Re: Ulysses' Maps (New Map 10/2021)
Love the aesthetics, but I (a tadpole of a cartographer) have 2 initial concerns.
- The hills feel sort of yours & mine
- Giving bush bonus to height and glyphs might pose problems
What are your thoughts?
Thanks for your input ATG! Those are both valid points and I'll walk you through why it's designed the way it is. As far as your first concern goes; this was kind of the thought experiment to begin with. Yes, yours and mine hills are a good way to make a stale map, but my thinking was 'what if a map consisted solely of small hills?' The theory was, if there are enough hills that are small enough, well distributed, and quickly accessible by melee, it might actually be a lot of fun. The map comprises of eight 7-hex hills, with the hills outside the SZ only giving you lvl 2, the perimeter hills give you lvl 2 and 2 hexes of lvl 3, and, to draw the action to the center, the middle hills offer the best position with some lvl 2 and 3 hexes of lvl3.
The map does offer 8 hexes of lvl 2 with jungle protection, but the jungle predominantly helps lvl 0 and 1 spots and of course doesn't boost any of the highest places on the board. The jungle bush near the sand hill was specifically to draw SZ development to the left more as I felt there was a bit of a rightward pull. It gives two 5 move figs lvl 2 jungle protection on turn 1 which felt like a big enough draw to balance the pull.
I justify the glyph jungle bush with the fact that the lvl 0 in this map is a pretty poor place to be. Unless you're a small figure hiding, or have a water power, you're probably just there to grab the glyph, which doesn't have any LOS protection and has 4 higher adjacent hexes that can smack down on you. The +1 D you might get will still be worse than the +1 A that everyone else will likely be getting on you.
In practice podding has not been an issue on the map. Yes, you can try and claim a hill, but rarely can you hold it. There has been a fair amount of hopping from hill to hill, almost feeling like multiple miniature fronts falling and rebuilding which has lead to some truly epic moments.
Of course most of this is just theory scape as I can only run so many games on it myself, but figured I'd let you know how I tried to avoid some cartographical pitfalls while working within my initial concept.
