Rhye's of Europe Organized Development Thread

re: mitsho

what do you think of this one? it'll need to be cut (and i don't know how to do that), and it is on the large side - but i've been playing with this for a couple of days, and i think it's workable. this is by no means a finished product - see the tags for some of my concerns - and it was designed as a playable (i.e. fair to the computer) map, so some of the resource placements (and their overall abundance) are uh, optimistic. we're going to need to weed some of them out, and probably reducing the amount of arable land available.

..tries to upload map, has it rejected as a wb save...


having a huge eastern europe becomes less of a problem if we're disallowing settlers (which was suggested early - it might make sense for certain civs to be gifted settlers at certain dates/events, but as you stated, the focus of the game shouldn't be about who gets to settle poland, hungary, and romania.




argh. how do i upload the map here so that people can look at/play with it?

Archive it with a zip or a rar. (Open the programme and you should find in the tools section or wherever an option, look a bit around). If you fail totally, send it to me via e-mail (pn for adress if needed), I'll do it.

Ok, it becomes less of a concern, but then, I'm not quite convinced. As you probably would need to do a settlers map anyway and city founding was quite common during MA. I just think it is a bit too core to the game. We'll see, I am curios on your map for now...

m

ok, here's the map as a zip file. seems to unpack into the correct file, so i hope it's viable.


once again, caveats with the map - i designed it to be playable vs. many opponents, so resources are plentiful; probably too plentiful - although i think that by the dark ages, most countries would have developed a source of iron and a source of wheat.

i added in a few non-european luxuries such as silk and sugar; sugar representing sugar beets (not historically accurate, as they weren't developed as a sugar source until the industrial era); and silk representing both trade routes and the places it was grown after being smuggled back from china (italy, southern france). those should probably be removed, but i again come back to the question of luxuries and how they should be dealt with - i'm not sure if we're better off replacing some with more native luxuries like linen or amber, have them show up via colonial wonders, or have their sources concentrated in areas meant to represent the terminii of the silk road.
i also have rice on the map in at least one location, which probably doesn't belong (we could put wild rice in the various swampy areas, but it doesn't factor in much as a food source) - it may be worth replacing rice with barley, oats, or rye.



the settler idea was as follows (in my understanding) : no civ (or few civs) can build them, but they may appear periodically to reflect episodes of expansion. it may also follow that all civs start with a few, and most have a few viable city sites. in the event of a civ like venice (example UHV: control rhodes, crete, and cyprus) which would need to control x number of island colonies, we could conceivably have a settler-spawning event similar to the adventurer event in RFC when the incas/aztecs are encountered.

this way, we can reflect historical efforts to expand and found cities (such as the german expansion into bohemia, bavaria, and prussia). perhaps the russians could be allowed to build settlers and encouraged to recreate a sprawling, unstable, and weak empire with a network of underdeveloped cities.

thoughts?

My only request on the map is it has enough middle-east to contain the following cities: Aleppo, Antioch, Acre, Jerusalem, Damascus, Tripoli, Edessa, Cairo. That should be sufficient to allow for a decent crusade aspect.

I should note that I totally support a large or larger map. Because I don't think a smaller map will handle as many civs as we want very well.

st.lucifer said:

i added in a few non-european luxuries such as silk and sugar; sugar representing sugar beets (not historically accurate, as they weren't developed as a sugar source until the industrial era);

Click to expand...

Include the Azores and Canaries on the map (closer than really are obviously) and put sugar on them. Since Rhyes and Fall has later spawning resources, I assume you can have sugar beets showing up later.

and silk representing both trade routes and the places it was grown after being smuggled back from china (italy, southern france). those should probably be removed, but i again come back to the question of luxuries and how they should be dealt with - i'm not sure if we're better off replacing some with more native luxuries like linen or amber, have them show up via colonial wonders, or have their sources concentrated in areas meant to represent the terminii of the silk road.

Click to expand...

I'd put a silks on the edge of the map under control of the muslim powers, and then have several colonial wonders that can provide them.

the settler idea was as follows (in my understanding) : no civ (or few civs) can build them, but they may appear periodically to reflect episodes of expansion. it may also follow that all civs start with a few, and most have a few viable city sites. in the event of a civ like venice (example UHV: control rhodes, crete, and cyprus) which would need to control x number of island colonies, we could conceivably have a settler-spawning event similar to the adventurer event in RFC when the incas/aztecs are encountered.

this way, we can reflect historical efforts to expand and found cities (such as the german expansion into bohemia, bavaria, and prussia). perhaps the russians could be allowed to build settlers and encouraged to recreate a sprawling, unstable, and weak empire with a network of underdeveloped cities.

Click to expand...

