Rise of Asia

Or am I neither dead nor alive...

Well then.. I guess I'm just going to have to go get that Shot Gun off the wall and cure that.

EDIT: Wait. I'm a Pirate. I'll use a cannon instead.

Why there's no Vietnam (DaiViet). The fact that Champa was conqured (later) by DaiViet doesnt make them Vietnamese civilization

Daiviet was replaced by Champa on the list. And I think that Champa and Yue are vietnamese civilizations, and I just wanted one vietnamese civ. I chose Champa, I cannot remember why, but it doesnt matter. If people rather have daiviet its ok with me.

Champa was more culturally related to Kambujadesa although Kambujadesa was a threat to Champa as well. They adopted a Brahmanic culture, very different from that of the Chinese-influenced Viets.

So they would fit in with the Thai, Burmese, Laos and Khmer I take it?

Not quite, Champa was a Hindu civilization, why the rest werent. Why dont you choose something bigger than just Yue/Viet or Champa. I mean the BaiYue/BachViet or the Hundred Viets, who once ocuppied the entire Southern China and Northern Vietnam

The Khmer (Kambujadesa) were Hindu as well; Jayavarman, one of the great Khmer kings, was a Shivaite Hindu. They later adopted Buddhism, but even by then, Shivaite Hinduism was still a religion of the elites.

"Hundred Yue" or "Baiyue" is a very broad term, pretty much referring to everyone from Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Fujian, Guangdong, Yunnan China to northern Vietnam. But then again, so is the term "Chinese" or "Han".

Perhaps Nanyue with Trieu Da or one of the Nanyue kings would do? Nanyue's capital was near present-day Guangzhou (forgot what its Yue name was...) and held territories stretching from Guangdong province to the Red River delta in morthern Vietnam.

now that I finally posted Heart of Destiny, you can expect me to begin full time attention to this project.

What is the status of this project?

-Biq?
-Map?
-Final list of civs?

I'll handle the tech trees, maybe make some units, maybe a leaderhead. Come to think of it, I think I will make a leaderhead right after I'm done with the Chinese Wall Guard, which I am in the process of rendering the final animation for.

Sword_Of_Geddon said:

What is the status of ...Map?

Click to expand...

As I posted above, I moved the map to a lower priority so I could concentrate on school (finals/certification exams). On the other hand, if I hear that it's really needed, I can get it done sooner.

Well I just want to know what is going on that is all.

Is this dead? Shiro where art though?

Im busy lately. But I am working on units and heads. You can see my threads.

Oh. Just wondering. I'll PM you soon.

Here’s my work-in-progress on the map.
View attachment 131452
It’s obviously at an early stage in development. I’m posting it only because lack of progress on the map while I finished classes apparently helped bring discussion to a screeching halt. I am continuing on it (spent about 10 hours at the computer on it this last week, plus additional time pouring over atlases virtual and physical). I’m not posting a preview/thumbnail right now, because I’m really only interested in comments from those interested enough to spend some time looking at it in the editor; Shirou, SoG, or 7Ronin could persuade me otherwise. Telling me that the terrain shouldn’t be in huge continuous swathes is not an example of a useful comment; right now I’m more interested that desert is where desert should be as a whole. I am also aware that the majority of rivers are not there yet, and that the Himalayas and most other mountains are missing. Making a realistic map is a lot of work. I have spent hours amounting to man-days wrestling with the coastlines in the South China Sea for example. It may help to understand what’s involved to bear in mind that with the scale of map we are working with the smallest feature we can create is a tile that measures about 120 miles horizontally. If you do post a comment, please help me and the other forum members out either by being specific to C3C grid coordinates (ie the desert in the region of 11,63 to 17,61), or by naming a major geographic landmark I can locate in an atlas (ie Ganges River or the island of Java). I welcome any fruitful comments; specific questions I can bring to mind are: is Taiga best represented for purposes of game play by Forest overlaying Tundra? Have I left out any major continental feature/ island (at one point it took a few hours while working on other parts of the map to figure out that the tickle at the back of my brain hammer2 was trying to tell me that I had skipped over putting the island of Taiwan on the map). Just a reminder: while I’ll listen gladly to any reasoned argument, the only one who can do more than suggest is Shirou. As my work and the discussion progresses, I’ll post newer versions of the map.

Blue Monkey said:

Here’s my work-in-progress on the map.

Click to expand...

Wow, I'm blown away by this. This map is exceptional to say the least. When you finish it I don't think that there will be an Asia map than can top it.

The placement of everything seems to be perfect.

I just have a few very minor comments. Taiwan and the Japanese island of Kyushu should perhaps be just a tad larger. Also, Luzon and Mindanao in the Philippines seem a bit anemic.

Thank you for working on this.

Blue Monkey said:

It may help to understand what’s involved to bear in mind that with the scale of map we are working with the smallest feature we can create is a tile that measures about 120 miles horizontally

Click to expand...

7ronin said:

..... Luzon and Mindanao in the Philippines seem a bit anemic.

Click to expand...

This is exactly the problem I mentioned above. A tile is like a single pixel: I can control the color/terrain but not the size or shape. Imagine that you want to draw a map with a pixel 120 miles across, and 60 miles top to bottom. Luzon, as islands go, is a fairly simple shape: It’s basically a rectangle: at it’s widest is one pixel wide and 6 pixels top to bottom. But our pixels aren’t in a stacked one on top of the next grid like a piece of graph paper. This is what 1 pixel east-west by 6 north-south looks like where Luzon falls on our map:

See how different plains, grassland, and hills look if all I do is click six times. I can’t control how wide or narrow Civ stamps a particular terrain, and it stamps different grid coordinates differently: here are various examples of single tile island, all grassland:

I can plump up Luzon by making it 2 pixel/tiles wide in places, by changing the orientation of the island or it’s geographic location by over a hundred miles, by distorting the kind of terrain present, etc. Noone can spread terrain across half a tile on either side of a line, anymore than that can be done with a color across half of two adjacent pixels. Now take a look at a map of the Philippines and compare the shape of Mindanao to Luzon.

You raise a valid point, but the question moves from one of mapping to one of scenario design and game play: how do I distort the location, shape, surface area, and terrain to balance realistic mapping versus playability. The game doesn’t care what Japan looks like to us. On our map right now Japan has 37 land tiles. When I change the Philippines (29 tiles at the moment) I change its strength relative to Japan as a tribal base for production and growth. Now add in differences in terrain and resources. It gets a lot more complex than “Luzon and Mindanao in the Philippines seem a bit anemic”.

Difficult choices indeed. In any case I think we will all defer to your judgement as to what is best. Any way you look at it though this is a great map and a stunning piece of work.

I hope that eventually you will share with us your techniques.

Thanks. I've messed around with maps a little, but this is the first time I've tried to make one for a "real" modding project. In searching the forae for my own sake, I've discovered there's a relative dearth of tutorial support for map makers, and the map Editor's Help function doesn't. Once we've got this one through to comepletion I'll probably start a map-making thread.

Now let's hear some more brass-tacks level comments! Do others agree with 7Ronin that I should plump up the islands mentioned? What about the Taiga question? What else should I be looking at as the design develops?

Your suggestion for the taiga sounds good. Will it be possible to make certain mountains impassable? We wouldn't want civs wandering back and forth across Mt. Everest. Where are Swoggy and our host/leader? OtM?