Have fun ;-)

Wuh?
What does that mean lol

The Twilight of Gods. It's from Norse mythology.

It's basically like Christian Apocalypse, only worse.

Hm, I just looked at the map and it has Greek gods all over the place. Oh well. :P

I really like the way you used stairs to denote different levels - it makes it easy to tell what connects to what. I'm going to try this out!

Love the artwork. Nice job!

Norsk gods, Greek gods ... what's the difference? Now shut up and pray! Uh, I mean .. play! :-)

One thing I will fix for version 1.1 is size, numbers are too small.

@ Fizzer:
Is there actually a limit on the map size, in kilobytes? This one is well over 1MB now, and I could reduce/simplify the eye-candy quite a bit if that had any impact on server traffic/costs? Just curious.

The limit is 2MB, so you're well under the limit. Reducing the size is always helpful since I pay 0.018 cents for each megabyte transferred, but don't worry about it too much :)

(suddenly, offtopic)

Um, Fizzer, that sounds like quite a lot, doesn't it? Is it only for bandwidth?


I know that the scale of things is entirely different, but for hosting of my (lets say small-medium) site I'm paying 11 złoty (~$3.80) per month, and that includes SQL database, disk space, free subdomain, and 20 GB of bandwidth. WolframAlpha says that's pretty much the same price you're paying for bandwidth alone.

And that site is quite expensive, actually - I'm only using it because they allow me to pay via text message ;). By credit card, I'd be paying them 8 zł/month (~$2.78).


(For anybody interested - the hosting company I'm talking about is boo.pl.)

There are some sites that offer a fixed bundle of bandwidth for a low price. They can get away with this because most of their customers won't come near the limit.

Therefore, these types of companies lose money on the customers that use lots of bandwidth and offsets this by all of the customers that use very little.

If all of their customers suddenly used near their limit, they would have to change their pricing scheme or go out of business.

That being said, 0.018 is a bit high. Amazon charges 0.015, but they have other disadvantages. This is all within the normal range of bandwidth costs in the US.

(now I'm getting even more off-topic - maybe you can split this topic or something? I don't want to suddenly move the discussion)

While we're talking about bandwidth - why are you not sending pages gzipped? It can easily lower the bandwidth used two, three times, espec. if you're sending data like HTML or SVG files.

(more offtopic, now that we're talking about it)

If you want to save bandwidth, why aren't you serving pages gzipped? This can easily compress HTML or SVG by two, three times.

(I don;t want to "split" the discussion - maybe you can split the thread?)

Almost all of the bandwidth comes from delivering the Flash .swf file and the maps. The html is negligible.

The .swf file is already a natively compressed format. I just tried zipping it and it only reduced it from 1,204,616 bytes to 1,201,782 bytes - that's less than a 0.2% savings. Clearly not worth it.

The maps aren't delivered as SVG. These are pre-processed when you upload them into a custom binary map format that's optimized for rendering in Flash very quickly. For example, the Götterdämmerung SVG file is 1,370,486 bytes, but the binary file that actually gets delivered to clients is only 478,612 bytes.

I'm curious about the Northern bonuses.. It would make sense for them to be one closer to the center, since it seems to be attempting to make a balanced map, and those two spots are growth stunted, i can see you want the paths to be based off the center path at the peak. which doesn't lead to that much of a problem, it gains the 2nd bonus at the same time as the other peaks, as well as the third bonus, presuming enough armies to win every attack, as well as even the last bonus.. however due to the unbalanced nature of distribution, it puts less pressure on the center top peak, *4 turns, presuming enough armies, every peak can capture all the bonuses around it.. but the top side peaks can break the bottom side peaks, the bottom side peaks can break the bottom peak, the bottom peak can break the bottom side peaks, and the top peak can break the top side peaks, but cannot be broken itself.. gives it a clear advantage..


just food for thought.

I see what you mean, I will look into that. I will also remove starting point 7 and 8 as those two are totally imbalanced and make no sense. I'm not really comfortable with the peaks being kind of dead ends, but I may have a solution for that as well, stay tuned. (/me runs off stealing shamelessly other mappers' ideas :-)

If hex-maps really are popular I could do a bigger one where starting points wouldn't be so cluttered and completely balanced. I have no idea though wether or not the map gets played at all, some kind of counter showing the number of matches played with each map would be great, Fizzer.

Somehow hex-maps feel sort of boring, figuring out how territories are connected and keeping an overview is part of the game to me. There is but little room for surprise attacks on hex maps, whereas e.g. Mosaic Madness can drive you nuts sometimes, especially in a 2 minute realtime game.

should look at Eranis World, they have a pretty good hex map, albiet not entirely evenly distributed amongst locations, and personally i like hex maps, although i know of people on here that won't play them..

Version 1.2 is pending to go public, I've rearranged a few things. Still not entirely even, fixing that would've meant redrawing large parts of the map. I've reduced the Level 4 Bonuses to 1 though, so the impact of the imbalance shouldn't be too serious anymore.
Next map will be better thought out :-)