Many people play custom scenarios, be them strategic, to offer fixed starting positions or to embrace the Diplomacy playstyle of the game.

However, people are often not of experience when it comes to making scenarios, so, I offer some helpful hints to get people needed assistance for making custom scenarios, and templates in general!

1 - When you are assigning open seats to your template, make sure to click load template again, customize the template you are planning to play and then overwrite your save on it. This way, every time you open that template for playing, you will have Open Seats filled out already! Saves time and kills the tedious aspect.

2- For larger maps, make use of being able to click a bonus and assigning to it the properties you want. Make use of customizing all territories to assign a standard starting armies for territories. Be sure to make use of the Tab button to save time between assigning armies or changing the color of a territory. You might want some basic keyboarding skill first though!

3- You should always try to set your Move Order to something that is not No-Luck Cyclic. You'll generally want Luck, and No-Luck Cyclic is a poor mode in general, killing off a lot of strategic aspects (for some at least).

4- Make sure to adjust the Luck Bar. 75% Luck is an obscene mode where 4 armies can't kill half as many (something WarLight suggests to do in its very own tutorial! Attack a territory with twice as many!). 0 - 25% is my usual range for templates of any sort, 33% being used occasionally by myself.

5- When you can, avoid changing between templates within your Template Library. It can cause some very disastrous mix-ups in my experience.

6- Don't go above x10 for your bonuses, it puts proportions out of whack. It's best to follow the template's pre-set bonuses, and adjust based on where you want emphasis. For example, a 230 BC Diplomacy should have lots of power based in Greece, Italy and Tunisia (Carthage). But, if you x100'd, the differences would be gaping between the 3, offering little strategic possibility.

7- Standard prerequisites should be less than 50% Boot Rate, and more than Levels 3 - 10, depending on preference. Using those, you'll avoid noobs.

8- Make use of cards! They can often make templates 3x better. Make sure you adjust the amount of cards you can hold and how many you get per turn according to how you want your template to be. If its strategic, you're probably going to set pieces per turn higher than the sum of minimum pieces per turn you receive. If Diplomacy, I'd recommend leaving it even to Sum of Min. Pieces per turn, to make sure nobody has over-advantages.

9- Try to establish "Budgets" and Plans. I.e., We shouldn't have many slots; Let's avoid allowing too many cards. They should act as supports to your overall goal with the template.

10- In case your game stops advertising, kick out an open seat and then replace with a new one. It re-advertises it.

11- You can swap players' slots in-game.

12- If you are playing Diplomacy, try to keep the rules to a minimum. This will allow your Host's Message to "host" other things, among these the list of what slot is what (a growing feature among Diplomacy templates).

5- When you can, avoid changing between templates within your Template Library. It can cause some very disastrous mix-ups in my experience.

Boy, this happened quite often to me. It tends to swap the Host Message around. Ideally, refresh before setting into changing a different scenario.

7- Standard prerequisites should be less than 50% Boot Rate, and more than Levels 3 - 10, depending on preference. Using those, you'll avoid noobs.

I like to set it either to level 2 or 7. Level 2 ensures no first game players nor accounts just recently created to cheat from joining, while 8 offers even bigger protection in that aspect. It depends on the game's size, if it's a 35+ slots one I'd rather keep at 2 to fill faster, slightly.

10- In case your game stops advertising, kick out an open seat and then replace with a new one. It re-advertises it.

From my experience, a Real-Time game takes about 30 minutes or 1 hour to stop advertising.

11- You can swap players' slots in-game.

Be extra careful with this one, slots may glitch if you swap while a player is joining and declining hoping for a better slot, "locking" him in the slot he was glitched in. Most of them end up leaving the match, locking a slot (thus forcing you to go to slots again and risk yet another glitch) or, in worst case scenario, cause the guy to curse the hell out of you in the chatbox.

12- If you are playing Diplomacy, try to keep the rules to a minimum. This will allow your Host's Message to "host" other things, among these the list of what slot is what (a growing feature among Diplomacy templates).

I'll admit, the character slot quite annoys me, as I try to keep all my games with a complete slots list, it takes a good portion of them. And so, the rules and/or backstories get to be considerably shortened.

4- Make sure to adjust the Luck Bar. 75% Luck is an obscene mode where 4 armies can't kill half as many (something WarLight suggests to do in its very own tutorial! Attack a territory with twice as many!). 0 - 25% is my usual range for templates of any sort, 33% being used occasionally by myself.

Huh... I completely disagree. I hate luck modifiers, it kills the game's strategy partially. I mean, defending a territory with 10 troops against the enemy's 1005 makes me feel like flipping my table. Luck modifier shouldn't even exist if you ask me, but in any case, I say it shouldn't ever be set above 15%.

1 - When you are assigning open seats to your template, make sure to click load template again, customize the template you are planning to play and then overwrite your save on it. This way, every time you open that template for playing, you will have Open Seats filled out already! Saves time and kills the tedious aspect.

Worth noting that whatever slot you put yourself in when you do this trick will also save you on that slot, so the next time you open the same template, you'll be set to the one slot you chose.

