Any good map scripts that work with VP?

vyyt said:
If I am not mistaken, Tectonic is somehow derived from Fractal - that's why the randomness. Some people complain Tectonic creates too much snow / tundra with Barbs. But for me, it is the map I enjoy the most. I also quite like the Planet Simulator.
Click to expand...
Yeah sometimes PS is awesome but in a LOT of my games there's a LOT of desert without flood plains. Anyone who settles there is just crippled for life. Is that not the case with you?
 
There tends to be a lot of desert with Fractal as well.

The few times I’ve tried Planet Simulator, it’s had a tendency to generate maps that were extremely difficult to navigate. Large mountain ranges, highly complex river systems, forests and hills everywhere. Very nice to look at, but quite tedious to play.

I like Tectonic overall, but I find the ocean rifts too large. Is there a setting to reduce them?

I still use Communitas most of the time.
 
PapaRockett said:
Yeah sometimes PS is awesome but in a LOT of my games there's a LOT of desert without flood plains. Anyone who settles there is just crippled for life. Is that not the case with you?
Click to expand...

If deserts are your only issue with PS, then it's very easy to solve. First, you can simply adjust adjust world temperature. The downside of doing is that it will also affect other variables, like the amount of snow/tundra. Making the world colder could replace some desert by more fertile tiles... while broadening the arctic range.

The other way is to tinker with the script. It shouldn't be too complicated either. Open the map script with some text editor, then locate the following chunk of code:

Code: 
-- MOD -- Slightly lowered amounts of desert, tundra, snow.
--
function GenerateTerrain()
    print("Generating Terrain (Lua Small Continents) ...");
   
    -- Get Temperature setting input by user.
    local temp = Map.GetCustomOption(2)
    if temp == 4 then
        temp = 1 + Map.Rand(3, "Random Temperature - Lua");
    end

    local args = {
        temperature = temp,  
        grain_amount = 3,              
        iDesertPercent = 32,          
        fSnowLatitude = 0.82,            -- MOD -- DEFAULT -- 0.75
        fTundraLatitude = 0.70,            -- MOD -- DEFAULT -- 0.6
        fDesertBottomLatitude =    0.2,  
        fDesertTopLatitude = 0.4        -- MOD -- DEFAULT -- 0.5
        };
    local terraingen = TerrainGenerator.Create(args);

    terrainTypes = terraingen:GenerateTerrain();
   
    SetTerrainTypes(terrainTypes);
end

Try adjusting the line iDesertPercent, I guess that it will affect the amount of desert you get under default settings, all the while leaving tundra and snow as is. You can also tighten the desert range with the fDesertBottomLatitude and fDesertTopLatitude settings.

Blue Ghost said:
There tends to be a lot of desert with Fractal as well.

The few times I’ve tried Planet Simulator, it’s had a tendency to generate maps that were extremely difficult to navigate. Large mountain ranges, highly complex river systems, forests and hills everywhere. Very nice to look at, but quite tedious to play.

I like Tectonic overall, but I find the ocean rifts too large. Is there a setting to reduce them?

I still use Communitas most of the time.
Click to expand...

Yes, huge forests are a problem with PS. They look nice and are kinda realistic (most of non-Mediterranean Europe used to be just that) but are imbalanced methinks. Forest pantheons or uniques (looking at you, Hiawatha) are overpowered when someone start in one of those areas. They also create a huge defensive advantage.

That said, I like complex mountain ranges and river systems. Not only do they look good, but they also make very interesting tactical locations.
 
PapaRockett said:
Yeah sometimes PS is awesome but in a LOT of my games there's a LOT of desert without flood plains. Anyone who settles there is just crippled for life. Is that not the case with you?
Click to expand...
Honestly, I do not remember, I haven't had a chance to play for a couple of months now (this will change next week, ha!!). But I do not mind a little imbalance = if 1 civ born in dessert is doing poorly from time to time. Anyway, I think it was not that bad, otherwise I would have remembered.
 
