SirSebstar wrote:it looks like a map that can ONLY be played by people with bob installed
BoB certainly helps a lot with this map, as with any complex map. But it is playable without it.
Here's the basics:
1. Both land segments and water segments are territories.
2. Any territories that are adjacent can attack each other, unless there is ice in between. So,
a. Baffin Bay and Davis Strait attack each other (adjacent water terts)
b. Ekati and Fort Reliance attack each other (adjacent land terts)
c. Coats Island and Hudson Bay attack each other (land and water terts adjacent)
d. Eureka and Alert do NOT attack each other, even though they are on the same island, because there is a band of ice in between them.
e. Banks Island and McLure Strait do NOT attack each other, because of the band of ice on the north edge of the island.
3. All the land segments are part of bonus regions, and colour-coded as such. So, you know that Steffanson Island and King WIlliam Island are part of the same bonus region, because they are the same colour, even though they are not adjacent.
4. The borders between the water terts are not delineated with heavy lines, but they are still easily visible because of differences in the colour of the water. So, you know that Arctic Ocean, Beaufort Sea, and McLure Strait are three different bodies of water because they are three different shades of blue.
5. Water terts are part of a bonus ONLY if they lie on an explorer's route. So, McLure Strait is part of a bonus because McLure's route runs through it, but Arctic Ocean is not part of any bonus. Some of the explorer's routes contain both land and water terts. You can always tell which terts are part of an explorer route, not only by tracing the coloured line that marks the route, but also because there is a coloured circle in the route. If a tert is part of more than one route, then the circle is more than one colour. See the red and yellow circle in the McClintock Channel? That tells you it is part of both the Amundsen (yellow) and Franklin (red) exploration route.
The main difficulty is in the fact that the land bonuses are often not directly connected. So Alert and Eureka, which are both needed for the Ellesmere Island bonus, do not connect, and if you wanted to take one from the other you would have to go through seven other terts along the way. Quite a tortuous route! But once you wrap your head around that, it's actually pretty logical. There are no one-way attacks to make life difficult for you, which to me makes it a lot easier than many of the WW II maps, for instance.
Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 1:45 pm
