I think it would add a great new dimension to the game to have a random map generator. It seems to me that many of the maps have little idiosyncracies that give an experienced player an edge.

For example, every player knows the best starting territories on their favorite maps. They know all the choke points, and key territories. Especially in teams games, the peculiarities of a well-known map make all the difference.

With a random map generator, map familiarity could be removed as a factor, and add a new level to the competition.

Someone has actually started designing something like this, and I guess it works pretty well. None of the maps have been published yet but there are screenshots of the results:

Nightshade, that is not what taxi was looking for. While these maps are indeed random, the end result will that each will be published and become a static map where familiarity with said map will lead to increased success.

What taxi is looking for is the ability for a map to be generated on the spot which would remove the benefit provided by experience with a given map. While the concept is certainly intriguing I don't think it would be practical given the nature of WL maps system. Too much goes into generating maps to have it done randomly in an efficient manner and the cost in terms of storage space would be too extreme to justify.

I believe the AI challenge is employing a random map generator in their next competition.

I remember playing a risk-clone years ago that had a random map generator.

it is surely do-able!

Taxi,
Did said risk-clone store every single game on its server? Or have as complex maps as are available on Warlight?

Have you ever looked into the map-making process to know what it entails?

It stored player info, number of turns, order of elimination, and victor.

but it did not store the map itself.

though you could save maps locally.

So it had a completely different storage/server structure.

do you want a generator that creates entirely new maps? or a generator that picks a random map from the existing maps? If you meant the first suggestion try out the second one and randomly choose one map from those thousand maps within warlight you dont know yet, which might have the same effect. if you meant the first suggestion, take a pen and write two random numbers. the first one between 1 and 44 and the second between 1 and 25 (or use dices or generate them with MatLab or what ever). First number gives you the page, second number the map. Combine both of my hints and you will have the perfect answer towards your question!^^

yeah, but storage is so cheap

Storage is cheap when you aren't the one paying for it.

There are already 1000+ maps here at 2-3MB each. That's 2-3GB of storage for maps alone without any gameplay. I would assume that each game played on a given map would require far less space to store the requisite information. Let's say 500K per game as it stands now. That means your 2000 games takes up 1GB of storage.

Having purely random maps would multiple the storage costs by a factor of ~5X. That means your 2000 games now require 2.5MB per game or 5GB total. And that is just for you. MY 1500 games would require 3.8GB.

So in the current system, two moderate players (you and I) require ~ 1.8GB of storage plus the shared 2-3GB for the maps so a total of ~4GB. Your new system would require 7.8GB for JUST two players. Expand to ten players and you go from ~12GB to ~45GB. One hundred players goes from ~100GB to ~450GB

Edited 8/11/2014 19:59:12

Ranek,

random map picker can be fun, but I bet you'd sometimes get some weird maps - might be disappointing for ranked play.

Richard,

Google cloud offers a terabyte for less than $30

Nightshade,

those screen caps look like exactly what I am talking about.

Then clearly the game requires a whole lot of terabytes seeing as Fizzer previously stated:

Amazon won't host servers for free, and it currently costs over $1000/mo just to keep the servers online.

That was back in September so I am sure his costs have only increased. Adding in random maps would at the very least double the load.

Is this really necessary the whole idea?
Because there are random start positions (see initial distribution) which makes you start on a different territory(ies) every time.
Wastelands to influence the connections and choke points.
And there is also the scenario maker, which gives you all the different versions of maps you needed.

Taxi driver, are those really the screen caps you are talking about? Because 7.8gb for two players mean 1tb can hold random maps for about 250 people. $30 for 250 people is tonnes for an online game which only very few people get paid for memberships.

storage is typically the least expensive part of any data/hosting service.

I used to have a managed server network of 4 machines sitting in a rack in a national data center. The cost was about $1200 per month. When we doubled our storage, the rate only went to $1350 per month.

As I said before, very easy to say it is cheap when it is someone else's money and time involved!

I can easily see random maps with default parameters becoming a new standard for ladder play.