Malazan Empire: Blend - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

Jazzarm, on 01 October 2019 - 10:09 PM, said:

That's actually a very good point, I hadn't considered the additional players when thinking of the objective. Thanks for pointing that out!

With the tiles I am planning to make tonight, we would end up with 17 Industrials, 17 Hazardous and 15 Culturals. I think that should be fine, yeah?

I really like Jazzarm's suggestion of having a ban phase and reducing the pool of factions down to 10 as a way of making a snake draft a little more equitable.

I'd appreciate other people's opinions! It's open to discussion until we get past the map building phase. I plan to create the new planet tiles tonight then SHOULD be able to send everyone their slice colour and tiles, so I'm hoping to be able to create the map by tomorrow evening, at which point I will make a decision on how we draft based on everyone's input in here!

Jazzarm, on 01 October 2019 - 05:56 PM, said:

We actually already have 11 custom tiles that have been created for previous 9-player games, which brings our number of tiles with planets on them (blue tiles as you name them) to 31 + the 2 wormhole tiles. If you want to see what they look like, go check out the map from Game 3. Our custom tiles are Mansa III, Gwynan, Tura Nora, Ensapta, Lodd Eru, Daemon, Nevant, Silvano, Zej Rajja, Herrah VI and Everra (which is a planet in a nebula).

I'm thinking of adding 3 more tiles with planets on them (I'm looking at everything currently in the game to ensure balance), which means we would have 34 planet tiles, 2 wormhole tiles, 2 Supernovas, 2 Nebulae (+the Nebula planet tile that we created), 2 Gravity Rifts, 4 asteroid tiles and 8 blank tiles, which if I mathed correctly would bring us to the 54 tiles we need. PLUS we have the Mallice tile which exists off the main board.

Right now, we have one 4/0 planet in our custom tiles (Daemon), so I thought I'd add another 4/0 planet tile, and then two 3 planet tiles (keeping in mind that I'd be balancing the number of planet traits as well as balancing the total resources/influence to keep around the same ratio as was previously in the game).

The reason for the first (addition of a 4/0) is because right now any time someone gets the action card that allows them to exhaust someone's planet in order to gain the resources from that planet always gets used against Daemon. A second planet, I think, would help balance that.

The reason for the second and third is cause I thought it'd be fun to have a couple of 3-planet tiles on the board.

If I add that many planets, though, I think I would have to modify the objectives where you have to own X amount of planets with the same planetary trait to add 1 more for the 1VP objectives and 2 more for the 2VP objectives, because altogether including the tiles we've already custom made, we'd be adding about 5 of each planet trait to the overall game board.

Jazzarm, on 01 October 2019 - 04:50 PM, said:

I am hoping to get the map built and starting location and race selection done throughout this week so that Round 1 Strategy Phase starts on Monday.

That, of course, depends on everyone being timely in getting everything to me after I've sent out PMs to everyone, but I think we should be able to manage it!

So just for the hell of it, I think I'm gonna create 2-4 new hexes. As it stands, we have 43 hexes including all the anomalies and blank hexes. We need 54 to fill the map. I could just add 9 anomalies and blanks, but I think it would be more fun if I added maybe 3 new planet hexes, 3 anomalies and blanks. Thoughts?

Anyone have any suggestions on what we could use more of in the game? You know, without breaking it?