PapaRockett said:
Yeah sometimes PS is awesome but in a LOT of my games there's a LOT of desert without flood plains. Anyone who settles there is just crippled for life. Is that not the case with you?
Click to expand...

I've found desert starts tend to be paired with fewer close neighbors so much of the time it balances out; less competition for fewer good city placements. I also like that it creates some no-mans land areas on the map; even the expansionist AIs have enough sense not to settle some areas.

The oddity I've found with PS is how often it'll create areas that lack rivers. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Goddess of Fertility because of it. On the other hand there was the game where after building some dozen plus cities I discovered I couldn't build Slater's Mill because not a one of them was on a river.
 
I use Communitas, but I start all players on Terra (largest continent). So there's plenty of congestion in the early game, which presents challenges and opportunities.
 
For those who own the DLC, there's Continents Plus which is fairly good too. It looks much better (more archipelagos, bays, peninsulas...) than vanilla Continents while preserving the overall geographical balance. It also constrains city-states to spawn on islands, but you can remove that feature:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...acement-in-pangaea-and-continentsplus.453587/

Speaking of vanilla maps, Frontier can look quite good too, although I find starting positions to be somewhat unbalanced. I've seen multiple civs starting too close to each other, while one of them had a fairly large backyard to expand into, unaccessible to the rest. That said, maybe I simply picked unbalance options.

EDIT: what I particularly like with Frontiers is that it tends to create inner seas, quasi-landlocked seas (à la Mediterranean) or large lakes more often than continents-like maps such as Continents, Continents Plus, Communitas, Tectonics or PS.

Indeed, my dream would be a map where I can force the script to spawn such features in the options menu...

The downside is the lack of mountain ranges. A younger world would be more hilly, but mountains would still be scarce.
 
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I asked this in another thread, can someone provide the file for tectonic or send me a link to the thread? I onyl find tectonics in the subforum and from what I read it is something different!?
 
I've tried to dive into Communitas map script to adjust it for VP better, but I don't have the time anymore for extensive modding work. I was trying to first adjust the prevalence of resources, because I feel that Communitas provides a little too much strategic resources at Standard resource rate, and also adjust how much land it produces by default at various map size selections so it's not necessary to add additional AI Civs to create a proper density at default settings. As far as the actual terrain goes, I don't know what actually needs adjusting. There always seems to be a good balance of tundra, snow, desert, forests, and multi-hex islands on Communitas.
 
DeadInTheWater said:
So Magean... what are your preferred Tectonic settings again please?
Click to expand...

Here they are..

The tl;dr: no islands (there will be some anyway), more land and/or low sea level, more plates, snaky (sometimes standard) continents. In small/standard maps, standard continents has a very high change to yield a nice looking Pangaea, but still a Pangaea. Hence the choice of snaky.

Magean said:
@heinous_hat : I've spent the last 45 minutes generating Tectonic samples in the WB and I must say I am quite happy with it now. First, increasing map size did have a huge impact on the quality of the result. Second, after many tests, I've been able to come up with quite satisfactory results.

There are two things I tried to avoid: ugly, massive Pangaeas that look like polygons dropped on the map; and its polar opposite, an abundance of small landmasses that give a Small Continent/Large Islands feeling. I want strategic depth inland and I want naval civs to be balanced, neither OP nor UP. Plus, the sheer abundance of land is also a big factor.

I discovered that the Islands setting is very important. For a given % of land, less islands means that continents will be larger, or that one-tile islands will be merged into more relevant large islands. This is a big improvement. On the one hand, it may salvage a small-continentish setting by making the landmasses bulkier. On the other hand, it may alleviate the Pangaea issue by creating Australias or Madagascars. It can also remove coastal water and thus make Astronomy more relevant. Besides, less islands is also fairer for the AI, which has a tendency to lose settlers on irrelevant Falklands-like tiles. Overall, the results improved substantially after I reduced Islands frequency. Besides, setting Islands to None doesn't remove them entirely; there are still a few one-tile ones left, and there will be large islands with this setting, but no archipelago. I strongly suggest you experiment with Few or None to Islands.

