The Mirror Universe

[korossyl]

I'm playing CivRev for DS, and have been for over a year. There are two circumstances of note in my playing:

1) I cheat, badly -- I'll restart over and over and over again until I've found a city spot I think is perfect. So I might go through a dozen false starts before every involved game I play to the end.

2) There have been some games I've played that have been so spectacular that I've saved them, so I can refer back to them later. I currently have three of those.

So I started a new game, and after five or so attempts, found a promising starting spot. It looked a lot like one I had played before, so I founded my capital, and starting exploring......
And discovered that it was, in fact, a map entirely identical to one in one of my saved games. The resources were different, the civilizations and starting spots were different, but the map -- I double checked -- was 100% the same.

So...
Is this a glitch? Did the game somehow pull data out of my earlier saved game? If so, why were the variables randomized?
Or...
Is there some enormously high amount of maps saved on the cartridge that the game draws from and randomizes?

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[ericball]

There are two possible explanations:
1. The maps are precalculated and stored in the game. Then when you start it randomly picks one of the maps, randomly assigns starting points (which may be encoded with the map) and randomly distributes resources.
2. The map is randomly generated, but occasionally the same random number generator seed happens - resulting in the same map. However, since the resources and starting points were different, this would indicate a second random seed is used after the map is generated.

Two advantages for #1 - don't have to include map generation code in the game (good for DS) and makes multiplayer easier (use map X and random seed Y).

 

[elthrasher]

Despite what may have appeared in a press release somewhere, the maps are not randomly generated, but are randomly selected from a large library (hundreds perhaps) of pre-generated maps. Sometimes the resources and artifacts will be a little different, but I know for a fact I've played the exact same map with everything in the same place multiple times.

Really helps the online play when I know where everything is and my opponent doesn't.