A good explanation of the exoplanets map scripts?

[akjone02]

Last Edited: 11/12/2014 at 9:55PM EST
The following information has been gathered from testing and from this thread. Please note that these descriptions may be inaccurate. Help improve this list by posting in this topic below. Thank you to all who have contributed!

• Re-Scan for planets
  This setting appears to do nothing except generate a new selection of random maps with random names. Mostly meaningless if you're using advanced options to set your planet age, temperature, etc.

STANDARD PLANETS

• Terran: "A world with a few large landmasses separated by oceans and some smaller islands."
  The "standard" map, similar to earth with a few large landmasses, 1 or 2 islands, and large oceans.

• Protean: "A world of one ocean and one very large, continuous landmass with the possibility of small, coastal islands."
  A Pangaea map, one super-continent.

• Atlantean: "A world of islands of varying size separated by narrow water passages."
  An interesting map, seems more fractured or random than archipelago. Lots of tiny landmasses and lots of tiny water passages. Almost like a pangea map that's been flooded.

• Archipelago: "An oceanic world populated by medium and small islands."
  Landmasses are more defined and set apart than on the Atlantean world, but still a primarily water map.

• Equatorial: "A rapidly spinning world with a bulging equator and day/night cycle much shorter than Earth's."
  A map with a large band of land around the equatorial region with progressively smaller islands as you head towards the poles. Players start on islands and compete for the large central landmass.

• Skirmish: "Multiplayer land battle, optimized for head to head or two teams. Variety of terrains available."
  No info available yet

• Taigan: "A punishingly cold world whose best lands are found along the coastlines and rivers."
  As the description implies, the freezing counterpart of an arid map. Lots of tundra and snow tiles.

EXOPLANETS

• Kepler 186f: "This lush forest planet is one of the oldest known Earth-like planets."
  Appears to be a map with significant amounts of forest. Also said to contain more marshes than a normal map. Rainfall settings react differently to this script. No info yet on oceans or general map layout

• Rigil Khantoris Bb: "Orbiting the closest star to the solar system, the historical records of this arid continental planet’s settlement are well-preserved."
  Appears to be a map with significant amounts of desert. No info yet on oceans or general map layout

• Tau Ceti d: "This planet of seas and archipelagos features a booming biodiversity and a wealth of resources."
  An archipelago map, differs from standard archipelago in that it has no poles. Also appears to trend towards "narrow" features. Landmasses have lots of points that are only 1 or 2 tiles across, and water gaps between island are also very thin.

• Mu Arae f: "Tidally locked in orbit around a weak star, the southern hemisphere of this planet is a blistering desert where the sun never sets, while the northern hemisphere is perpetually in frozen darkness."
  The description on this one is pretty solid, half the map is tundra/snow the other half is desert/arid.

• 82 Eridani e: "An alien world of scarce water and wracked by tectonic forces"
  A world without large oceans but lots of canyons and mountains. Usable terrain is limited due to abundance of lakes and impassible tiles. Lots of bottlenecks, little water. You can adjust the sizes of water bodies on this map, from small lakes to large lakes to "seas," but no oceans.

• Eta Vulpeculae b: "A massive continent holds a deep wilderness in its interior, rich with resources and thickly populated with indigenous life."
  The "wilderness" in the center of this map is not necessarily forest, but can be of about any terrain. Players start on the outskirts of a map with a single super-continent (often starting on peninsulas or easily bottlenecked areas). Claiming the middle of the map is a free-for-all and there are tons of aliens in the interior. Map is MUCH larger than other maps of the same size (a "small" eta map is more like "standard" of other scripts).

Original Post below
So I pre-ordered BE and got the exoplanet map pack... but for the life of me I can't figure out what the new map scripts do. For several of them I can specify almost every option (terrain type, landmasses, sea level, etc). A couple don't allow terrain changes but look to just be the same as choosing a Pangaea or archipelago map.

Does anyone have a solid idea of what the map scripts do and how they differ?

