Huge Africa Map

[Rakete4]

As a tribute to the Mongoose Mod, that I owe hundreds of hours of great Civ-gaming, I have designed a huge map of Africa for the Mod.
Play as Carthage, Egypt, Arabia, Ethiopia, Mali, Yoruba, Madagascar, Zulu or Boer.

First and foremost, this map reflects the real terrain and real resources of Africa as much as possible.
I have spent a lot of time on the accuracy of the map, and I think it looks great now.



Download Africa map Version 2.0


New in Version 2.0:
-inclusion of the Arabian peninsula
-reworked terrain in many regions
-new terrain types: Savanna, Date palms
-new civs: Arabia, Yoruba
-customized leaders, city names etc.
-thoroughly testing, to avoid imbalancies


The previous version 1.2 of the map is included in Mongoose Mod 4.0.1.

[LunarMongoose]

Originally Posted by Rakete4

As a tribute to the Mongoose Mod, that I owe hundreds of hours of great Civ-gaming, I have designed a huge map of Africa for the Mod.

Dood, I really, really appreciate that intro. Thank you again for your effort in making this, and glad I could be of service with the mod.

I'm gonna move our email discussion back onto the forum, if that's okay hehe:

Originally Posted by Rakete4

If you can still edit the file listing, can you include the screenshot there, too?

Yep, you can always edit everything about a file listing, at any time. I've added your screenshot to it.

Btw I see now that units ARE linked correctly, ie by name, in a WB save, and don't get messed up when the XML order changes, so that's excellent. Sorry, I'd never opened a WB file directly before, so this was all new to me! The Neanderthals are Bushmen... Interesting. Oh, and I love that you included a Sandworm in the deepest depths of the Sahara, rofl.

I do wonder about all the water that's far away from land, being Coast instead of Ocean?

Oh, and I won't have to send you a modified version for the update, really; I'll just tell you the 2 search-and-replace commands you'll have to do to convert it for use in MM 3.7: change all occurances of the string "CITY_RAIDER" to "RAIDER", and all of "CITY_GARRISON" to "GARRISON". Takes 10 seconds.

There are 5 new animals, but the ones that will be of obvious interest to an Africa map are the Orangutan, Hyena, and Rhino, so start planning where you want to put those.

p.s. - Did I mention that perhaps my favorite movie of all time is The Lion King? This is just so neat...

[Rakete4]

Originally Posted by LunarMongoose

The Neanderthals are Bushmen...

The Bushmen are not there just for fun, they are also a means to prevent Zulu and Boer to rush each other with the initial units that they have got. Both have to fight the Bushmen first.

Originally Posted by LunarMongoose

Oh, and I love that you included a Sandworm in the deepest depths of the Sahara, rofl.

There are two Sandworms, not just one, but I'm considering to skip them or relocate them in future versions of the map.

Originally Posted by LunarMongoose

I do wonder about all the water that's far away from land, being Coast instead of Ocean?

I had initially transformed all tiles into coast with the worldbuilder, because it was not possible to transform all tiles into Ocean. So later I had to replace the Coast tiles by Ocean, and it's a silly work, my computer is so slow in doing that. I have got an Intel Atom. I have to replace the Coast tiles with Grassland tiles first, and then replace grassland with ocean. The worldbuilder is really buggy. So I decided to keep that really challenging work for future version. To change it with the text editor is not any faster, by the way.
To place rivers correctly is another such science, by the way. But it works.

Originally Posted by LunarMongoose

Oh, and I won't have to send you a modified version for the update, really; I'll just tell you the 2 search-and-replace commands you'll have to do to convert it for use in MM 3.7: change all occurances of the string "CITY_RAIDER" to "RAIDER", and all of "CITY_GARRISON" to "GARRISON". Takes 10 seconds. ?

If that's all I need to change, that would be great.

Originally Posted by LunarMongoose

p.s. - Did I mention that perhaps my favorite movie of all time is The Lion King? This is just so neat...

I don't know that movie. I just thought, since the lion is often called the king of animals, there should also be a king of the lions then.


Going to write more later....

[LunarMongoose]

Originally Posted by Rakete4

There are two Sandworms, not just one, but I'm considering to skip them or relocate them in future versions of the map.

Noooo!!! You know Sandworms can't actually attack cities in version 3.7, so they're a lot more manageable now, right?

Originally Posted by Rakete4

I have to replace the Coast tiles with Grassland tiles first, and then replace grassland with ocean. The worldbuilder is really buggy. So I decided to keep that really challenging work for future version. To change it with the text editor is not any faster, by the way.

I may be able to write a procedure in the SDK code that does it automatically, then just open the WB and save it. I'll let you know after both my mod and vanilla mapscript updates are done, heh.

Originally Posted by Rakete4

If that's all I need to change, that would be great.

That's why I said earlier, I was pleasantly surprised to find that WB files save units (and everything else) by name, rather than by their index positions in the XML lists like normal savefiles do. This protects WB files from the frequent changes to the XML that happen in mod updates.

