270BC Wars - Official Thread
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Mistress of Italy, Rome, looking over the sea, discovers herself engaged in the inexorable struggle for survival against the might of Carthage, encroaching on Africa and Spain, and the islands nearby, as far as the columns of Hercules, the end of the World.
In Greece, the royal hegemony of Macedonia is bitterly challenged by a warring coalition of free cities and leagues, from Sicily, in the west, to Asia, in the east.
Across what remains of what was taken by Alexander, what had begun as a spate of civil conflicts conflated into a dynastic strife between the new realms of Egypt and Syria.
Beyond the Hellenistic world, the ascendancy of Parthia looms on the horizon, eager to champion the resurgence of Persian supremacy to her former greatness.
Meanwhile, hailing from unknown lands, the tribes of Numidia are swarming out of the wilds of Libya, their savage want for slaves and violent desire for booty, unquenchable.
'Tis a clash of civilizations: for either side, the other side is to be eliminated.
By Cernel
Happy new year everyone! I'm excited to present a new map (modification) officially released (1 January 2021) for TripleA 2.5.
Download it by launching TripleA and clicking on "Download Maps" or from here:
https://triplea-game.org/map/270bc-wars/
The game is 2 sided, with 4 powers per side, but a random hostile player is going to add some mayhem to the fray (it gets "triggered" easily).
The main concept behind this modification is having a game like 270BC but funnier, faster and with more balanced units. The game scarcely tries to be any historical (In particular, the territory ownerships of the original 270BC are intentionally simply kept no matter if historically wrong.). I believe this is also the first TripleA game coming with a full rulebook too!
Estimated average play-time (at normal settings) is 6 hours per game, with all good players.
Please use this thread for whatever you want to say about the game, if only to let me know you liked it or not. If you want to be through, be sure to make clear how you played the game (settings, number of players and so on) and maybe share the save-game.
I believe the game is finished, but changes are, of course, possible, and I'm open to whatever contributions. In particular, it would be good to fix the many wrong or misplaced territory names, but this would also need someone providing a full set of new images for all territory names (also non-changed ones). Map-skins are also welcomed. In any case, be sure not to provide anything copyrighted.
Play-testing balance is still critical.
Cheers!
"270BC Wars" is a map modification of "270BC". Credits are at the end of the game's notes. For the official 270BC thread:
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/1448/270bc-official-thread
Special thanks to the following pre-release (before 1 January 2021) play-testers (lobby usernames, each possibly followed by the forum username):
Navalland @Schulz
guerrilla_J @guerrilla_J
Aposteles -
@epinikion asked me what the probability of Jerusalem falling before the turn 1 of Egypt is (the game version is 1.0.0.0.0.0).
Here are my calculations, assuming the defender takes casualties to maximize its remaining power (and using the regular dice system).
Up to 5 non-owned spearmen/archers can be placed in Jerusalem before the first turn of Egypt.
The probability of 5 is 1 over 7,776 and the probability of winning the ensuing battle is 46%.
The probability of 4 is 25 over 7,776 and the probability of winning the ensuing battle is 23%.
The probability of 3 is 250 over 7,776 and the probability of winning the ensuing battle is 7%.
The probability of 2 is 1,250 over 7,776 and the probability of winning the ensuing battle is 1%.
The probability of 1 is 3,125 over 7,776 and the probability of winning the ensuing battle is 0%.
The probability of 0 is 3,125 over 7,776 and the probability of winning the ensuing battle is non-sense.
The probability of Jerusalem falling before the first turn of Egypt is then "(0.46(1)+0.23(25)+0.07(250)+0.01(1250))/7776=(0.46+5.75+17.5+12.5)/7776=36.21/7776".
That is about 0.47%, so Jerusalem should averagely fall once every 215 games before Egypt can do its first turn.
Can anyone please check I've not calculated anything wrongly?
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@Cernel why is there a '+' folder in the map? Seemingly it's making the download size quite a bit larger than it needs to be.
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@lafayette It's of course full of useless things (which may be of use if anyone would want to make changes to the map). I believe the map folder itself contains only useful items.
For example,
@thedog said in General 2.6 Discussion:@lafayette said in General 2.6 Discussion:
@thedog It's just the location of where the game notes are stored that has changed. Using an image makes updating game notes far more difficult (arguably impossible without the original doc file), I do not recommend it, but it's your prerogative.
In my case I always put the original doc in the same folder as the png.
I would put the useless "original doc" inside the "+" folder outside the "map".
It would be generally (not only for this map) good if only the "map" folder is downloaded via TripleA and renamed as the repository name. That would also get rid of one folder level and avoid downloading useless things like the preview images.
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@cernel said in 270BC Wars - Official Thread:
I believe the map folder itself contains only useful items.
Well... Intendedly so. I've just realized that the map has a useless "capitol.txt" file which shall be removed at the next update. Of course, there may be other uncallable items which I'm missing.
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@cernel It used to work that way where only the contents of map folder would be distributed, to simplify it's the whole repo. To keep perspective, the preview image download is not very significant to downloading the entirety of the '+' folder. Recommend to keep a personal repository for that content and link to it in a README.md file.
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@lafayette It is just not practical, and at risk of being forgotten overtime, splitting things between repositories. As in the example I've made, I tell you that many map-makers are keeping useless items in the map repositories. You are just seeing them clearly in this case since I took care to group them within a
+
folder instead of leaving them within themap
folder.The most widespread example may be leaving the (useless) base image of the map in the map folder. Example:
https://github.com/triplea-maps/world_war_ii_global/blob/master/map/baseTiles.png
(That is particularly useful to have if you want to make some tweaks to the placements and other things.).In my case, something like that is in
https://github.com/triplea-maps/270bc_wars/blob/master/%2B/polygonsMap.png -
@cernel Git remembers all files that were ever added, you can delete them and retrieve them easily. If the files are not used, what value do they have? There is a saying in programming YAGNI - you aren't going to need it. There is also the 'sunk cost fallacy' that says it's hard to give up on something after an initial investment has been made. I think you probably can safely remove the unused stuff. It could be done automatically one day via a script to clean up map repositories. To another extent, a published map is not a place to maintain a scratch-pad of useless items. We have a whole repository available for anyone to upload useful but not used map assets, perhaps those items would do well uploaded there. In the meantime, any useless items is adding to disk space requirements, slowing down how fast the map runs, slows down the download, and slows down a number of operations performed during map maintenance. So it's a bad idea to put unnecessary artifacts in a map repository.