Ben

Indeed, Game Ideas is the page with the rulesets. I have to say, looking at The World Game rules is probably the most overwhelming thing someone new to the game could do. 😀 But I’m glad you’re interested!

I can send you the Caribbean map file. You can import VASSAL saved game files (.vsav) which for Pirates CSG are the maps/oceans. You can also build your own ocean of course. You may not need it at this point, but my VASSAL tutorial might be useful. Building a big ocean takes a little time since you have to make sure it comes out right by establishing the proper borders and corners. You can actually edit the module to upload a bigger ocean picture file, but that didn’t work well when I experimented with that for this game.

For arranging an ocean, I usually just try to include some interesting features or things I haven’t done before. Sometimes that involves stringing terrain together in new or old ways. An island surrounded by terrain (often a single type, like reefs to make a lagoon of sorts) might get extra gold on it, and probably shouldn’t be a location that someone can pick for their home island (not that they would want to of course). The ocean for CG4 is probably my best one yet for a fictional ocean, partly since I had more room to work with than I did for CG1-CG3. Maybe the islands are a little too far apart given how large the ocean is, but I think it has worked out well enough and was arguably a slightly needed change compared to CG1-CG3. Tightly packed islands in a campaign game usually just mean that factions will be able to collect gold/resources more quickly, which can lead to fast paced launch cycles. That has happened for a very different reason in CG4, but it can feel a little artificial when factions are launching many ships per turn and the game size quickly spirals into crazy levels where turns start taking many many hours to play. (which I don’t mind, it just makes the game a big time commitment to keep consistent with)

Things that generally make oceans more fun to play on are stringing together terrain (sometimes with islands too) and using round earth rules for the game itself. From a gameplay perspective, I pretty much adore whirlpools at this point. I think that’s more of a convenience/play style factor than what makes a good ocean though, especially since they can be used to bypass ocean/terrain features haha. It can be fun to have whirlpools used as the only access point for certain areas – such as a separate ocean (Command the Oceans heavily featured this as a necessity of physical limitations), or a treasure laden “danger area” that seems mysterious to the factions.

Sometimes I place things randomly using the random placement method in VASSAL, but it usually doesn’t work that well so I just place things where I think they should go. I normally just use random rotation of things so they don’t look identical (how they are rotated on their x/y axis).

Overall, I guess I basically try to make things interesting (new features, connecting islands/terrain, and having at least 1-2 wild island (only) clusters) while trying to keep it as fair as possible for all players regarding home island location advantages.