S, having had many health adventures that suck this fall and realizing that I really need to crawl before I walk, I messed around with Civ 5 Beyond Earth and remembered I wanted a gentle terraforming mod I could do to occupy by eyes and hands while listening to audiobooks.
I founds an old scenario called Mars 2 which had Mars with a theoretical ocean (if all the water melted and supposedly what the ocean looked like in the northern territory 3 billion years ago), but that was about a dying Mars, so I swapped out the icecaps and the oceans to create something more like the Fantastic Worlds Mars map with just some ocean at top and bottom to let the AI naviagte properly.
THe map is about 9000 tiles which is the same as the normal FW one and the standard earth map from regular Civ. I did some calculations and found out that when you aren't cheeky about ocean area not technically being land area (this became a very irritating joke quickly trying to goggle the numbers) Mars has 38% the surface area as earth. The 9000 tile Mars map of either type is 35% of the 32,000 tile world map from things like the Imperialism and the Overlord Map, and such, meaning You can get a real visceral idea of the difference in size, which I've included here,
What I haven't done yet is decide if I want to include Earth in some capacity the way the TOT version does, not sure it's a good idea, but the how losing contact does need to be established.
I am open to all pointers. I'm not TOO interested in the accuracy of the Mars map other than having a transformable basin up to the theoretical waterline and the vast Martian highlands of the south, cause it turns out most of the topology we know, the red soil, is only a couple of inches deep, so changing it doesn't seem like it would be very hard.
I'm mostly thinking about the terraformed spaces. The whole game is built around the three city resources and you screw with the trade arrows too much on land and POW! everything goes unbalanced.
If I have earth,m Earth is obviously a great place for population centers, but you can't cap population growth too bad on Mars without crippling the AI competitors, which given this is a building scenario, hard enough..
But I made some discoveries of scale, got something to experiment with, and right now I'm thinking about what kinds of terraformed landscapes a player might idly want to create on earth and Mars in the end game as they listen to something else casually. Something pretty, but also novel enough be kind of a painting. Probably just enough
I was thinking of returning to the shallow seas experiment I saw in the FW version of Midgard, where it was land but after an eruption it looked like shallow sees with coral and other bounties.
I founds an old scenario called Mars 2 which had Mars with a theoretical ocean (if all the water melted and supposedly what the ocean looked like in the northern territory 3 billion years ago), but that was about a dying Mars, so I swapped out the icecaps and the oceans to create something more like the Fantastic Worlds Mars map with just some ocean at top and bottom to let the AI naviagte properly.
THe map is about 9000 tiles which is the same as the normal FW one and the standard earth map from regular Civ. I did some calculations and found out that when you aren't cheeky about ocean area not technically being land area (this became a very irritating joke quickly trying to goggle the numbers) Mars has 38% the surface area as earth. The 9000 tile Mars map of either type is 35% of the 32,000 tile world map from things like the Imperialism and the Overlord Map, and such, meaning You can get a real visceral idea of the difference in size, which I've included here,
What I haven't done yet is decide if I want to include Earth in some capacity the way the TOT version does, not sure it's a good idea, but the how losing contact does need to be established.
I am open to all pointers. I'm not TOO interested in the accuracy of the Mars map other than having a transformable basin up to the theoretical waterline and the vast Martian highlands of the south, cause it turns out most of the topology we know, the red soil, is only a couple of inches deep, so changing it doesn't seem like it would be very hard.
I'm mostly thinking about the terraformed spaces. The whole game is built around the three city resources and you screw with the trade arrows too much on land and POW! everything goes unbalanced.
If I have earth,m Earth is obviously a great place for population centers, but you can't cap population growth too bad on Mars without crippling the AI competitors, which given this is a building scenario, hard enough..
But I made some discoveries of scale, got something to experiment with, and right now I'm thinking about what kinds of terraformed landscapes a player might idly want to create on earth and Mars in the end game as they listen to something else casually. Something pretty, but also novel enough be kind of a painting. Probably just enough
I was thinking of returning to the shallow seas experiment I saw in the FW version of Midgard, where it was land but after an eruption it looked like shallow sees with coral and other bounties.