A secondary question... is there any purpose to the "re-scan for planets" button other than to change the planet names?

 

[GeoModder]

A secondary question... is there any purpose to the "re-scan for planets" button other than to change the planet names?

AFAIK, no.

 

[Cyon]

The "dry world without ocean" has oceans which is weird. And what is special with the bulge one eludes me. The only one that is any different is the half desert half ice world.

What does ornery people think of them?

Had anyone a favorite among them?

 

[Talcove]

The "dry world without ocean" has oceans which is weird. And what is special with the bulge one eludes me. The only one that is any different is the half desert half ice world.

What does ornery people think of them?

Had anyone a favorite among them?

The bulge one, if I understand which one you're talking about, is actually somewhat different. It has a large, continuous, strip of land on/around the equator, surrounded by smaller islands. The islands get smaller the farther away you get from the equator. If I recall correctly all players start on one of the smaller island, making the equator a big colonial land-grab.

 

[Rakshasa72]

I positively in love with Tau ceti b map.

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

I've found they have very few dig sites and resource pods compared to the regular map scripts

 

[Jacozilla]

I'm probably in the minority that really love BE (while acknowledging and waiting for the inevitable improvements/fixes so obviously needed) - so I'm bummed I forgot to pre-order and get the map pack bonus.

I missed seeing on steam whether there was anything worth pre-ordering for because they list things so far in advance to pre-order I don't think I even saw a pack offer.

Probably going to be no, but no way to get the bonus maps short of waiting for some eventual map pack dlc like with CiV?

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Try my Better Exoplanet Name mod for convienence:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=333051748

The Exoplanet Mapscripts are:
-> Vulcan: No oceans, instead lots of hills and mountains.
-> Aridean: Lots of desert
-> Oceanic: Lots of ocean, smaller islands than Archipelago, no pole caps
-> Tilted Axis: Lots of desert on one half, tundra on the other half
-> Arborean: Heavily forested map
-> Wilderness: Seems like a pangae-style map, but with a giant wildland at the interior

 

[PhilBowles]

The "dry world without ocean" has oceans which is weird. And what is special with the bulge one eludes me. The only one that is any different is the half desert half ice world.

I had a good game on Mu Arae f (the tidally locked world) - but while, yes, there was a lot of desert around me, I actually had a great grassland starting position. The Alpha Centauri map was a harsher desert map.

 

[akjone02]

The only one that is any different is the half desert half ice world.

Sure, that one seems pretty straightforward... generates much different from a standard map, so I like that one pretty well.

The bulge one, if I understand which one you're talking about, is actually somewhat different. It has a large, continuous, strip of land on/around the equator, surrounded by smaller islands.

Nice! I had no idea that is what that meant, I like the sound of that map, thanks for the description!

I positively in love with Tau ceti b map.

Great, can you give me some idea what the script generates?
"This planet of seas and archipelagos features a booming biodiversity and a wealth of resources."
So is Tau Ceti any different from setting up an archipelago map with lush terrain and high resources?

 

[Barathor]

Try my Better Exoplanet Name mod for convienence:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=333051748

The Exoplanet Mapscripts are:
-> Vulcan: No oceans, instead lots of hills and mountains.
-> Aridean: Lots of desert
-> Oceanic: Lots of ocean, smaller islands than Archipelago, no pole caps
-> Tilted Axis: Lots of desert on one half, tundra on the other half
-> Arborean: Heavily forested map
-> Wilderness: Seems like a pangae-style map, but with a giant wildland at the interior

A simple and clever tweak. I was initially going a little crazy trying to find the Kepler script (because that was the only one I was interested in) until I searched it's tooltip text in the XML to find out it's Arborean, haha.

- - - - - - -

On my second game now and I utilized the Advanced Settings menu this time (I totally missed it the first time I set up a game). But, before I did so, I dug through the Lua files for a bit.

Kepler is alright, but it has a TON of forest all over the place (hence, Arborean), plus marsh, which isn't really stated in its tooltip. Balance-wise, I'm not sure how this affects things, but it may make some bonus resources much more prevalent than others which require a clear tile.

