A thing what bother me about the map

[stealth_nsk]

It's fun thing to have unexplored map shown as... map. It's also fun to have fog of war represented as the same map, but with features outlined. However, this brings a lot of visual problems:

- Unexplored land looks the same as grass. And looks like plains, deserts and tundra are likely to be the same.

- With black-and-brown colors it's really hard to distinguish districts between each other. Their cool colored roofs are just wasted under the fog of war.

- Many other features like rice/wheat, or sheeps/cows become really unreadable, but these at least could be shown with resource icons.

In general, the new fog of war looks like very bad visual decision to me even if does look cool. I really hope Civ5-style fog of war will be at least an option.

 

[Uberfrog]

I can't believe these issues haven't occurred to them, and I'm sure they'll have been addressed by launch. We've barely seen any ingame footage yet, after all!

 

[AriochIV]

I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up including an option to turn it off. I noticed a few of the previewers were confused by is (mistaking the edge of the mapped fog for a coastline).

 

[hugojackson18]

I like it but I'm glad to know I'm not the only that is confused by it

 

[stealth_nsk]

I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up including an option to turn it off. I noticed a few of the previewers were confused by is (mistaking the edge of the mapped fog for a coastline).

I'm afraid the option could be to disable fog of war visuals at all. In this case we'll be unable to distinguish "fogged" tiles from fully visible ones.

 

[nunor]

I agree that I doesn't make a lot of sense to "simplify" the graphics so that things become clearer and more distinguishable, just to have a super-detailed fog of war that can potentially lead to confusion between explored and unexplored areas.

 

[Hakan-i Cihan]

We don't know much about the lens system yet. IT could be that certain specific information in fog of war is easily obtained with the lens system.

 

[Barathor]

Yeah, after the initial hype has worn off from seeing things for the first time, I'm not sure if I really dig the map-fog as much as I used to.

The edges are a little too "shredded-up". Though, that was probably partly done so that it doesn't look too much like coastlines in the ocean -- but it's still mistakable.

Mostly, though, I get a bit of a cramped-in, claustrophobic feeling while viewing the empire when it's surrounded by the map effect. There is something pleasing about cloud-busting and having the world open all around you and visible (but shadowed). Especially when the world's as beautiful as it is in Civ6!

I'm sure there will be an option to disable it, but I hope it only doesn't become black darkness + shadowed. It wouldn't be fitting for the current aesthetics of the game. I need the pretty, white clouds to reappear, haha, with shadowed explored terrain when it isn't visible.

 

[stealth_nsk]

We don't know much about the lens system yet. IT could be that certain specific information in fog of war is easily obtained with the lens system.

I don't care if option for more informative fog of war is under lens as long as it exists

 

[m15a]

I like how it looks, but I agree with these complaints. When I heard about the Age of Exploration style map fog, I expected it to have more color - muted compared to the non-fog areas, but still a lot more colorful than what is shown in the screenshots. I feel like that would fix the readability problems and still feel like an authentic old-time map.

 

[Ryika]

It's probably just not fully done yet. The fog-water has a clear, blue tone and a water texture, I don't see a reason why they wouldn't go ahead and translate that onto other terrain later on.

Of course, if they don't then that will indeed be a huge problem.

 

[Josephias]

I think at the end we will see this fog of war as a fine thing. For the moment, I think there is two things that might evolve from now to october.

- We will grow accustomed to it. At the moment, it is so different and unusual to what we have had, that stands out too much.
- Playtesting and feedback might lead to easy changes such as adding a slight "aquarel" color shade over the paper-brown to make terrains stand out more, and "discovered" map to differentiate more from unknown "here be dragons" land. Also stronger "ink-type" shades can be added to district drawings in fog of war map to make them stand out. None of this updates should be really too much time-consuming and probably they are already trying several versions.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

I quite like it.

 

[Zaarin]

I don't have a problem with it personally; I think it makes a good distinction between "this area we have clear information about" and "this area we're kind of guessing on." I would hope that it would become clearer and more accurate after researching Satellites, though...Plus, as other's have pointed out, we're five months from launch. You'll notice none of the icons have been done, for example; I imagine a lot of the graphics will be seeing some polish before release, since they're not essential for establishing gameplay features.

 

[JtW]

I like the map-like fog of war but they made one mistake with it, IMO. If you look at ancient maps, you'll see people basically assumed that whatever was at the edge of the known world continued indefinitely (mainly: the ocean just went on forever.)

So the mistake Firaxis made here is not to respect that - they should have the fog of war depict the map of the ocean everywhere there is an ocean at the edge of the known world, and land wherever there is land. So you only should have a coastline on the fog of war if there is a coast at the end of what area you know.

 

[Spaceturtle]

I think it is readable enough. You can see the difference between terrains.

Ed Beach said that the game will have different map filters (religion, diplomatic, etc.) and I'm sure we will be able to activate icons for resources and other things. That will help.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I think it is readable enough. You can see the difference between terrains.

With some experience - probably. But the districts are still a problem. And I don't like to use filters for things I should be able to read without them.

 

[Ryika]

Makes sense that you wouldn't be able to know about the districts in a city in the fog though.

 

[Acken]

The only thing I don't like on the above screenshot is that cities blend in too much in the fog of war. But maybe its because there are no name plates.

It really look like we're getting the same maps as civ5.
A first task I want done or that I will do is to work a mapscript mod to have something like the nqmapscript (or my mod's). I just cannot play base civ5 anymore with its annoying 1 tile choke points due to narrow passages and mountains.
Although I guess this one doesn't look that bad... we'll see when its released.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Makes sense that you wouldn't be able to know about the districts in a city in the fog though.

No, if you saw them, they are still displayed on the map, but without their colored roofs many of them look quite similar.