Besides, in my opinion, any Sea Level above Low has too high a risk to generate scarce land, so I avoid raising it. Likewise, I stick with More regarding land.

When it comes to Plate, More Plates help avoid a blocky Pangaea. However, it may also result in the small continent feeling I described above; with the other settings set as I describes though, the risk is low.

Finally, I avoid blocky continent as the risk of a fat rectangle dropped on the map is too high. Standard and Snaky are both valid choice provided the options are set as above; the choice depends on what risk I want to minimize: Pangaea or scarce land + small continents.

The other options are left at default values.

Anyway, thanks for making me try this map again!
Click to expand...

Magean said:
I've just tried and counted 154 tiles on the length side of a huge tectonic map. Must have been 152 then, so apparently it works. I didn't bother with counting width tiles... it's not easy because there's no black line to follow along the poles. Anyway, it must have worked as expected then. This map was really, really big.

EDIT : been generating Tectonic samples again. 128x80, aka Large size for Tectonic (would be huge for Vanilla maps). As before, I set sea level to low, land to more, and islands to none. However, I decided to give more of a try to Snaky continents. The results were good. The sea level, land and islands options prevent Snaky's bad outcomes, that is to say continents that are merely stripes of land akin to large islands.

First, I generated five such maps with Plates set to more:






Then, I switched Plates to less (I avoided "normal" as an extreme setting was desirable to better emphasize the setting's effects), here are the results:






As you can see, less plates result in bulkier and in my opinion less interesting landmasses, that are nearly always true Pangaeas (taking the other settings into account). More plates create large islands and subcontinents, for a more interesting gameplay and better aesthetics. Note that More plates can quasi-consistently generate an inner sea somewhere, which is a feature I love and would like to be able to control at map generation.

A good alternative is to set Plates to more, continents to standard and sea level to medium. The end results are somewhat comparable. Medium sea level is compensated by standard (hence, blockier) continents. There'll be less land on average, but the overall shape of the outcome will be similar.
Click to expand...
 
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Well, since many people say that Communitas should be played with sparse resources, I’ve tried that setting. I am playing Japan and got an isolated start. Quite a big continent/island, like 1/5th of the entire map just for me. Well... not a single Iron. Bye, bye samurais. I hope I’ll get Oil at least, since there are deserts around. On one hand it’s totally annoying, but on the other - forces you to completely rethink your strategy. It was so unexpected that I decided to go on, to see what I can make of such awful situation.
 
Resources. Assuming standard size map Communitas or Continents and default resource level. Does anyone know what should be „optimal” or „ideal” distribution of strategic resources? I’m asking real numbers, doesn’t matter the location.
Or to rephrase it, we have 8 civs, how many of each strat resource those civs would need to optimally grow and produce a reasonable amount of units of various types.
[I repeat this question from Q&A because maybe here is better place]
 
At some point, I installed the Communitas map script directly into my game, but I forget where I read how to do that.

I was wondering if I can do the same thing with other map scripts, like Tectonic, so I don't have to run it as a mod – and if it's possible, how do I do it?
 
Animorganimate said:
At some point, I installed the Communitas map script directly into my game, but I forget where I read how to do that.

I was wondering if I can do the same thing with other map scripts, like Tectonic, so I don't have to run it as a mod – and if it's possible, how do I do it?
Click to expand...

Yes it's possible. All you have to do is locate the folder where the mod installed, for example "~\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS\Tectonic Map Script (v 4)". Then you copy the .lua file (only this file) and you paste it directly in "~\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\Maps".

The mod changes a few parameters, such as the default number of players for each map size in the case of Tectonics, otherwise there's no problem running the map script alone.
 
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