^ Island pattern 1
Prison Islands 65x90=6k, 36% land, Classic, Flat, v1.sav
Islands imprisoned by islands. Why? The idea was to delay, for at least some tribes, expansion, access to other areas, and meeting other tribes for a different game experience than most maps provide. (In terms of diplomacy, this scenario is the opposite of "The Hunted" in which every tribe begins meeting others on turn zero -- right off the bat!) To escape, the inner island tribe must either build or capture a city on the outer ring island, or ally with the tribe(s) occupying the outer island for access to the greater sea. Even when not allied and without a friendly city on the outer island, it is still likely that the inner island tribe will meet other tribes eventually, when other tribes are visiting (or attacking, or allied with) the outer island tribe. 9 players=250 land tiles-per-player, 21 players=100 land tiles-per-player. There are 30 sets of islands in this map, so 60 players would leave no island unoccupied.
Also attached is a shell script generator which can create this type of map at different sizes/dimensions by repeating an island pattern with randomized terrain and river tiles. Five island patterns are available and any of them can be specified on the command line when running the script. The fifth pattern, shown below, provides yet another twist to the game -- the outer island is composed of arctic tiles on which settlers can not build cities and only engineers can transform those tiles, which delays all contact with other tribes until after Explosives technology has been researched (with the only exception being contact via Marco Polo's Embassy.) When a pattern using arctic tiles for the outer island is selected, no start positions are generated for the outer island. Each island pattern may also have a different ratio of land tiles for the outer and inner islands - more tiles on one than the other may give one tribe an advantage over the other.
^ Island pattern 2 ( add "-i 2" on the command line after the script's path)
^ Island pattern 3 (same as pattern 1 but oriented horizontally rather than vertically for a wider map rather than a taller map.)
^ Island pattern 4
^ Island pattern 5
EDIT: Incidentally, for anyone who can't or doesn't want to run a shell script on their system, some of the map generator scripts can be run successfully at
http://www.onlinegdb.com/online_bash_shell
Just unzip the shell script file and open it in any (plain text) text editor. Select all, copy, and then paste into the browser window at the onlinegdb.com site and click the small green "Run" button at the top of the page. LittleSticks v1.1 also runs successfully there and those (Prison Islands and Little Sticks) are the only two I tested at the site.
EDIT2: Spiral Sea works there too.
