Twilight Imperium Tutorial: Guide to Map Making

This is just a fun, casual guide for those of you interested in map building. We all have our methods and Matt is here to share with you how he makes tournament maps. At this point he's made 20 tournament maps and a handful of more casually minded maps, so maybe his opinion is worth something here? Hard to say, but here's 40 minutes of him rambling about it. Trust us, he could have gone on for much longer...
0:00 Introduction
2:35 Setting the Wormholes
6:08 A Note on Organization
8:06 Setting the Anomalies
21:00 A First Pass on Planets
24:07 Taking Stock
25:30 Running the Numbers
30:42 Looking at Old Drafts
34: Looking at Full Maps

[@bobbyhall994]

Would LOVE to see more map videos in general. I get that Milty draft is more popular but would love to see map analysis and building a whole map together

[@Nnonetwo]

This is very helpful! I play TI in a casual group and I am always searching for pre-made maps. Now I feel MUCH more confident in simply creating my own. I worry a lot about galaxy balance, even if our games are chaotic and random and silly.

[@TronAction]

I've been waiting on something like this! I've made custom maps for my friend group but I'm not sure I'm the best at balancing the maps. This helps alot! Thank you Matt!

[@robvitaro5545]

This was a great video! I liked seeing your thought process on both the balance and the aesthetics.

[@calvineagar1863]

This was fantastic, I really learned a lot for my own building

[@BlitzKreeg8]

Thank you, Matt!! You rock

[@cplmackinnon]

Love the idea!

[@sparty6231]

How did you get TTPG to be setup like that?

[@EasyRider5642]

first! And thanks for making this Tutorial, will help me already on sunday :)

[@septimustavi9352]

That was insightful. I do this process very differently, though I'm creating full maps for the people I play with and do it for varying player counts (4 through to 8). I start by working out whether I'll prioritize resources or influence, and roughly how much of each they should have in their slice. I then use an excel sheet I created to determine which planet systems go into which players slice. I focus on getting their ideal resource and influence spends as close to my rough allowance as possible across all the slices. Then I go through and try to make sure that no slices have more than 2 extra planets over the slice with the least planets and no slice has more than 3 planets that have the same trait (this is the challenging part). Once this is all done I go to keegan's map generator and create a custom galaxy in which I'll place the slices, then I'll start playing around with where each tile is going to go within in a slice (sometimes I'll even move the slices around, eg. swap the northern slice with the southern slice), where to have wormholes, what to do for the equi distants, anomalies, empties, and so on, until I'm content with the overall layout. Then I take a photo of it, with the tile numbers clearly displayed, so we can set-up the map quickly on game day. I am looking forward to the day this group have all played enough where I can start to do something similar to a milty draft with them, that'll be amazing and I'd probably approach building a map closer to how you talked about doing it (cos imbalanced resource and influence values should get balanced by the players choices during the draft)...but I think thats a ways off for now.

[@Cards0rDice]

Would loooooove more premade maps! And more 6/6/6

[@Grynjolf]

Not sure why this showed up in my suggestions, but what software is this? Looks similar to tabletop simulator but can tell it's different.

[@H4rrysp94]

Tabletop playground is the name

[@CaptainOmNoms224]

Now how do we add these to our custom milty draft?

[@tylercorbett786]

I know you guys are super busy but anyway you could make a video on how to play asynch games? Either way appreciate all the content. I could of listened to a three hour video of you making a map.

[@SpaceCatsPeaceTurtlesPodcast]

We could do a video on it. I know there are a lot of resources for learning on the async discord and a lot of people available to help. but we could potentially put together a starters guide on async. I'll look into it!

[@tylercorbett786]

@@SpaceCatsPeaceTurtlesPodcast appreciate it. It's just a little intimidating. I'll have to look into the discord.

[@chrisedwards6573]

Amazing that you can have so many thoughts and ideas about how to make a map or slices and yet everything comes out so badly. I know that it will never be 'balanced' but I've never seen a set of slices for any of your tournament stuff that I thought wouldn't leave at least one player with a bad game, and I've never seen a Milty draft where it isn't at least two players having a bad game. I think these pre-constructed maps/slices just need to be put to bed as a bad idea. Yeah, if you let poeple build their own slices they'll optimize them and that makes for boring/samey maps, but it also makes for everyone having a more fun time. I wouldn't want to join any tournament where I'm automatically more likely to lose just because I randomly was 5th in draft order. And no, I've never been in one of your tournaments and I never will. I have helped people practice for them, and it was always a bad time, without exception. I'd always have rather used my time doing almost anything else, and I get the same feeling every time I play a milty draft game (I'm also never going to play one again; I'd rather pull out my own toenails). There are so many ways you can make a map both interesting and fair, and these pre-built slice maps NEVER do both.