Communitas map script

[ExpiredReign]

@Thalassicus

Great job.

@mitsho

The plural of 'oasis' is 'oases'.
The boxed in feel is just the way I like mountain ranges to be. Sometimes you just have 1 or 2 passes to defend and the natural boundary allows cities in the interior to focus on less military duties.

Not sure of the details. But do ALL improvements give adjacent tiles bonuses?
I've come across some where oases, lakes & farms improve adjacent tiles.

I tend to agree with you. The hexes represent a large area as it is. Extending the bonus may be too much.
I haven't checked, but I think vanilla does the improving too.

 

[Ahriman]

In the maps I'm playing, deserts don't feel like empty wastelands, they are crowded with oases, wheat, incense, and stone.

[And the oasis adjacent tiles are as good as grassland. If earth were like this, we would have seen settlement all through Australia and the Sahara.]

 

[albie_123]

Agreed with Ahriman, detailed in a post I made in another thread:

I agree with you Thal for the most part. But at the same time, in the base game it's certainly not viable to found a city, say, in tundra and snow, or in a desert surrounded by mountains. But in the mod, with the exception of the extreme poles and extremely mountainous regions, a city can be placed anywhere with almost no problem. There should at least be parts of the map that are not suitable for cities. Take my home country of Australia, for example. There are certainly a few towns out there in the center of Australia - and more than a couple of mines - but there simply isn't an environment conducive to large (or even medium sized) cities.

We should aim to make most of the map inhabitable, requiring different strategies (I'm in a forest, how will I deal with this? Or, I'm on a small tropical island, how should I chose to expand?), but a small portion of the map should be harsh and unforgiving. That's how vanilla did it, even if we do have the same percentage of features present.

I think this is a personal choice problem, and we can't please everyone, unfortunately - but shouldn't we then go for what vanilla went with?

Incidentally Thal, I think you should post this mapscript in the PerfectWorld3 thread once you're done with it. It's impressive enough that everyone - not just people who play with the mod - should be made aware that it exists.

 

[dappi]

I love this map script, but as others I would love it slightly more with deserts that are A bit less useful, resourcewise. Im fine with a map which isnt perfectly balanced. And if needed, buff Arabia and Marocco (as someone else suggested). Anyway, thats my take on it, dont know if a lurker should have much to say about matters like this. Much respect to thal and those who put so much work into making Civ a better game!

 

[albie_123]

Actually, lurkers have as much say as anyone. It's great to get opinions other than the ones of the frequent posters.

Keep in mind regarding Morocco that they benefit from desert in all of their uniques.

 

[agc28]

Deserts are abundant in the current version.

Deserts also have abundant food sources (oases and wheat). I see tons of stone/iron in desert. However, that is pretty much it.

Right now, it is perfectly reasonable to build cities in the desert, but they won't have much production/gold. They will have tons of food. Bizarre.

 

[Thalassicus]

Good news!

The vanilla game already places natural wonders after start locations are chosen. It just ignores those start locations. Placing them in important locations should be much easier than I thought. I was worried NWs were placed with the rest of terrain creation, before start locations, which would make improving their placement much harder (but still possible).


@agc28
I'd be okay with changing some desert yields from food to gold/production.

 

[Ahriman]

Are they placed before or after city states? They seem to often be within city state borders, but that may just be my imagination as a I notice it more then (as I'm frustrated by not being able to get them).

 

[Thalassicus]

I reduced the food of freshwater deserts to 1 in the next version (was 2).

I'm okay with reducing oases yields. Oases provide 3 1 in the vanilla unmodded game. How about 3 0 oases? This won't have too detrimental an effect on gameplay, and would nerf deserts below vanilla.

Something to consider is BNW removed gold from terrain. It might give us too much gold if we replace freshwater desert food with gold.


===============

Map creation goes like this:

Communitas.lua (or Continents, Pangaea, etc)

1. Create terrain - ocean, grassland, rivers, etc.
2. Create features - forest, jungle, isles.

AssignStartingPlots.lua (vanilla file shared by all maps)

1. Divide map into territories.
2. Choose a territory for each player.
3. Balance terrain by placing bonus resources.
4. Place natural wonders.
5. Place strategic resources and random bonus resources.
6. Place citystates in unclaimed territories.
7. Equalize citystate start locations.

Since natural wonders are random in vanilla, they usually go in uninhabited territories, which then get selected for citystates. I'm working on improving this. It's in the part shared by all maps, so it will require the mod and also change vanilla maps.

 

[Ahriman]

How about 3 0 oases?

My problem is not so much with yields on the oasis tile itself, but with them making the surrounding desert into tiles that are as good as grassland (actually, better, because they are affected by Petra and because they have better defensive properties).

I would prefer that desert tiles with no resources remained at 0 yield, even when adjacent to an oasis.

With 3 0 oasis tiles but the current situation, we have the situation where barren desert adjacent to an oasis can end up being better than the oasis itself!

 

[Thalassicus]

I agree about freshwater desert. I reduced the food in v3.1.8 so it's more like tundra, instead of grassland. I wanted to try it for a while, just to see what it was like, and decided I didn't like it.

While going through AssignStartingPlots I noticed Gem reduced the abundance of wheat in desert by half. This will also be in Cep once I reactivate the modded file. This will make food less common in Cep deserts than the vanilla unmodded game.

 

[Ahriman]

I reduced the food in v3.1.8 so it's more like tundra, instead of grassland.

This sounds like a decent compromise. With this, and your wheat change, I think that should work nicely.

 

[Thalassicus]

I agree. I figure with freshwater desert equal to tundra/coast at 1, we won't work it in the early game. Farming it gives just 2, barely enough to feed the citizen working the tile. Freshwater desert also slows workers so it takes longer to improve. This limits its usefulness until we have freshwater improvement bonuses in later eras.

 

[mystikx21]

Last test game I had a flood plains coastal city with 4 wheat and two oasis and a fish... it was not pretty.

I think oasis yields are fine at 3-1, the major problem was the 2 on freshwater desert. 1 is fine, and less wheat should help. This would make deserts viable in late games, for going after say, oil supplies but hampered early on. The availability of stone helps early as at least some bonus happiness and production.

 

[albie_123]

With the freshwater changes and the wheat nerf, I think I'd be okay with 3-1 Oases. The gold gives them a bit of flavor.

 

[albie_123]

Regarding mountains - could we make the snow appear bit closer to the equator (that is, not only in extreme north / south)? It might not be the case but in all my maps it seems that snowy mountains are restricted too close to the poles. While it looks awesome having differentiation between climates, I think we should start the snowy mountains a little earlier (around where southern Europe is in the real world - right now it seems like it's starting around the top of Europe).

 

[Ahriman]

The tundra start preference really seems to screw Sweden. They seem weak every game where they show up.

 

[agc28]

I feel the tundra start is more powerful than desert start.

Two very powerful pantheons. +2 food to camps, and +2 faith to open tundra....

 

[albie_123]

I don't even understand why Sweden have a tundra bonus, nothing about their Civilization is to do with tundra or snow, and Sweden itself certainly isn't tundra. If it's for 'flavor' then it seems strange that only Sweden have such a bias. Definitely should be removed.

 

[xInVicTuSx]

I've always wanted an Inuit civ to be true tundra based. :>

As for deserts and oases, I prefer gold over food. It makes more sense to me, as its more of a stop off point to trade rather than encouraging lots of permanent settlement.