You actually wouldn't have to change anything normally, but I shortened "City Raider" to "Raider" and "City Garrison" to "Garrison" this time around, and wanted to change the XML tag names to match. Sorry about that hehe.

Originally Posted by Rakete4

I don't know that movie. I just thought, since the lion is often called the king of animals, there should also be a king of the lions then.

It's Disney's biggest animated movie of all time, arguably. It's world-famous, and so is the music from it, which I bet you've probably heard before and didn't know where it was from. In any case, you should make it the next thing you watch. Just saying.

[Rakete4]

Some more info about the map, for those who are interested in my "transformation rules" that I applied to transform the real terrain into "Mongoose-Mod terrain".


1. The map mostly reflects todays terrain, since it would involve too much speculation to judge about the exact size of the Sahara at the time of the ancient Egyptians, as an example. But barrier lakes like Lake Nasser in Egypt or Lake Volta are not respected. Lake Tchad has got the size that it had in around 1900 A.D., and todays deforestation was also undone.

2. The map was built by using a grid on a map, so all distances should be reflected correctly. Without islands, the continent measures 88 tiles form North to South and 75 tiles from East to West. Map size is 144x96.

2. One tile reflects about 8500 km², but rare terrain types like Peaks and swamps are mostly reflected whenever they are present in a certain tile, that means, in reality most of the tile can be covered by other terrain. In that sense, rare terrain types are overrepresented, which makes the map more beautiful, and it improves the gameplay.

3. All lakes are reflected that have got a size larger than 4000 km².

4. All islands are reflected whenever their real size is above 500 km². Though, in a few instances, several neighbour islands with each of them greater than 500 km² had to be reflected as only one island, for example in the Canary Islands. Also, in some instances like Sansibar or Djerba, the shape of the continental coastline and the island could not be reflected correctly, because the islands are too close to the coastline.

5. Any mountains were reflected as peaks that are higher than 2800-3000 meters. This holds for all of Africa except for Ethiopia where I used a different scheme. All other mountains are reflected as hills. Hills/Flatlands distinction was based on relief, not on altitude. Please let me know if you think that the relief of any region is not correctly reflected!

[Rakete4]

Since there are hundreds or even thousands of oases in the Sahara, not all of them could be reflected. To find out which of them are most important, either in size or in historical relevance, was the most challenging part of all, I REALLY spent a lot of time on that. There is very little info on that in free online sources. German and English speakers obviously are not really interested in that part of the world.

Here is the list of oases that are reflected on the map. Some of them actually reflect groups of oases. Please let me know if you think any oasis should be removed or added.

List of oases:

Morocco: Tafilalet/Sidschilmasa

Algeria: Ouargla, Ghardaia, Timimoun, Djanet, Tougghourt, Touat, Beni-Abbes, In-Salah/Tidikelt,
Tamanrasset

Tunisia: Tozeur

Lybia: Gadames, Murzuq, Al Qatrun, Kufra (double oasis)

Egypt: Siwa, Bahariya, Farafra, Kharga, Dachla

Mauretania: Chinguetti

Mali: ---

Niger: In-Gall, Bilma, Chirfa/Djado

Tchad: ---

Sudan: El-Atrun

[Rakete4]

List of lakes:

-Lake Tchad
-Lake Mai-ndombe
-Lake Tana
-Lake Turkana
-Lake Victoria
-Lake Albert
-Lake Edward
-Lake Kiwu
-Lake Tanganjika
-Lake Rukwa
-Lake Malawi
-Lake Mweru
-Lake Bangweulu

[Rakete4]

List of rivers:


Morocco/Algeria/Tunisia:

-Sebou
-Oum er-Rbia
-Wadi Draa
-Wadi Ziz
-Cheliff
-Medjerda


Lybia:

-Wadi al Shatii
-Wadi al Hayaa
-Wadi an Nashu


Nile river system:

-Nile
-Atbara
-Blue Nile
-White Nile
-Akagera/Nyabarongo


Horn of Africa:

-Awash
-Shabelle
-Ganale/Jubba


Great Lakes:

-Semliki
-Ruzizi
-Lukuga
-Shire


East Africa:

-Tana
-Ruaha/Rufiyi
-Rovuma


Madagascar:

-Betsiboka
-Mangoky


South Africa (Region):

-Sambesi
-Limpopo
-Vaal
-Oranje
-Cubango/Okavango
-Kunene
-Kuanza


Kongo (Region):

-Congo/Lualaba
-Luvua/Luapula/Chambeshi
-Kasai
-Lukenie (only from lake Mai-ndombe to Kasai)
-Ubangi/Uelle/Kibali
-Ogooue
-Sanaga/Lom


Tchad:

-Chari


West Africa:

-Senegal river
-Niger
-Volta
-Benue


That's it

[Rakete4]

List of floodplains:


On deserts: Nile, Okavango

On plains: Senegal river, Niger, Volta, Sambesi, Chambeshi

[Rakete4]

I plan to make an overhaul of the map after the Easter-weekend, but I still need to decide whether to include the Arabian peninsula or not.

