Abilard's Modified Europe

[abilard]

Here is a map that is a modified version of UnCopain's excellent 107x87 Huge European Map. The changes that I made:

* Removed the bottom six rows... it was only Sahara Desert.
* Added Jordan River and Sea of Galilee
* Made the Dardenelles Navigable
* Made Venice an Island
* "Beefed" up Mountains: South Norway, Grampian Mountains (Scotland), Pyrenes, Systema Central (Spain), Systema Beticos (Spain), Alps, Balkan Mountains, Rhodope Mountains (Bulgaria), Northern Carpathians, Tatras Mountains (Poland).
* Added three historic Alpine passes using roads: St. Bernard's, Little St. Benard's, and Gotthard's.
* Changed hills around Bohemia... didn't "look" right to me.
* Made Agean Islands more "hilly"
* Added the oil fields of South Romania, Konigsberg, and East Slovakia.

This is only a map. No pre-set starting locations.

This is still a work in progress... more to come.

To see the original masterpice by UnCopain, visit th thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=156846

View attachment ModifiedEurope.zip

Alpine Passes:


Dardenelles:


Sea of Galilee:

 

[Drogear]

Nice work, Im happy to see that you started on the changes this fast.

How about the resources, and plans on changing them? I played France and they seems to have some sweet spots but England for example is rather dull. I admit that I haven’t had time to spot most other places to see how they look.

Any plans on implementing 18 civ on the new map? I played some games with 10 civ and the map felt way to big for it kind of lonely, 18 civs makes it more densely populated.

hm... damit I had a great idée but the boss came in and started talking so I forgot about it!...

 

[Drogear]

Have you ahd time to playtest? How does the new map effect gamespeed? Im not sure the 6 tilt change is going to do enuff

EDIT: Now it came back to me! Have you played the earth_realism 1.3(4) map? IMO they have a very good idée of having preeset barbarian own citys in many parts of the map where the original cities where positioned.

This would make for more historical accuracy, bzuc the citys got the right spot and name even after they eventually get overrun by you or the AI.

The barb city units could be made unmobil and having pretty high defensive stat to keep them from overrunning the AI and to be overrunn them self to fast.

This makes for balancing abilities to, say if one civ always come on top you could position barb cities to slow their expansion.

 

[abilard]

Look over your shoulder... is he gone? Good!

As to resources, I only added four oil fields- two in Romania, one in East Slovakia, and one near Kaliningrad. These were strategic in the 20th century and are the most important resource add-ins (imho) since petrol is key to the end game strategy.

Also added horses to the Puszta- Hungarian plain. Can't have hussars without horses!

If anyone wants to add and correct other resources... please do! I like mapping in general, but I really dislike ersource placement.


You must be reading my mind about adding 18 civs. I will further truncate the east part of the map and add in 18 civs. I just need to think about the best balance of civs in terms of geography. The thing to watch on European maps is that the edge players often end up winning because they only end up haveing to watch one front. Russia can't always win. As such, I'm thinking about how to "crowd" the edges without ignoring key civilizations in the middle.

I also intend to add several barbarian cities as well to fill things out.

Unfortunately, I haven't test played it yet... but I hope to make these additions quickly so I can get to the fun.

Another couple of ideas to speed up playability:

a) double move values for all land units, triple move values for all sea units, appropriately increase range of air units. This should accelerate warfare (more fun!)

b) start each civ with two or three cities.

any other suggestions? i'm really open to thm at this point.

 

[Drogear]

I cant say I think the double-move is a good idea; Makes for balancing problems, not sure the AI can handle it properly either.

The speeded up start isn’t either going to help, only make the game slow down faster.

The only real speed save is to chop down the map into lesser parts, say one for a more Eurocentric view w/o east Russia and middle east. Or a classic Mediterranean approach with Greece, Rome, Persia, Egypt, Ottoman/Turk areas and cutting the map to the north and West)

seems like civ games always has these problems with slow late games! civ2, had to w8 5-10min between rounds (on a old comp), civ3 is unplayable later on with even a super computer, civ4 is better than civ3 but my cel 2,4 1gb RAM cant play the bigger maps. Other games that like HOI/HOI2, EU2, RTW haven’t got there problems at all but still they seems to acquire the same amount of computer power.

 

[Junuxx]

What if the roads on the mountain passes get pillaged?

 

[Angus Khan]

I just posted this at the original uncopain thread. I thought I should repost it here:

Drogear & abilard,

Yes, this is a very nice looking map.

It's also a great map to chop chunks out of for smaller scenarios.

I have already chopped a section out the map centered on the Balkans for a scenario I'm working on. I used Civ4Editor. The only real problem I had was that it screwed up the river directions.

This map is great for chopping for 2 reasons - it's big, and it uses a cylindrical projection. This means that if someplace is north of you, it will appear directly above you with this projection, regardless of how far off to the side of the map you are. So Ireland is directly above Portugal like it should be, instead of Portugal being skewed way to the left as in many other projections. Because of this property, you can chop out a map of say, Great Britain, and it won't look distorted.

I agree that this map needs modifications. Venice as an island sounds intriguing. Also, re: Istanbul, the Sea of Marmara will become salt water if the Dardanelles and Bosporus are opened up. This would mean adding a river or 2 to maintain irrigibility if wanted.

Is there a sticky of map reference material? I think there may be one in the Civ 3 forums...? I have been viewing much of Europe the past few weeks with Google Earth. What an amazing app. It could be useful in identifying terrain.

