The WeeWar Times

Image via Wikipedia

Most of you have probably played on one of Stirling’s maps , he is one of WeeWar’s most popular and prolific mapmakers,  and one of the best players.  Stirling’s alter ego Dan Janowak, 36, from Madison, WI., (He is moving first to Scottsdale, AZ and then on to Pasadena, CA.) is a healthcare IT consultant.   When I asked him about his hobbies he listed:

Volleyball, strategic analysis [yes as a hobby], read and keep up on the latest news in biomedicine, astrophysics, archeology and whats happening in the world today. Although I don’t always hear things first since I’m not usually reading their journals. That’s why I say I read the news and not the journals… less to read… Oh and weewar and weewar mapmaking.

Dan took a break from his busy schedule of repeatedly killing me to answer a few questions:

If you add up all the votes for the different versions you have created the most popular map in WeeWar, Europe.  Why do you think the map is so popular?

rrrob says " wwii is always popular". I’ll go with that. Who doesn’t like Europe or fighting to dominate it? There is enough room between player core positions that there won’t be any quick kills, so there is a flexibility to potentially save a team member or recover on your own. The distance between positions and the variety of terrain also provide a lot of different ways to try and win.

Let’s look at the WWII setup and BRP vs YGW. It isn’t exactly WWII, but it works. Purple has lots of income early, but can find it difficult to land an invasion force and sustain it, so there is the challenge for purple of attacking through france or Scandanavia. White has the challenge of the two front war, but has the income or should have the income to handle it. White also needs to use every unit in the game to do well. Moving around the board, red also has a two front war but with enough infantry neither yellow nor white will be able to make progress against red and since red is Russia, having lots of infantry is "natural" for the Russian style of play. Add in heavy infantry and a couple raiders and aa guns and aircraft won’t be able to penetrate Russia’s defenses so easily, making them fairly useless purchases. Eventually red can put up a DFA to secure bases from a distance and a minimum of effort. Russia can make progress against white. The red yellow front is generally a stalemate unless the red player doesn’t think like a Russian. Yellow has options, lots of options, more than most players realize. Yellow can try to dig into the Ukraine , which is easier to do in early moves, or provoke and challenge red while sending units to Tunis to help green attack blue. Yellow will have more success against red with each increase in the number of infantry sent to Ukraine per turn. Green vs Blue was always a great matchup although I’ve shifted that war considerably in version 4.02. The entire battle of green vs blue used to come down to who controlled the southern French harbor at 11,17. Green and blue have to decide how to fight each other and blue also has to decide if and how it can support the war against white in France. What it boils down to is options. Each position has a lot of options in how to go about accomplishing their missions and add in luck and every game ends up being different, although most games follow standard patterns.

For FFA it all changes. White and green usually understand that they can’t attack each other and still hold off the other positions. The play also becomes more opportunistic and there still aren’t a lot of quick kills. Based on terrain and typical player dynamics the map lends itself to a self balancing situation. As soon as one player grows strong in a given region, the others attack it and the weaker players recover. If the weaker players get attacked, then eventually the stronger players attack each other to fight for future dominance. But there is enough income on the map that allows the weaker player to recover and survive.

There are a lot of different ways to win, the terrain is diverse and creates restrictions, dominance isn’t easy to gain, recovery from errors or bad luck or too many attackers is possible, it’s Europe after all and who doesn’t want to fight for Europe and the map allows every play style including the Russia infantry forces and the British naval forces. Players who like land vehicles should probably play as Germany, not Russia.

What makes a good map vs just a popular one?

Some maps are both and others are neither. Eye candy such as map 25343 are generally going to be popular. lol Allison’s http://weewar.com/map/20874 is a good 2 player, which also made it popular. A two player game is easier to finish than a 3-6 player because if you are both online then you can run through a couple games in a night. I mark some maps as favorites to remember them even if I might never have played the map. If you really want to find out if popular is skewed, then take a poll of preferred play styles. The maps that appeal to the best cross section of preferred play styles should be the most popular. Allison’s map is largish for a 2 player map and it has lots of middle "prize" bases and harbors to fight over. The terrain forces some limitations. So it becomes good because winning isn’t simple and you can play the map many times and have different paths to victory each time. Stirling’s Europe provides more of the same. Scary Island has the best coolness factor of the top three, but has the most difficult path to victory since the harbors are generally not in places where boats can join the frackas soon after being built. If the unit doesn’t get used the first turn it appears, then haven’t you wasted some of your investment? Number 4, Earth, is cool but it takes too long to win and get anywhere and it is more likely to lead to naval stalemates. Scary Island, Necklace from Tiffany’s and Earth all play slowly, so while they are popular they don’t get played as much. So there are two more pieces: coolness factor of the map and how quickly do players get into battle and get a sense that the game is progressing as well as how quickly is the game won.

Balance seems to be one of the hardest aspects of WeeCartography, do you have any tips for novice mapmakers?

Check back tomorrow for Stirlings answer to this question, it was such a complete guide that it deserved it’s own post!

What are your favorite maps to play?

Any European map, even if it is zoomed in to be just Great Britain vs Northern France. They tend to have a variety of "realistic" lol terrain that isn’t just a row of hedges.

• Stirling’s Europe version 3
• Take me I’m Cuba – but it needs to be fixed for more 3 player options.
• Fortress
• http://weewar.com/map/24524 Very hard for players to gang up on a player once a player has gained control of their corner.
• Mo’s Rubicube – tight space need to manage resources.
• http://weewar.com/map/25611 This looks nice, but I may have only played it once a long time ago.
• http://weewar.com/map/27802 This looks fun, but any 3 player game should have the the one ganged up on as blue.
• http://weewar.com/map/27971 This is a lot of fun and it might need another tweak or two, but we’ll see.
• http://weewar.com/map/25957 This would be good if it were balanced a bit better – purple needs to be able to get to one front fairly quickly. Otherwise purple doesn’t really stand a chance.
• http://weewar.com/map/28035 This could be good if green was not in the middle and was in the lower left corner.
• How could I forget this? Stirling’s Europe 4.02

If I like a map I usually copy it and fix it.

My favorite map will hopefully be Stirling’s Europe 4 after however many tweaks it goes through to balance for blue vs red – 3v3 WWII style – FFA and probably top vs bottom. I’ve been wanting to widen the map for a while so that red and yellow could walk around the Black Sea, which frees up the last remaining easy stalemate on the map.

Who are your favorite map makers?

Uh probably VandiL and Niki .

Do you have any tips or tricks that you use in the map editor?

Find a map you like and copy it and modify it and go from there. When I make my real world maps, such as Europe I google "Satellite map ukraine" without the quotes and different countries of course. There is a company that provides terrain information and city/road information. Sometimes I copy that and figure out a hex grid to lay over the top of the map and then I just make judgements as to what each hex should be. Then once the first draft is done I check for playability based on terrain limitations, then I try to figure out where to put the starting locations so that players have equal bases. China is rough because all of the big cities are in the Northeast and along the coast. So placing even starting positions can be rough.

Any final tips or words of wisdom on mapmaking or WeeWar in general?

Play against yourself.
Ask someone if it is balanced.
Play someone that has a really high ranking with that player as various positions. You’ll learn things about the map you might not see during map creation.

Weewar in general? Have fun and remember to use the bonuses and prevent the opponent from using them.

Thanks Dan! If anyone has any questions for Dan please leave a comment here and if you found this information particularly interesting and love Stirling’s maps, show your thanks by leaving a comment or buying him a Pro account !