Conquer Club

This would be good.

Army of GOD approves of this suggestion. *smiles at camera, thumbs up*

Agreed, a very useful idea.

Probably the best thing to do would be to simulate a drop of a new game but with only one player, so starting neutrals would be white numbers, the other locations would be red, no extra neutrals would appear due to leftover regions when splitting among a number of players, and the actual starting values would appear. Starting values can be different on different regions. The XML permits this to provide for compensation on maps which might be unbalanced otherwise. However, I don't think any map has been quenched using this feature because there is always an uproar in the Map Foundry about different numbers of troops for different players being unfair.

totally agree with this.

currently looking at the map preview for something like feudal war gives no clue as to the starting layout of the game.

100% agree, I always find myself trawling through discussion topics to find the nuetral starts.

Completely agree. On many maps I have had to go do game searches of active games on that map in the sun and then I try to find one that is still in round 1.

Until this excellent suggestion is implemented, you have some other ways to learn the layout:

1. In your browser, go to http://www.conquerclub.com/maps/ where you will find all the XML files. Open the one you are interested in, then try to find <neutral> tags. Problem: not very convenient.
2. Use the Map Inspect feature of the Conquer Club Map Maker tool. You will need to know the URL of the Map XML, which you can find via the page mentioned in the step above. You will also want to know the image URL for the map, which you can dig up with some effort on http://maps.conquerclub.com/, or you can just use the image which is usually found in the first post of the map discussion topic in the Viewing Gallery for quenched maps, and the Final Forge for maps in beta test, or you can just leave the default image URL for the Classic map in place, and just look at the text description of the map which is produced once you click the Map Inspect button. Problem: this tool is a little out of date -- I don't think it can cope with all the latest features of the XML.
3. Use the Map XML Wizard, which is discussed here. Again, you will need the XML and image URLs. This tool will let you start a mock game, so you can see the neutrals. You can also examine the XML with the tool.

Ender's post is a great source of knowledge.

Currently, the Cartos and Lack are working on ways to move forward with Basic Map Info pages. Stay tuned for more to come.


--Andy