@airborne, sorry, it was directed at Sayjo - but was way late...

...my point being that I'm comfortable with this variant not needing 10 years of development or whatever...

I'm confused...Only one thing to do! Play Battlefield Heroes Beta! BLow off the work for a day!

no no no no... sorry - don't mess with the rules. I didn't mean to suggest that.

To play-balance I'll make Austria's armies at 5 strength and Italy's 0.

hehe.. well it's clearly an exciting idea, given the flurry of discussion.

It looks like alot of work to me, but if you could pull it off it would be pretty awesome to see how it plays on this site.

Good luck. It'll be great if you can get this to work.

Hmm...I could get good help here but, inexperianced...maybe...I should put an ad on wordleaders hm...

worldleaders*

worldleaders? surely you kid. of course you kid...

http://www.worldleadersthegame.com/
They have created 3 variants Classicial Greece, Youngstown, and Colonial

Then again that would mean 1900 would be on both sites...

oh... I thought you were threatening to only put it on Worldleaders and not here... :-)
I've played Youngstown and Colonial... I think 1900 looks like it will be noticeably better than either of those. Classical Greece looks really interesting.

I'm threatening to recruit help from worldleaders in exchange for putting it on both sites. What do you guys think?

Sounds good to me - many hands make light work. Being that this site is not for profit it seems reasonable. I assume that the coding would be identical? (even though the sites look different??)

Most likily

I'll post ads tomarrow...for now I sleep...zzzzz

looks complicated ><

Wow thats a long thread considering how little is said :P
I'm not quite sure how world-leaders works, but to develop that map for a custom installation of phpDiplomacy would probably take about 4 hours hard work, because there are quite a lot of changes to make (most are quite subtle) and assuming something goes wrong somewhere - it always does!. You've got the link in the dev forum, so obviously I'm happy to help.
Not quite sure why you're searching for more advice from all around though - little confused. You can quite easily make that variation on your own, you won't need anyone else to split the work with.
When you're finished I can probably host it for you if you want, depending on the status of my host by then :P

I think I've worked out why you're expecting such a challenge - do you intend to start from scratch and completely do the map again? That would take quite a long time without using any tools to assist you. I think you'd probably do better if you instead worked from the current phpDip map and changed what was different.
Also, I suggest you work through most of it on a dev server rather than trying to make your changes then apply them all at once.

1900 looks like a great choice.

And speaking as a programmer with 30 years in the business (and 13 years of web stuff) figlesquidge nailed it -- set up a dev server and test it to death. But it sounds very doable.

I'd love to see the main phpDip have a variant option on the game setup page rather than separate sites, but I know that's a rather more significant change...

Wouldn't be too much work though Ninja, the code is well set up for it. I made this as a rough guide when the issue was first suggested, and it should be accurate enough to lead people through the process of making a map variant. I'll be updating it based on airborne's comments, so hopefully once this one has been done the instructions will be perfect.
http://forum.phpdiplomacy.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=142

I would like to add varients to the site as well, but it would need to be propperly thought through, which would arguably be as bigger issue as actually coding it, where would links go, how would stats work etc etc

I like the look of the 1900 map, but some of the rules strike me as impractical... I just don't like the idea of an Egypt/Hejaz to Mid Atlantic link, and the inablility to build in Africa must make England and France's centres there very hard to defend?

Still, I'm sure it was devised by a cleverer man than me and it probably works well in practice. Good luck with this, airborne :)

Yeah figle, my friends and I were just discussing variants in the main site and I suspect it would completely screw up the points system. Separate points tracking per variant? Maybe I should just wait for the variant, first. :)

I also think Glorious makes some excellent points about 1900, but having played many variants (on paper, back when we still used abacuses) I still think 1900 is one of the better thought-out variants.

Wouldn't it be better to start with some "slight" variant first like:
- fleet rome
- build everywhere
- no press

youngstown...... noooooo.....

youngstown.......

Ninja pirate ,
"were just discussing variants in the main site and I suspect it would.... "

main site?? this is the main site.
do you mean the developers forum?

um...no press...Can't everyone just use honour rules?
Fleet Rome fails in my opinion
build everywhere is going againist the amazing god-like standard rules of City-named regions are Home SC

@Sicarius If you crave youngstown so much go play on worldleaders...wait you are already on the site right?