Can anyone confirm that this map pack is just pre-set earth maps and not new random maps?
Hi.
To answer your question, in a sense it's both, but the maps definitely lean more to random.
Here's the blurb from Amazon describing the map pack:
The Scrambled Continents map pack includes real geographic locations with special scripts that produce randomized interiors each time a new game begins. While the familiar outline of the continents geography stays constant, the inner heart of the world changes each time you play for endless replayability on countless plausible worlds. Maps include Africa, Eastern Asia, North and South America, Western Europe, the Middle East, a thawed Antarctica, new scripted maps for Small Continents and Oceania, plus one map including all of Earths continents.
That's accurate and fairly pithy. The shape of the land remains the same, but forests, terrain types, resource types and locations, city states and civ start locations are randomized. The number of civs and city states can be varied, as can other game launch settings. Each map has customizations attuned to preserve a general flavor like the real world area being represented, but provide enough randomness to make it worth playing multiple times. (I have always thought that the magic of a random map, and the wonder of what's under that next bit of map fog, is at the core of what makes Civ a special franchise. So much so, I found myself in the role of expanding the range of available maps, for the past decade now.)
Most of the maps in these two map packs are very much akin to Great Plains or Amazon: there's no surprises in the shape of the land, but there's no way you could craft a "perfect" plan for them, the way you can if replaying a drawn map multiple times. Exploration and adaptation matter.
There's fan-made versions of nearly every inch of Earth's surface, but map scripts still tend to be few and far between. Many players hunger for the random maps, so here's another batch of them, assembled by me with as much attention to detail as I put into what has come before.
These are *not* drawn maps. Truly they are map scripts, just like Great Plains is. The land shape there is already known, too. Every map script I've ever produced for Civ4 or Civ5 has predetermined, fixed elements intermixed with randomization. The variances in the intermix are what separate one map script from another. The randomization is there to provide replayability for those who like any given map style. ... In that sense, the new map packs are highly randomized, and the maps in the packs differ one from another in flavor.
Someone earlier in the thread asked why these map scripts aren't part of BNW, but I was otherwise occupied during BNW production. I wasn't part of it. Reception for Scramble For Africa has been very positive, though, overall, so the demand from the fans for more randomized maps has been answered.
The merging of drawn elements and scripted elements began long ago with Great Plains, and has been expanded in the Civ5 DLC. The New World scenario has a pre-drawn Europe component, but random Americas. Polynesia has predrawn home islands and drawn versions of some key islands, but the rest are randomly generated island chains. Civ5 has long been on a steady course of ever-more intermix between drawn and scripted elements, to expand the range of available content, and this is a thorough push forward along that trend line -- now with the ability to use WorldBuilder maps as a base, and script anything at all on top of them, changing or adding *anything* desired. The technology in play has reached a new level, in this regard.
When I signed on to work on Civ4, the franchise was still working with just the core three map scripts: Pangaea, Continents, and Archipelago. Great Plains was among the first batch of new map types I created for Civ4 -- and all the way back then I had the vision of applying that concept to numerous other real-world locations: familiar coastlines, familiar climates, randomized details. These new DLC packs represent the full culmination of that vision. I know they're not for everybody, as some fans prefer drawn maps, and some don't play enough to play every map once, much less several times. But if you're still playing Civ5 a couple of years after release, maybe they're actually just what the doctor ordered, for you: more random-map fun on NEW map scripts, for the taking.
- Sirian
it's only 5 bucks
We need to support them if we want them to support the game
)
).
