Eight Gates

#Players Any (2-22 seems most likely)
#Provinces ~220 land, 10 water
Balance MP Even
Era Any
Preset Races No

gateoverlandpreoc8.jpg
Here's a preview of the overland map (without province borders). It's a swampy area with 4 flavors of gates visible. Clockwise from top left: water, life, blood (the pool of blood at the bottom), astral. The blood gates look different from the other 7 flavors of gate because blood magic is different from the 7 other types of magic in dom3.
(The thing in the middle is just decoration.)


Story

While the Pantokrator ruled, there was relative peace in the world. Skirmishes would break out from time to time, but not major wars. The people were united under one god. Since his sudden dissappearance, the world has turned to Chaos. The various peoples of the world have each rallied under their local deities and are fighting for primacy. Even the world itself is being torn apart - rifts have opened up in the fabric of the world, swallowing land and lake alike into voids of nothingness. In the wake of this chaos, eight flavors of magical gates, previously only accessible to the Pantokrator and his highest servants, have opened up across the land. Any common man can travel the gates, crossing huge areas of land in a short time - but sometimes there is a horrible price for travelling the Gates.

With the people warring and the world itself in destruction, one supreme god must rise to power, to calm the world and to rule the heavens. Will it be you?

Details

A few important things should be discussed. First, how the gates and nodes work, and second, the FOUR DIFFERENT versions of this map (for the price of one!)

Gameplay-wise, there are five gates of each of the 8 flavors (fire,air,earth,water,astral,death,nature,blood) scattered across the overland map. If you step into any of the five pools of blood on the overland map for example, you are brought to the blood node (which looks like the four nodes in the picture above, except blood themed). In the blood node, you can exit through any blood pool. If you stay in the blood node (or any node) too long, you will have bad things happen to you, depending on which of the .map files you play with. You might also be able to recruit blood mages (other mages for other nodes) in the blood node, once again, depending on the map version. The other seven flavors of gates all function the same way.

The 4 versions are:
1. Gates provide connections between faraway lands, but nodes are not special. Nodes are weakly guarded.

2. Gates provide connections between faraway lands, and nodes harm those who stay in them for long. Nodes are weakly guarded.

3. Gates provide connections between faraway lands, nodes harm those who stay in them for long, and each flavor of node allows recruitment of spellcasters with that magic path. Nodes are weakly guarded.

4. Gates provide connections between faraway lands, nodes harm those who stay in them for long, and each flavor of node allows recruitment of spellcasters with that magic path. Nodes have stronger thematic guards than versions 1-3.

Balance Notes

The starts are not preset, but many provinces are marked "nostart". The possible start locations are spread out, prevent starting on the edges, all have the same number of neighbors, avoid excessively bad neighbor terrain combinations (no starting surrounded entirely by wasteland), and avoid being in the same spot as a gate. For a map that has great flexibility in the number of players, and not definite start sites, I think it would be hard to find a better balanced map. Now… If you play on a version that provides wizards in all of the different nodes, maybe that helps some races more than others, and if you play with gates that harm you, undead are probably at an advantage. But the starting conditions are both flexible and balanced, imo. The map has a lot of chokepoints, and a fairly low number of average neighbors. This is countered by The Eight Gates - a means of teleporting across the world. This means that despite the low average connectivity, there is no/little chance of getting boxed in because of myriad options for expansion/attack.

Author and Credit

Made by Zylithan, used AoW:SM editor (with community UPatch1.4) and GIMP

Version history

Currently 1.00. No previous versions exist. No errors have been found. Note that there are 4 .amp files, with different properties, discussed above.

Download Link

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=d3smm&Number=552196&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=all
(There is a .rar and a .zip)

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