Planet Simulator

This map is great. However, I noticed a possible bug while playing through with a Terra start as Polynesia.

The "new world" has very scarce luxury resources, making it harder to justify wild expansion. Compared to the old world, where luxuries were very tightly clustered, in the new world luxuries were practically half a continent away from each other. Is there any chance you could look at the spawn logic, Lamil? I recall hearing that the "official" Terra map has the same problem.

kenneth1221 said:

This map is great. However, I noticed a possible bug while playing through with a Terra start as Polynesia.

The "new world" has very scarce luxury resources, making it harder to justify wild expansion. Compared to the old world, where luxuries were very tightly clustered, in the new world luxuries were practically half a continent away from each other. Is there any chance you could look at the spawn logic, Lamil? I recall hearing that the "official" Terra map has the same problem.

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There is no Terra. If you're choosing Terra from the map dropdown, you're not playing with this map script, you're playing on the official Terra. You have to choose Planet Simulator from the map dropdown.

Found this map script a couple of months ago and really enjoyed the games I played with version LL2 - thanks to everyone involved in making it.

Since LL3 was released, there was some discussion about clustered starts. Did the changes in LL3 make this more likely to happen or is LL2 equally likely to have these clustered starts?

There was also mention a few weeks ago of adding a "random" to the continents/pangaea dropdown, which I think would be great (for some reason I hate making that choice). If it's easy to do I would be grateful. If I were doing it I would bias it a little towards continents, maybe 60/40.

So far I've played with mostly "standard" settings. I would like to introduce more uncertainty into the land mass sizes. Is random sea level the best way to achieve that?

Grayson Carlyle said:

There is no Terra. If you're choosing Terra from the map dropdown, you're not playing with this map script, you're playing on the official Terra. You have to choose Planet Simulator from the map dropdown.

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There's a Terra option/"All civs start on largest continent" option in the advanced options.

kenneth1221 said:

There's a Terra option/"All civs start on largest continent" option in the advanced options.

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Did you generate a sample of Terra Planet Simulator to compare with Continents PS ?
From my understanding, the Terra setting does not impact how landmasses are generated and filled up with resources. It only defines start locations. Therefore, you could very well have picked the Continents setting and started on the luxuries-poor setting. Just bad luck. But that's merely my understanding.

kenneth1221: This map script uses the same resource placement logic as the official map scripts, and as such suffers some of the same flaws. In particular, the weird luxury placement on terra-style maps is a consequence of this. The resource placement code is thousands of lines and I'm afraid I am not up for rewriting it.

psparky: LL2 and LL3 are essentially equally likely to have clustered starts.

Adding random to continents/pangaea is a very straightforward change I can make for the next release.

Random sea levels is probably the best way to achieve more variety in landmass size; you may consider using either "frequent and varied" or "random" island settings as well, although that's probably not as important

Excellent, thank you. I will use LL3 for my next game with random sea levels and see what I get

LamilLerran said:

kenneth1221: This map script uses the same resource placement logic as the official map scripts, and as such suffers some of the same flaws. In particular, the weird luxury placement on terra-style maps is a consequence of this. The resource placement code is thousands of lines and I'm afraid I am not up for rewriting it.

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Wow, that seems like a lot of work and something I wouldn't ask from anyone. However, would it be possible to replace the Terra lux gen with regular continents lux gen? Would that be a copy-paste job I could do on my own?

Unfortunately, there is only a single option that controls whether a map is Terra-style in terms of both start location placement and also luxury resource placement -- you can't change one without changing the other.

It is possible that these aren't *too* terribly entangled in AssignStartingPlots.lua and that someone could disentangle them without all that much work, but it's definitely not a simple change and it's possible that it would more or less require a complete rewrite.

[Edit: I have been looking at switching in Communitas-style resource placement and that might help with this too (I'm not sure). That said, the Communitas resource placement edit is not going well and may not happen at all ...]

Played my first game with LL3 - interesting map which I shared with my brother and he also said he liked it.

Since I was sharing the map I went with standard settings. It did have a different feel from the LL2 maps, which I later realized was probably due to the sea level bug in LL2 (low level used although standard selected). With LL2 I had almost always gone wide, but this felt like a tall map, so that makes sense given the bug. Also, my only land-based oil was in a marsh completely surrounded by mountains. Looking at the map later I thought perhaps there were a few too many mountains, so I took a look at the code to see how this is controlled...