Yes Drogear, I would like to see those parts of the map go too, ... however...

I would also like to see the entire map maintained as a resource for European scenario designers to chop "sub-maps" out of. Many different scenarios could be created by chopping small to standard sized maps out of this single map.

The map could even be expanded in the future using Civ4Editor...

 

[Angus Khan]

Yes, good job getting started so soon. I would like to contribute to this map.

First off, the best place I have found for useful European maps is http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/.

Google Earth is great for distinguishing mountains from hills, and hills from flatlands when you're not quite sure which way to go.

As for plains and grasslands, I don't really like the idea of covering most of France and Germany with a huge carpet of grasslands. I'd like to see more plains there.
I have looked at land use, rainfall, soil and other maps. I believe that the best maps may be the land use ones. They distinguish cropland (grasslands in cIV ?) from grazing land (plains in cIV). Would this be an appropriate division?

BTW, I am quite certain that this is a Mercator projection map (I just love map projections).
It's good qualities are 1) shapes like coastlines are represented accurately throughout the map and 2) north is always straight up.
It's worst quality is that the scale of the map decreases the further north you go. So the British Isles and Scandinavia are relatively bigger on this map than they are in truth. However, it isn't a really big problem since Scandinavia has been truncated and many people will prefer large British Isles.

As for your eastern chop off point, that's tough. Do you leave in Stalingrad?
Do you keep Rostov? - the Greeks were there 2,000 years ago.

If you do cut out Rostov as you say in:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=118914&d=1141814501
then you might want to connect the Muis river (1 or 2 tiles northwest of Rostov) to the Donets river to allow trade up the Donets.

Enough for now. I hope this helps.

 

[Angus Khan]

Yeah, I'm back...

Here is a map of France from that UTexas map site.

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/europe/france_land_1972.jpg

Compare this to a similar map of Spain which is, of course, much drier.

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/europe/spain_land_1974.jpg

There are similar maps of many other european nations.

Do these maps look useful for distinguishing grasslands from plains? Does anyone care?

If so, which of these land use types would be cIVs grasslands (2 food) and which would be it's plains (1 food, 1 hammer)?

Also note the presence of wheat, vineyards and olives...

 

[Roetghoer]

I've zipped my Resource revision of the entire original map of uncopain, its in the attachment.

I'm really interested in what you think of it and what you are making yourselfs

I don't have much time at the moment but i'll take a look at your work this weekend.

Grtz, Rutger

 

[jlocke]

I'm making a WWI scenario with this map...
anyone want to help?

 

[Drogear]

It's also a great map to chop chunks out of for smaller scenarios.

Is this hard to do? I really lack the skills for modding civ4... kinda hopping that someones going to do this for me btw: at bloody work most times, if I could Ill load up civ here...

Would be fun to test if a chopped up eurocentric map would make much diffrence speedwise. But this would require some civ modding to fitt 18 civs, needs replacements for arab, persia and perhaps more?

 

[Angus Khan]

It's also a great map to chop chunks out of for smaller scenarios.

Is this hard to do? I really lack the skills for modding civ4... kinda hopping that someones going to do this for me

Well, install Civ4Editor and see what you think.

Would be fun to test if a chopped up eurocentric map would make much diffrence speedwise.

Well, if you chopped out a standard 84 x 52 map, it would be about half the size of the original and play quite a bit faster.

 

[abilard]

What if the roads on the mountain passes get pillaged?

My decision to use roads for passes isn't settling well with me for many reasons. I'm gonna go back and find a better solution to the mountain pass issue this weekend. Good point.

Google Earth is great for distinguishing mountains from hills, and hills from flatlands when you're not quite sure which way to go.

I agree, but Google Earth can be difficult in terms of where exactly to place plains or grassland. It's great for providing the general idea though.

As for plains and grasslands, I don't really like the idea of covering most of France and Germany with a huge carpet of grasslands. I'd like to see more plains there.

Well, there simply aren't plains in France and Germany. About ten months ago a drove diagonally accross Germany (Salzburg to Trier) and saw a lot of hills, forest, and grasslands... no plains though. To break up the monotony, I would reccomend using forrests instead. Generally speaking, I think UnCopain did a very good good on the grasslands vs. plains issue.

Those land use maps are pretty neat, but we need to remember that this is how people are using the land at one point in time. I'm not sure if pasture, for example, would consistently be eaither grassland or plains.

As for your eastern chop off point, that's tough. Do you leave in Stalingrad? Do you keep Rostov? - the Greeks were there 2,000 years ago.

Agree with you completely. I haven't lost any sleep about chopping off the bottom six rows of dessert. On the other hand, I think its good to keep the current width of the generic map. Individuals can chop off unwanted portions when they make their own mods and scenarios with it.

I've used civ4 editor is Mapview easier to use?

 

[Nightravn]

I found YAME(Yet Another Map Editor) to be a great map editor especially for chopping existing map and what not. With to instances of it open you can copy actually the size you want form one to the other and then do it again with the rivers so everything is in place as it should be.

 

[Angus Khan]

abilard -"I've used civ4 editor is Mapview easier to use?"

Sorry, I was confusing Mapview with Civ4Editor. It is Civ4Editor that allows easy cut and pasting of map portions. My apologies. I will correct my previous posts on this...

Thanks Nightravn, I'll look into YAME. I don't think Civ4Editor can paste to other maps.