Restricitng settlers seems very constricting, why not just have harsh maintence penalities for expansion that ease over time?

Squirrelloid said:

My only request on the map is it has enough middle-east to contain the following cities: Aleppo, Antioch, Acre, Jerusalem, Damascus, Tripoli, Edessa, Cairo. That should be sufficient to allow for a decent crusade aspect.

I should note that I totally support a large or larger map. Because I don't think a smaller map will handle as many civs as we want very well.

Click to expand...

check the tags. i don't think i've got aleppo, but i have the others plus damietta and alexandria.

Disenfrancised said:

Include the Azores and Canaries on the map (closer than really are obviously) and put sugar on them. Since Rhyes and Fall has later spawning resources, I assume you can have sugar beets showing up later.

Click to expand...

good idea. the map doesn't have any extra space out west, but i'm going to have to cut a large amount of eastern stuff - if we can cut that, we can add more ocean pretty easily. this would also allow for a more realistic distribution of whale resources.

Disenfrancised said:

I'd put a silks on the edge of the map under control of the muslim powers, and then have several colonial wonders that can provide them.

Click to expand...

i considered doing something like this with multiple silk resources - and putting the plantations on mountain or marsh tiles or redefining the trade bonus of the silk resource so as not to give the controlling civ a huge resource advantage as well as an economic one. i had envisioned colonial wonders as providing new resources like tea and tobacco, replacing the hit singles and such, but as the whole initial drive for exploration/colonization was to secure sources of spices and silk, it would make sense to have those included as well. perhaps have them provided by a national wonder that can be built fairly early (~1450-1500), rather than some of the later, more powerful colonies?

Disenfrancised said:

Restricitng settlers seems very constricting, why not just have harsh maintence penalities for expansion that ease over time?

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it is constricting - but i think of it as reflecting the reality that in post-roman europe (and arguably before then), founding a new city generally meant killing off the area's existing inhabitants and building on the ruins. obviously, this is an oversimplification/exaggeration, and i don't want things to be completely static - but it cuts down on the computer's urge, while playing as spain, to send a settler on a galley off to norway to found a useless city with no access to resources, or to start founding cities in hungary. if we can convince the AI that this sort of behavior is illogical, i'm flexible on the settler question. one of the biggest challenges that i found in rfc was getting beyond the more-is-better approach, and it would be nice to preserve that.

mitsho said:

Just look a bit at some maps. Of the existing ones (also the ones proposed in the old thread), none has really enough room for Genoa, Venezia, Rome, Naples and a independent Milano for example .... way too crowded. Given the impact, Italy should be bigger, but we really don't need a ~50 tile Ukraine (I'm sorry, it's not meant that way).

m

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but I don't think you need an independent Milan either (what for ?). Florence was more important but none mentions it. You should look at candidates that had a decent land extension, and in Italy I think they are Venice, Genua and the Naples/Sicily. Rome (Papal States) could exist as a single city and shouldnt be playable IMO because its possible goals would be too boring, but could make for an interesting game element triggering various events. Venice and Genua can be single cities in Italy, they should be colonial powers (just like Portugal / Netherlands in RFC). If you use EE3 map there's still room for independent Savoy, Tuscany and Lombardy if you really want them in. I don't remember if that map includes the holy land though, probably not :/

st.lucifer said:

ok, here's the map as a zip file. seems to unpack into the correct file, so i hope it's viable.

[...]

thoughts?

Click to expand...

I like this map. Some changes I would make in the area I know are:

- Baleares, Corsica and Sardinia, 1 tile less
- Sicily 2 tiles more (N-NE) and it should be an island. (Naples-Sicily if it will make in could start with 2 settlers one on the island and one on the peninsula).
- Venice should start on the river delta (it's kinda famous for that, heh)
- scrap the mountain left of Genua start (hill)

obvious revision to resources, btw I think that luxuries such as sugar, silk, etc should come from colonial quests and not as resources on the map (except maybe for the Moors and Arabs).

onedreamer said:

but I don't think you need an independent Milan either (what for ?). Florence was more important but none mentions it. You should look at candidates that had a decent land extension, and in Italy I think they are Venice, Genua and the Naples/Sicily. Rome (Papal States) could exist as a single city and shouldnt be playable IMO because its possible goals would be too boring, but could make for an interesting game element triggering various events. Venice and Genua can be single cities in Italy, they should be colonial powers (just like Portugal / Netherlands in RFC). If you use EE3 map there's still room for independent Savoy, Tuscany and Lombardy if you really want them in. I don't remember if that map includes the holy land though, probably not :/

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You got me wrong. I meant Milan (and Florence for that matter) as Independent Civ Cities. Cities that belong to the civilization of the independents ... And I'd say that the city kinda deserves that...

m

PS: I don't have a civ on this computer, thus I can't comment on the map, but I will soon.

onedreamer said:

I like this map. Some changes I would make in the area I know are:

- Baleares, Corsica and Sardinia, 1 tile less
- Sicily 2 tiles more (N-NE) and it should be an island. (Naples-Sicily if it will make in could start with 2 settlers one on the island and one on the peninsula).
- Venice should start on the river delta (it's kinda famous for that, heh)
- scrap the mountain left of Genua start (hill)

obvious revision to resources, btw I think that luxuries such as sugar, silk, etc should come from colonial quests and not as resources on the map (except maybe for the Moors and Arabs).

