Brave New World Version Released 31/08/13
Concept.
Although there are a plethora of beautifully rendered Earth maps already available I have yet to find one that fully meets my needs.
Huge or Giant earth maps are simply too big. They slow to a crawl even on decent machines so unless you have the patience of a saint are virtually unplayable.
TSL Giant Earth Maps for example is 180 x 94, thats a staggering 16920 tiles! Even Huge 128*80 maps are 10240 tiles and are seriously resource hungry.
The trouble is anything smaller and key regions like Europe become far too compact, even when upscaled.
I set myself the challenge of creating a fully playable 22 civ Earth map with a giant Europe on a normal sized 104*64 earth map, thats just 6654 tiles!
Disclaimer: This is a GAMEPLAY focused Earth map. It is not intended to be geographically accurate.
Scandinavians please exit the thread immediately as further reading may make you cry.
Fitting a giant Earth into 40% of the tiles is quite a challenge but like Plato, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein before me I had a moment of genius.
Spoiler :
Chop off over half the planet!
Do the vast, virtually uninhabited expanses of Siberia, Northern Scandanavia and Canada or massive oceans enhance gameplay?
This is a map has created from scratch tile by tile and taken quite some time.
It features a massively upscaled Western Europe and other crowded areas such as Central America, the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Conversely areas with less Civilisations have been shrunk, as have the oceans to allow for more land.
Spoiler :
Gods & Kings Version
22 Playable Civs +16 City States
England
France
Germany
Spain
Ottoman
Rome
Russia
Arabia
Persia
India
Mongolia
China
Korea
Japan
Egypt
Carthage
Songhai
Ethiopia
Iroquois
Aztec
Maya
Inca
The Brave New World Version does not include New World Civs
They have been replaced with Portugal, Venice, Indonesia and Zulu.