World of Erebus mapscript is a lot of fun. Bit too much kelp spawning, but I imagine you're all over that.
I warned him about that
You can turn down the amount of kelp that the world starts with in the map script (just open it in notepad and search for kelp) but it still grows like crazy and eventually takes over most of the ocean.
Not sure if this is in your power to change, but is there a way to force civs' starting locations to be at least a certain distance from each other? I'm really not liking ErebusContinent's tendency to put civ starting locations right next to each other.
(Some advice on what settings I should use to ensure this doesn't happen would also be appreciated.)
They are actually set to be placed pretty far apart in the map script. The biggest problem here comes from too little available land for the number of civs. That's more of an issue with which civs are in the game rather than the total number of civs (I frequently play with 4-5 extra civs). The AI also likes to move their starting settler and they seem to be obsessed with moving close to neighbors, sometimes placing their city two tiles from their neighbor's city.
Currently, as long as Valk is using the last version I posted, the starting plot has quite a bit of extra code in place to spread the civs out in most cases such as alternating a preference for the east & west map edge with each civ placed.
I do have some changes that I need to get around to uploading, until then you can try starting with the advanced start game option, just reduce the number of points to a level you're happy with, that forces the AI to place their first city closer to the starting plot selected for them.
World of Erebus does this a lot too, but I believe it is because it tends to spawn huge deserts in the center of landmasses, where it won't spawn anyone besides the Malakim. This leaves the rest of the civs clumped together. I turn deserts down to "low."
The smart climate options can help, that's why I put them in
If you follow the link in my sig the first post in my map script thread has some explanation on how to use the smart climate and individual climate settings combines to achieve different results depending on what you want to see.
I can be mistaken, but isn't WorldOfErebus supposed to be Erebus with a structure more like the Earth-style map from the original Civ (so long ago I played vanilla that I can't even remember the name), where there is an "old world" and a "new world", and everyone starts on the old world?
WorldOfErebus is really nothing more than ErebusContinent with the plate tectonics (controls continent creation) and climate adjusted to be a global representation rather than a map of a single continent. In other words, it's making the whole world rather than just Europe. Personally, I dislike the whole world maps because the climate bands are too compressed but a lot of people asked for a FfH version of Perfect World 2 which is essentially what WorldOfErebus is.
Would it be possible to have an option of not including Haunted Lands in your game?
Are you afraid of Python? If not, open up ErebusContinent.py (or WorldOfErebus.py) and search for HAUNTED_LANDS, they (and all other special features such as ancient city ruins) are listed near the top of the file. That section checks to see if they exist before trying to place them and if they don't exist it places burnt forests instead. Changing it to always place burnt forests is less than a single line of code. Likewise, you can see how it checks for the existance of a civ to determine whether or not to place Crystal Plains (handled differently for RifE and Orbis) and do something similar for Haunted Lands.
Or, if all else fails, just disable advanced terrain but that will pull out all of the special terrain and feature types, not just the haunted lands.
