Kaiserisak
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2008
- Messages
- 32
Alexmod – 50 civ World Map
24. november 2011, works with Civ4 Beyond the Sword 3.19
Download: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=17960
Description: This is a basic world map, based on the giant map made by Rhye, but I have tried to rebalance it to give it a bit more historical flair.
Terrain: Civ 4 introduced the concept of natural geographical borders with the impassable mountain peaks, and most of my tweaks of the terrain are guided by this concept of natural borders. With normal rules, terrains like deserts and jungles don’t really work to limit the contact between civilizations like they did for most of recorded history, so I have wanted to expand on the idea of using natural borders by placing strategic mountain peaks to limit contact, and also include an extra terrain type that I called “dunes” to make impassable deserts.
The Himalayas, Hindu Kush and other mountain ranges now works as effective natural borders, and I have also expanded on the Urals to make Russian expansion into Siberia dependent on their ability to wage war against the various hordes further south.
The Sahara is now also much more closed than it was, and it will no longer be possible to traverse the Sahara freely at will, and there is now only three main routes, the eastern, central and western. The eastern route follows the Blue Nile upward and into Ethiopia. However, this means that for Egypt or other civilizations to cross the Sahara here, they need to go through both the Nubian civilizations on the upper Nile, the Ethiopian civilization which is itself segregated away from the central African jungle through mountain peaks and lakes, and the Swahili civilization to the south of Ethiopia. The central route is the old caravan route from Algeria, through Tamanraset and onto Timbouctu. However, the Mali civilization will make expansion here rather challenging for a computer controlled Carthage. The western route is the salt-road from Morocco to Mali, used by the Moroccan Kingdom to destroy the Songhai civilizations in the 15th century. Again, expansion south of Sahara is definitely possible, but much more challenging than on the normal map.
I have also used tons of ocean- and ice-tiles to prevent early colonization of Australia and to segregate Greenland from Iceland etc, you need to be able to cross oceans to do this. No room for any Leiv Eriksson here unfortunately
It is now impossible to make cities on forests and jungles, and I have filled Siberia and central Africa with forests and jungles which somewhat prevents the AI to spam Siberia and rain forest areas with cities. This makes the situation significantly more difficult for any of the horde civilization since they are essentially limited to the steppes south of the Taiga, and it also make southern African civilizations like the Zulu much weaker. There is still the possibility to remove forests to build cities, but this will at least stop the spamming somewhat, while still keeping the possibility for a human to colonize this areas.
Units in jungle will also take 5% damage each turn, however, I suspect that the AI will have difficulty with adjusting to this change, so I will probably change it back after some more testing.
With a more detailed map, I would probably have expanded even further on the concept of natural borders and done more to the Tarim Basis, the Silk-Road, the steppes and the jungles of south-east-Asia, however with the limited scale of the map, I felt that it would not really serve any point. I am definitely open to suggestions though.
Civilizations: The game includes 50 civilizations, and all of them start in the old world, which leaves very little space for each. On the other hand, America and Australia are completely empty, and should therefore be subject to colonization attempts from the old world civs later on in the game. Most civilizations will only be able to build two or three cities early on due to the close placement of civs, and quite a few will only be able to build one. This is not really balanced, so the civilizations that start in fertile areas like China or spacious regions like Russia will probably dominate the game. However, I have done some tweaking to avoid any one civilization of being too dominant, like including strategic civilizations to block the progress of others. Novgorod is the best example of this. The following civilizations are included:
Europe:
North Africa:
Africa south of Sahara:
Middle East:
India:
South-East Asia:
Central Asia:
East-Asia:
Other Changes:
- Units have double movement
- Religions almost does not spread, which makes the use of missionaries mandatory
- Open Border Agreement and Map-trading is now unlocked with the technology of Nationalism, which eliminates the globe-spanning early wars that open border-agreements creates.
- As a consequence of this, the Missionary unit now ignores enemy territory.
- Most history-minded players of Civilization, have probably realized that the standard technology tree lacks some balancing after the early medieval ages. The best solution to this would probably be to include a few extra techs, but my mush simpler solution was to simply increase the cost of a few chosen techs like gunpowder to make the early middle-ages feel like they last a bit longer.
- Improvements take double time to make
- Only two world wonders per city
- Jerusalem starts as a barbarian controlled city, and I might let the game start with Judaism, however, I have not found a good way to balance that yet.
- The Aztecs (one city) and Incas (three cities) are also controlled by barbarians. However, that means the barbarians build cities through the whole of America, so I need to rebalance this or at least find an appropriate solution to it. I would also like a good suggestion to how I can make the conquest of these cities very beneficial for an old world conqueror.
- I have also added a lot of resources to make a few civs a bit stronger
I recommend that the game is played on Noble or higher difficulty, with Raging Barbarians, only technology brokering and fixed religions, but it is of course possible to play it in any way you like. However, the diplomacy is really messed up with so many civs, which is why I suggest playing it without tech-trading. If you play with it on, be prepared to get tons of annoying requests every turn to give away techs to increasingly irritated AI-controlled civs.
Thanks to Dale and Rhye for the basic version of the map, korny3354 for starting the project, and the_j for help with basic understanding of how modding works in civ4.
If anybody have suggestions to things I can add, feel free to post them here!