And unfortunately, the map crashes in MongooseMod 4.0, so I first need to find out what causes that.

[Rakete4]

quoting LunarMongoose's email to me....

Originally Posted by LunarMongoose

Include the Arabian Penninsula!

As for the crashing, the first thing to try, which I'll try myself in the next couple days, is load it up in 4.0, open the WB, make a new save without any changes, and then try loading THAT and taking a turn.

I have meanwhile followed your advice to try to save and reload the map. But it still isn't working.
I have tried all combinations:
-Save as a game and load as a game
-Save from the Worldbuilder and load as a scenario
-Save from the Worldbuilder and load from the worldbuilder.
None of it works.

Also, I have removed all units from the map, both barbarian and player units. I had thought that the crash could be caused by some of the units. However, it still does not work.
So I need your help with the Africa map, because I am running out of ideas what could cause the crash.

There is some burnt forest on hills in the map. Can that maybe cause a problem?
You once mentioned that your mapscripts never place scrubs and burnt forest on hills, because it wouldn't look good, with some parts growing from above the ground. However, I can't see that. It looks properly, in my opinion. I even plan to place scrub on desert hills, because it looks good. This would not affect the tile yield, however, because the hill is -1 food and scrub +1 food.
By the way, is it possible to place srub also on plains? Or would that cause problems. It looks good, and increases the tile yield to match grasslands. I need to make the Sahara, the Sahel zone and the deserts on the Arabian peninsula look more beautiful, and increase the tile yields a bit.

[LunarMongoose]

Okay, after finally sitting down and taking a look at the situation, it didn't actually take long at all to figure out the problem. Sorry for the delay, I was... umm... playing Soul Calibur 5, and before that watching a lot of television, and also eating myself into oblivion for the last month trying to get to May 15 as quickly as possible (which works REALLY well, btw!).

*ahem* So it turns out there's nothing wrong with the Africa map at all. Version 4.0 crashes on all Flat maps at the moment, due to a bug in the (awesome) new ocean storm code where I forgot to bounds-check the plot-neighbor functions in a couple places. It just turns out that the Africa map is probably the only Flat map any of us have tried to use so far.

(Fyi it should be crashing on Cylindrical maps too - and thus only working on Toroidal - except that normal Cylindricals have 100% land or floating ice along the top and bottom edges, so the storm code wasn't testing them, so the neighbor calls never got used anywhere along these edges. If it HAD crashed on Cylindricals I would've noticed the problem during development obviously... oh well, what can ya do. )

Anyway, it took all of 30 seconds to fix the problem once I found it. My fault, but in my defense the bug was really well hidden hehe. Time to look into the Rennaissance lag issue now, which I suspect has to do with one of my new AI wonder evaluation routines, but we'll see...

[Rakete4]

Thanks for solving this problem!

I had really been frustrated from removing almost everyhing from the map only to get the failure notice again and again.

Hopefully you will be able to solve the renaissance lag soon.

[Rakete4]

This is just to announce the launch of a completely overhauled Africa map by the end of July.

The new version of the map will include the Arabian peninsula, two new civs and new terrain types. The map will be thouroughly tested before the release to make sure that each civ has got a chance to grow powerful, although they will never be equally strong.

In the first version of the map, Mali and Ethiopia turned out to be too strong.

So, check back here by the end of July. In the unlikely case that the map is still not finished by then, I will announce a new date.

EDIT: I need to postpone the release of the map overhaul to the second half of August. I did work a lot on the map over the past weeks, but there are still a couple to things to improve. Thanks for your patience.

[Rakete4]

Version 2.0 of the map is online

Simply go back to my first post in this thread to find the download link.

[indrek_k]

Really cool map!

However, we tested it with a friend and made to turn ~100 before massive freezes started occurring at the beginning of each turn. Like, ~30 second freeze before every turn. We're both running the game on laptops, but decently powerful ones.

I blame the barbarians, i.e. the huge number of them who'll be spawning on the massive unoccupied territory.

[LunarMongoose]

Originally Posted by indrek_k

Really cool map!

Ooh, you found it. Kewl. Yep, this map is freakin' awesome...

Originally Posted by indrek_k

However, we tested it with a friend and made to turn ~100 before massive freezes started occurring at the beginning of each turn. Like, ~30 second freeze before every turn. We're both running the game on laptops, but decently powerful ones.

I blame the barbarians, i.e. the huge number of them who'll be spawning on the massive unoccupied territory.

Well, my friend and I have been playing on HugeMongoose (soon to be known as EnormousMongoose) since forever, and most recently PlanetaryMongoose (albeit with High Sea Level, heh), and we've always run into the same thing.

From what I know of the SDK, I'm fairly sure it's just the normal slow-down that occurs exponentially as empires get bigger. All AI decision-making gets DRASTICALLY more complicated as lots of cities and roads spring up.

Then again, I've been dead wrong about exactly this kind of thing at least once before, so it could also be an inefficiency in my code somewhere. But it IS true that AI calculations go up exponentially with map size, and they also explode in the pathfinding department as soon as complicated transportation networks emerge.