Click to expand...

Thanks for the input. I'll go ahead and implement some of it. For the islands, I was trying to preserve the shapes - but accurate size is probably more important. Venice is north of the Po delta - it's on more of a lagoon. The Astico runs through it, but isn't a big enough river to include on the map. I will move the city start 1 tile west, though. Agreed that Sicily should be an island; were you suggesting that it should extend north of the strait?

For resources: I liked disenfrancised's suggestion that sugar be moved to the Canaries and Azores. They're not on the map at the moment, but they'll be added as soon as I can figure out how to cut or add tiles.

edit: added updated map

map edits:

-removed all spices from map. i think it might be worth putting a couple back on to represent saffron, which was an important product for a few small, specific regions.
-removed silk; relocated it to five desert plantations east of damascus and edessa
-redid several city placements and possible civ starts, both for balance and for accuracy
-attempted to mark major existing cities for 600 ad start
-reshaped crete, rhodes, sicily, corsica, sardinia, and balearic islands for greater accuracy in size; made sicily an island
-redid much of scandinavia to more accurately reflect placement of rivers and lakes
-made minor changes to coastlines in iberia, north africa, and others; made north africa more arid
-probably some other minor ones, which i've forgotten. the updated map provided is the most recent version. feedback is strongly encouraged.


thoughts:
-i'm considering using snow terrain to mark marshes until using the actual marsh tile is an option. i haven't taken that step yet because it would be visually jarring, but i have been thinking about placement of marshes: currently, i have:
-frisian marshes in netherlands
-pripet marshes in eastern europe
-the fens of england
-the mouth of the danube
-areas around st. petersburg in russia
-parts of finland

-while corn has no place on this map, i'm leaving it in to represent a cold-weather grain of popular choice - my vote would be for barley. we could do something similar for rice, which strikes me as a good idea - replace with something more european.

-i'd like to add walrus ivory as a luxury resource available in scandinavia, as it was an important trade product, but there's no way of doing it without giving the vikings war elephants. unfortunate.

^^

If corn is changed to barley, I think that rice should be changed to rye. Would add some food resources to Northern Europe. And you could ask Rhye how to make walrus ivory in the game, he included cotton in RFC.

So let me get this right... you're bunching the whole of the HRE including Austria into one Civ but leaving all the piddling little Italian countries? Doesn't make much sense to me.

Disenfrancised
*Off topic*

Auður , Máttur , og Stríð eini vera til í the hugur af mannskapur. Sigur og blekking á þessi hljóður orrustuvöllur er the sannur gangstígur til velgengni.
Fela eitthvað í látlaus sjón eins og this undirskrift en spjara sig svo samstæða eini the endaþarms- vilja tilraun til lesa úr leyniletri það.

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Can you say "anal" on this forum?
I can read this but it's very bad Icelandic. Looks like it's been put through a horrible translation machine that doesn't know that the Icelandic language doesn't use "the" and "this"
Anyway, nice signature

*On topic*
I can't wait to play this mod.

If your looking for a Europe Map, why dont you use the EMA Maps? You may have to remove a bit of Russia via notepad, but you still have plenty of Europe room and the Middle East.

Ok, I want to look at the map without loading civ - what program should I use?

-Squirrelloid <- clearly has no practical modding experience

Just an input; make sure Scandinavia doesn't get too much recources, if you intend to have a hugeassed "norse"-civ.

There's two ways to go with Scandinavia. Either you make it totally dead when it comes to recourses, or you split it up in two, Sweden and Denmark. What you currently have is the "Norse" who will be pretty much alone there, especially if you cut out Russia, and could easily expand to a larger natural area than any other civ yet included. Alas, overpowered. If there is only one civ in Scandinavia, there would be pretty much constant peace unless some crazy-assed german comes and invades. And we wouldn't want that.
My (totally un-merited and unasked for) suggestion is to first have a viking civ (or the norse) who take over a lot of land, raid, trade blabla. Then around 1000-ish they collapse, and around 1200 Denmark and Sweden spawn. Denmark would be underpowered unless they manage to grab Norway, cos Sweden will get Finland. However, Denmark was united before Sweden, so they would get a heads-on there. Of course there will hopefully be a lot of nabbing up (t)here.
Cos, a "Norse" civ here would IMO (and this is not nationalism) suck. They would be totally outside in every way when it comes to international affairs. True, they kinda were before the 1600th century, but it would be worthless out of a gameplay point of view if you ask me. =)

Úmarth;6117356 said:

So let me get this right... you're bunching the whole of the HRE including Austria into one Civ but leaving all the piddling little Italian countries? Doesn't make much sense to me.