Pics are from an old version, but they should give a general idea:
24. november 2011, works with Civ4 Beyond the Sword 3.19
Download: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=17960
Description: This is a basic world map, based on the giant map made by Rhye, but I have tried to rebalance it to give it a bit more historical flair.
Terrain: Civ 4 introduced the concept of natural geographical borders with the impassable mountain peaks, and most of my tweaks of the terrain are guided by this concept of natural borders. With normal rules, terrains like deserts and jungles don’t really work to limit the contact between civilizations like they did for most of recorded history, so I have wanted to expand on the idea of using natural borders by placing strategic mountain peaks to limit contact, and also include an extra terrain type that I called “dunes” to make impassable deserts.
The Himalayas, Hindu Kush and other mountain ranges now works as effective natural borders, and I have also expanded on the Urals to make Russian expansion into Siberia dependent on their ability to wage war against the various hordes further south.
The Sahara is now also much more closed than it was, and it will no longer be possible to traverse the Sahara freely at will, and there is now only three main routes, the eastern, central and western. The eastern route follows the Blue Nile upward and into Ethiopia. However, this means that for Egypt or other civilizations to cross the Sahara here, they need to go through both the Nubian civilizations on the upper Nile, the Ethiopian civilization which is itself segregated away from the central African jungle through mountain peaks and lakes, and the Swahili civilization to the south of Ethiopia. The central route is the old caravan route from Algeria, through Tamanraset and onto Timbouctu. However, the Mali civilization will make expansion here rather challenging for a computer controlled Carthage. The western route is the salt-road from Morocco to Mali, used by the Moroccan Kingdom to destroy the Songhai civilizations in the 15th century. Again, expansion south of Sahara is definitely possible, but much more challenging than on the normal map.
I have also used tons of ocean- and ice-tiles to prevent early colonization of Australia and to segregate Greenland from Iceland etc, you need to be able to cross oceans to do this. No room for any Leiv Eriksson here unfortunately
It is now impossible to make cities on forests and jungles, and I have filled Siberia and central Africa with forests and jungles which somewhat prevents the AI to spam Siberia and rain forest areas with cities. This makes the situation significantly more difficult for any of the horde civilization since they are essentially limited to the steppes south of the Taiga, and it also make southern African civilizations like the Zulu much weaker. There is still the possibility to remove forests to build cities, but this will at least stop the spamming somewhat, while still keeping the possibility for a human to colonize this areas.
Units in jungle will also take 5% damage each turn, however, I suspect that the AI will have difficulty with adjusting to this change, so I will probably change it back after some more testing.
With a more detailed map, I would probably have expanded even further on the concept of natural borders and done more to the Tarim Basis, the Silk-Road, the steppes and the jungles of south-east-Asia, however with the limited scale of the map, I felt that it would not really serve any point. I am definitely open to suggestions though.
Civilizations: The game includes 50 civilizations, and all of them start in the old world, which leaves very little space for each. On the other hand, America and Australia are completely empty, and should therefore be subject to colonization attempts from the old world civs later on in the game. Most civilizations will only be able to build two or three cities early on due to the close placement of civs, and quite a few will only be able to build one. This is not really balanced, so the civilizations that start in fertile areas like China or spacious regions like Russia will probably dominate the game. However, I have done some tweaking to avoid any one civilization of being too dominant, like including strategic civilizations to block the progress of others. Novgorod is the best example of this. The following civilizations are included:
Europe:
Spoiler :
North Africa:
Spoiler :
Africa south of Sahara:
Spoiler :
Middle East:
Spoiler :
India:
Spoiler :
South-East Asia:
Spoiler :
Central Asia:
Spoiler :
East-Asia:
Spoiler :
Other Changes:
- Units have double movement
- Religions almost does not spread, which makes the use of missionaries mandatory
- Open Border Agreement and Map-trading is now unlocked with the technology of Nationalism, which eliminates the globe-spanning early wars that open border-agreements creates.
- As a consequence of this, the Missionary unit now ignores enemy territory.
- Most history-minded players of Civilization, have probably realized that the standard technology tree lacks some balancing after the early medieval ages. The best solution to this would probably be to include a few extra techs, but my mush simpler solution was to simply increase the cost of a few chosen techs like gunpowder to make the early middle-ages feel like they last a bit longer.
- Improvements take double time to make
- Only two world wonders per city
- Jerusalem starts as a barbarian controlled city, and I might let the game start with Judaism, however, I have not found a good way to balance that yet.
- The Aztecs (one city) and Incas (three cities) are also controlled by barbarians. However, that means the barbarians build cities through the whole of America, so I need to rebalance this or at least find an appropriate solution to it. I would also like a good suggestion to how I can make the conquest of these cities very beneficial for an old world conqueror.
- I have also added a lot of resources to make a few civs a bit stronger
I recommend that the game is played on Noble or higher difficulty, with Raging Barbarians, only technology brokering and fixed religions, but it is of course possible to play it in any way you like. However, the diplomacy is really messed up with so many civs, which is why I suggest playing it without tech-trading. If you play with it on, be prepared to get tons of annoying requests every turn to give away techs to increasingly irritated AI-controlled civs.
Thanks to Dale and Rhye for the basic version of the map, korny3354 for starting the project, and the_j for help with basic understanding of how modding works in civ4.
If anybody have suggestions to things I can add, feel free to post them here!
Pics are from an old version, but they should give a general idea:
Spoiler :