Don't go above x10 for your bonuses, it puts proportions out of whack. It's best to follow the template's pre-set bonuses, and adjust based on where you want emphasis. For example, a 230 BC Diplomacy should have lots of power based in Greece, Italy and Tunisia (Carthage). But, if you x100'd, the differences would be gaping between the 3, offering little strategic possibility.

YES, more folk need to know this.

4- Make sure to adjust the Luck Bar. 75% Luck is an obscene mode where 4 armies can't kill half as many (something WarLight suggests to do in its very own tutorial! Attack a territory with twice as many!). 0 - 25% is my usual range for templates of any sort, 33% being used occasionally by myself.

I think this is more a personal preference of yours than that it has anything to do with how to create a good scenario.

If you feel needing twice as many attackers as there are defenders is too much, you should consider changing the kill rate instead of the luck modifier. The default kill rate of 60% means you'll always need more than 1.5 times the number of attackers, even when luck doesn't (or, with 0% luck, can't) "steal" any kills.

Personally I've never understood the extreme averseness to luck... back when we played Risk on a board, we were playing with 100% luck for crying out loud!

^ Risk is also, as the name suggests, a game about calculated risk-taking and decision-making in the face of uncertainty.

Luck is part of that. Not that I'm against 0% SR templates (there's still risk-taking in that you don't know what your opponent's going to do and have to weigh some probabilities) but there's no reason to be completely against luck.

On number 1 :

Yeah. But you can still change it by going it to open seats before making the game. Or, swap it in the game lobby.

Number 4 :

Luck is a primary influence of the game, but you don't need it to win strategically and it is a matter of preference.

I just reached level 47 a few minutes ago and boom! a handy guide to custom scenario; Lucky me.

I left this purposely brief, to encourage others to offer some advice as well!

New tip:

13- Regarding historical based scenarios, historical accuracy should be key, but overall balance should be favored to make sure people don't rage quit, etc.

14- Regarding non-scenario diplomacy, be specific about how one goes about claiming their starting territory (ies).

13- Regarding historical based scenarios, historical accuracy should be key, but overall balance should be favored to make sure people don't rage quit, etc.

This right here. A WW1 based scenario can't have Germany as strong as Australia for obvious reasons, but if you make Germany's income 2.000+ while Australia has just 150, well, that's going to cause trouble.

A good way to make a slot stronger is to give it more armies on the map at the start.

This is, at times, a better way to balance than increasing the value of its bonuses. It ensures that if the player with that slot leaves, no one is made too powerful by taking their bonuses.

Note that starting armies make a slot very powerful during the first few turns, but lose effectiveness as the game progresses. Special scenarios can make good use of this; ex. a WWII diplomacy should give Germany lots of starting armies as to allow for a proper "Blitzkrieg" in the beginning but give the allies a good chance of winning in the long-run.

Edited 6/13/2015 06:04:33

Another tip: Don't do constant 2s. Generally, in the back, it should be 1s or 0s. On the front lines, that's different.

16- *I mentioned this in another thread, realized it was good, so I am adding it here!*

If you want players to be able to choose what slot they want, make the game a team game and offer 1 player for every team, try to do this based on the letters! This way, players choose teams, but they are really choosing their slot. This is a good combination with showing on the host's message what slot is what for creating a noob-friendly scenario.

The problem is when you realise all the 2s after finishing the scenario, in a map with single-territory bonuses lol

A good way to make a slot stronger is to give it more armies on the map at the start.

This. From testing games with friends I've started to come to the conclusion more and more that the way to give a starting slot more power without breaking the balance is to give them lots more men, but only a small income benefit.

This way also if that player is defeated, the new player taking over doesn't get his (+1000) bonus or whatever and simply become the new villian. He'll just get a normal bonus from that region :)

It gives the impression then that the strong player has been a nation stockpiling in preperation for war (such as the Germany example) rather than simply having a better income.

I can't wait to hit level 47 and start hosting custom senarios myself :)

Edited 6/14/2015 16:36:05

If you want players to be able to choose what slot they want, make the game a team game and offer 1 player for every team, try to do this based on the letters! This way, players choose teams, but they are really choosing their slot. This is a good combination with showing on the host's message what slot is what for creating a noob-friendly scenario.

This makes the first 5 players fill in all stronger slots from the very beggining.

And the first to come aren't always going to stick around for all the game.

I like leaving normally so that people actually have to keep rejoining to get a slot, having to work more for it will make it less likely the person will quit.

17 - Generally, if you want to designate yourself as a scenario maker who is just a special little guy, you are going to want to make your scenario very different from other scenario makers. For example, the abused WW2 and Modern-Day Genres. Generally stay away from these until you feel like you really want to give it a shot. here are a few good places to start making scenarios, and better yet, to give you some food for thought!

Medieval Western Europe
Classical-Era Asia
Black Death Europe (that would be a fun scenario kek)
Africa (early 1800s)
Napoleonic Wars
Incas/Mesoamerica/Mayans etc.

18 - Generally, you want to stay away from a lot of meta-game things, such as "Relations Points" or "Trade resources". These are things especially dangerous in Real-Time. These could work relatively well in Multi-Day given a proper audience. But these thigns are really proper for scenarios involving trusted friends or people who are generally willing to give it a shot and go along with it.