Click to expand...

Not exactly, no.

We're doing Germany from Austrasia onwards; Austria, Burgundy, the Dutch, and probably the Swiss. We're debating whether or not to make the Papal States playable, and if Sicily/Naples deserves kingdom status. All of these, at one point or another, were parts of the HRE. Unlike the HRE, though, these groups worked primarily towards their own interests, had periods of sustained independence, and eventually (with the exception of Burgundy) became their own countries. Look, we're not saying that the HRE wasn't important - but the period of time in which it acted like a nation (or even like an empire) rather than a collective of semi-autonomous satrapies with their own agendas was pretty limited. Geographically, it would seem to make more sense to include the HRE than Venice, but Venice wound up controlling most of the Mediterranean islands at one time or another, and chunks of Greece, Italy, and the Dalmatian coast of modern Croatia. Yes, this is significantly smaller than the HRE at its peak, but I'll argue that Venetian actions and interests, particularly during the Crusades, were often more important to Europe as a whole than whatever backstabbing and circle-jerking was going on in the HRE.

The decision to treat the HRE as a set of distinct parts rather than as a whole isn't some glib, Voltaire-inspired dismissal of the most dynamic area of Europe - it's just an attempt to represent it as being dominated by competing factions with quasi-national interests, as the HRE generally was. It would be a greater travesty to include the HRE as one civ and leave out Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Burgundy, and Switzerland.



If you have better ideas for how things should work, we'd love to hear them. Criticism with suggestions for improvement is useful, and could make this mod better. The other kind just lumps you in with the great terrorist guy.

Jaja said:

Just an input; make sure Scandinavia doesn't get too much recources, if you intend to have a hugeassed "norse"-civ.

There's two ways to go with Scandinavia. Either you make it totally dead when it comes to recourses, or you split it up in two, Sweden and Denmark. What you currently have is the "Norse" who will be pretty much alone there, especially if you cut out Russia, and could easily expand to a larger natural area than any other civ yet included. Alas, overpowered. If there is only one civ in Scandinavia, there would be pretty much constant peace unless some crazy-assed german comes and invades. And we wouldn't want that.
My (totally un-merited and unasked for) suggestion is to first have a viking civ (or the norse) who take over a lot of land, raid, trade blabla. Then around 1000-ish they collapse, and around 1200 Denmark and Sweden spawn. Denmark would be underpowered unless they manage to grab Norway, cos Sweden will get Finland. However, Denmark was united before Sweden, so they would get a heads-on there. Of course there will hopefully be a lot of nabbing up (t)here.
Cos, a "Norse" civ here would IMO (and this is not nationalism) suck. They would be totally outside in every way when it comes to international affairs. True, they kinda were before the 1600th century, but it would be worthless out of a gameplay point of view if you ask me. =)

Click to expand...

Thanks for the input, you raise some good points.

-I don't think we're cutting out Russia. It remains to be seen how we're going to handle the vast amount of territory they'll have to play with - I'm thinking that a lot of it is going to be represented as marsh - but they'll be there.
-Removing some of the resources from Scandinavia is probably a good idea, particularly food resources. My intent was to provide them with surplus resources for trade, as the Vikings provided most of the trade goods (furs, timber, metals, slaves) that flowed east through Russia and Constantinople, but they definitely shouldn't have a homeland full of giant cities.
-I think of Scandinavia as being fairly removed from world affairs during this era, aside from appearing periodically to raid coastal cities. But they did manage to colonize Russia and hold kingdoms in Normandy and Sicily, so maybe I'm being unfair. Certainly, they were more involved in European affairs after the Reformation.
-When was the last time Scandinavia was invaded before WW2? Russia took Karelia from Finland, but most invasions involving Scandinavian countries flowed in the opposite direction... probably another reason to change the resource distribution.

Well... Prussia took a chunk of Denmark in the 1860-70s. But if you mean the peninsula itself, Sweden and Norway... IIRC it was mainly the danes. Yes. Internal stuff.
On the other hand, Swedens baltic empire was slowly eaten away by mainly the Russians but also by the Poles and Germans, but it wasn't really an invasion.
Sweden has the luck of being one of the few countries in Europe that has never been bombed. =)