either huge or a special. I'm not sure which is larger but I vote for the largest in the hope that it will minimise the chance of people being right on top of each other!

I'm good to go, anyway.