Also, a heads-up, the rainfall setting won't have much impact most forest levels, since the modifiers are set to 0 on this script. Though, forests/marshes which would've been jungles in Civ 5 are affected, along with regular marsh tiles.

- - - - - - -

Also, another heads-up, as far as I can tell so far, the "Tropical" setting under Temperature doesn't do anything and was never finished. If you choose it, things will just default to "Temperate". Also, if you choose Random, this will cause you to have a 50% chance for "Temperate".

I imagine what they were planning on doing with this setting was to have one which decreases BOTH desert and tundra, for a more plains/grass dominant map than Temperate.

- - - - - - -

If anybody was wondering about Strategic Balance, it'll try to add a major Petroleum and Titanium to your starting area.

- - - - - - -

So far, I think I like Standard Terran, Rainfall: Wet, Sea Level: Low, World Age: 5 Billion Years.

Terran for a standard continents type of map with some randomization on their sizes.

Wet for a bit more forests. I LOVE how there's no improvement for them anymore and their meant to be chopped down for extra production to get things rolling faster. (I actually was planning on a larger mod to Civ 5 which removes lumber mills and brings back extensive chopping to the game -- with many other modifications, of course, to other abilities, rules, etc. to balance things.) I also love how there are no more lame jungles and it's all homogenized into one tree feature.

Low sea level for fatter continents. No need to worry about luxury totals not adequately covering the extra land -- there aren't any! Strategics and Bonuses scale with the terrain.

Older world age for slightly less mountains and canyons (and hills). In my opinion, they create too many choke points and traffic jams.

- - - - - -

Also, I fired off a game trying out unstaggered starts and it was really lame, in my opinion. Plus, I think the voices kind of bugged out a bit during first contact with all of them at once. But, give it a try for yourselves and see what you think.

 

[Kaigen]

Wet for a bit more forests. I LOVE how there's no improvement for them anymore and their meant to be chopped down for extra production to get things rolling faster.

You can build Biowells over forest without removing it, just FYI.

 

[akjone02]

You can build Biowells over forest without removing it, just FYI.

Almost always what I do with my forests. I treat them, now, as basically a second tile improvement, so I've got a biowell with all its glory plus a +1 production on that square. The defensive bonus is nice early too.

 

[Gokudo01]

this thread should be sticky

 

[akjone02]

this thread should be sticky

Thanks

I've updated the original post to include the info I've found so far about the planets.

Does anyone have a good feel for the terran map? Does it work like previous civ games where everyone starts on one continent and needs to migrate to the other?

 

[Arvedui]

I know that Skirmish is a map that doesn't wrap around itself, i.e., it's a regional map.

 

[Barathor]

Does anyone have a good feel for the terran map? Does it work like previous civ games where everyone starts on one continent and needs to migrate to the other?

Terran is basically a Continents map script, much like Protean is the new Pangaea.

I don't think Terra would work as well with BE; the new world is pretty much the whole planet. Story-wise, with the colonists' technology, I don't think they would miss out on entire continents to explore/exploit on the new planet. Gameplay-wise, being able to easily traverse oceans very early hurts the whole mid-game age of discovery feel.

Though, supposedly, the game creates "wild" areas throughout the map which are ripe with aliens and are good sources of the affinity resources.

 

[Joch]

playing a game now on the "82 Eridani e" map, lots of mountains, canyons, lakes.

It is a deceptively difficult map, since the terrain limits the good spots where you can found cities and the terrain then limits how far each city can expand. In addition, because of the bottlenecks, your trade routes can easily be blocked by Miasma which you have to clear. The other factions are also more of an issue since you all wind up competing for the same good spots for cities. On the plus side, lots of great defensive terrain.

 

[Fabio1701]

I agree, this thread should be sticky.

 

[akjone02]

Thanks for the replies all, I've updated the main thread. The Eta Vulpeculae b map is VERY interesting.