In the meantime I had started another game where the map seemed very odd. Searching for 'mountains' in the code I found the description and workaround for the tundra/desert bug, and realized that's what happened to my new map. I had lots of tundra, little or no desert and no proper mountain ranges. Virtually all the mountains were on the coast, some were "clustered" but not really in ranges, mostly isolated. This is a small map BTW, which I think is relevant. I think the mountains were the failsafe ones. So, the bug still exists and the failsafe doesn't always fix it. It's not really a problem, as now I can recognise the bug and just restart, but I thought you might be interested.

Anyway, I found how to control the number of mountains using age and generated two or three maps using each setting - none of these had the tundra bug - so now I know what to do to get what I want.

However, one of the maps had another oddity. Sadly, I didn't keep it as I was focussed on the mountains issue. One start was loads of desert with multiple rivers and not much else. There were two citrus in flood plains. I'm guessing that was the best it could do with the terrain and wanting to give me my luxuries, but it felt wrong to me. Sorry for the rubbish bug report, if indeed this is a bug, without a reproducer or even an example.

Definitely going to play more games with this generator as overall I think the maps are fun and look great too!

Just wondering if you are still working on this mapscript?

I've updated the OP to include a link to your most recent updated version LamilLerran.

I do currently plan to try and make time to return to the mapscripting community when Civ VI is released so that I can make a proper port of Civ V's Planet Simulator into Civ VI. When I do so, I may try to make some time to give this script some of the much needed attention it's been missing over the past year or two.

As far as an alternate resource generation scheme goes a la Communitas, I may or may not be able to at least provide advice if you're having some specific issue. I will say any attempts at this should be optional to the end user (even if you default to your resource placement) and the game's built-in resource placement options should always remain available.

Development is mostly inactive, but I am around checking this post (indeed, the only reason it took so long to respond is because I just got married!). So if there is a specific small feature that you would like, let me know and I can probably put out a release.

I don't recall exactly what the challenges in using Communitas-style resource placement were, but I remember they seemed fairly substantial and I have at least one dead end branch in git of me trying to implement this, so I am not currently optimistic about making Communitas resources happen.

Is it compatible with VoxPopuli, including More Luxuries and JFD's mods: CiD, Cultural Div, ExCE? 1st turn - everything is in Fog of War and I'm already defeated. I used the 7th Aug version.

Hmm ... odd, I would expect it to be compatible with most mods. Perhaps one of those mods overwrites AssignStartingPlots.lua (which could cause issues depending on what and how much of ASP was changed).

Zares said:

Is it compatible with VoxPopuli, including More Luxuries and JFD's mods: CiD, Cultural Div, ExCE? 1st turn - everything is in Fog of War and I'm already defeated. I used the 7th Aug version.

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I've been using it a lot with Vox Populi (but not the latest versions, the June and July ones) and got no issue. You may want to delete your cache.

Zares said:

Is it compatible with VoxPopuli, including More Luxuries and JFD's mods: CiD, Cultural Div, ExCE? 1st turn - everything is in Fog of War and I'm already defeated. I used the 7th Aug version.

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Bit of a late reply...

Cultural Diversity does override ASP functions, but I'm not sure to what degree. The file in question is ASP_Common.lua, which is essentially Gedemon's Culturally Linked Start Locations. This may clash with AssignStartingPlots.lua from More Luxuries, giving you unintended behavior during map generation. However, I don't think you'd be seeing the "instant loss" result from just that. In any case, you may be overriding start plot functions from one mod or the other... not really sure how well these play together.

Planet Simulator itself uses default ASP, does it not? If it has custom functions, then you'd have a potential 3 way problem.

All my games on this map are spawning other civs close to me. I don't like it crowded, any way I can change it?

Hi, I've been using and enjoying this script for a long while now. Yet, I wonder, does anyone more verse than I'm at decipher lua files know how to increase the likelihood of generating inland seas?

At:
I've trying commenting the function into a comment line, it had no effect though.

Thanks in advance!

What was your expected result?

The only thing that method does is turn deep water tiles into shallow water tiles. It's both for visual purposes, information purposes (knowing you're sailing or ported on a smallish inland sea), and it prevents atolls but promotes fish/luxury tiles.