Continent designation is stupid

[qadams]

Can't they do any better than this?

Here we have two very large landmasses connected by a narrow strip of land, almost like the Ismuth of Panama except it's between East-West hemispheres instead of North-South. So that should be where the separation between continents is, right?

Nope. Instead for some crazy reason they have the lavender continent spreading partway into the eastern landmass. I have no idea why. Makes no sense at all.

 

[Abraxis]

That is one sexy canal location.


It would be nice if map generation simulated proper plate tectonics like the Perfect World script from 4 and 5 claimed to and applied the continents on top of those tectonic plates. I just assume maybe they had other priorities since while those maps were amazing, they were also kind of unbalanced. Might be the reason why they avoid that in their vanilla scripts.

 

[UWHabs]

Most of the time I find they're not terrible, but yeah, certainly could be improved a little bit. Of course, they also sometimes need work in spacing civs out. My last game ended up having 3 continents on the same landmass: 3 civs started on one continent, 2 civs started basically on the border of that continent and the next one, and 2 civs started in that middle continent. The 3rd one? It had 2 city states, and a large empty open space. Kind of cool, as I got to play a little colonial power building a few cities on the far reaches, but kind of weird to see everyone packed in fairly close together with a big empty space available that nobody settled until late.

 

[kaspergm]

Continent designation often seems rather random. I've had cases where a huge landmass is 95 % one continent, and then a slight strip on one side is another continent, instead of being separated in two rather even parts.

 

[bcaiko]

Yeah, the continents designation could use some work so they actually do seem like their own landmasses instead of just arbitrary/random boundaries.

 

[steveg700]

Can't they do any better than this?

Here we have two very large landmasses connected by a narrow strip of land, almost like the Ismuth of Panama except it's between East-West hemispheres instead of North-South. So that should be where the separation between continents is, right?

View attachment 471125

Depends on who the cartographer was. We are talking about a largely arbitrary concept, after all.

In the game, are they capping the number of continents? If so, they can't go busting up continents along every narrow strip of land.

 

[Kinestic]

It could just be like Europe/Asia. They are the same landmass, it is just an arbritary designation.

Unfortunatly in Civ, with bonuses to certain civs based on their home continent, it is an issue that Firaxis should get around to fixing (eventually, because I think we all agree that there are many more important things that need fixing)

Or they may just leave it to modders. Oh well.

 

[Victoria]

As a heavy England player I rely on continents a large amount. The trouble is normally one half of an island is larger than the other and odds are higher that I will be on the larger.
So I have a valid game reason for things to be different but Inam fine with the designation, a bit weird I agree but it does not put me off my dinner.

 

[Wingednosering]

Most of the time I find they're not terrible, but yeah, certainly could be improved a little bit. Of course, they also sometimes need work in spacing civs out. My last game ended up having 3 continents on the same landmass: 3 civs started on one continent, 2 civs started basically on the border of that continent and the next one, and 2 civs started in that middle continent. The 3rd one? It had 2 city states, and a large empty open space. Kind of cool, as I got to play a little colonial power building a few cities on the far reaches, but kind of weird to see everyone packed in fairly close together with a big empty space available that nobody settled until late.

Something, something [insert a joke about there being no native american civs].

I think steveg700 is right. Each map size has a predetermined number of continents and each contains (4?) unique luxury resources. This means that map balance is tied directly to the continent system. If every small strip of land acted as a continental boubdary, it would be much harder to ensure a stable number for each map size.

Having said that, the system should be improved. After the initial boundaries are laid out, they should really look into moving their boundaries to match up with the map geography better.

I think a bigger issue is the Lens system. All of them clutter the screen and make it difficult to see basic map info while active. A better approach would be to show us continental boubdaries in game somehow without needing a whole seperate map overlay.

 

[bcaiko]

It could just be like Europe/Asia. They are the same landmass, it is just an arbritary designation.

Yeah, it is arbitrary, but there's some rationale there. For instance, Asia and Europe are separated by the natural boundaries of the Ural Mountains, Ural River, and the Caspian, Aegean & Black Seas. The boundary between Asia & Africa, as well as North & South America, are at a narrow point of an isthmus.

The continents created by the game's map generator seemingly have no rationale. Two random tiles of tundra will somehow be the boarder between two continents. You'd think the map generator would be instructed to create some kind of natural boundary at those boarders.

 

[Olleus]

The continent boundary is arbitrary for sure. It would be possible to design a better algorithm to do that.

However I suspect that this algorithm would be substantially more complicated than a lot of people think. Associating data (tiles) into different sets (continents) is a well known problem in machine learning precisely because of how difficult it is to do well. I doubt anyone at Firaxis cares enough to put the effort and money into making a good algorithm for this. This may well be the kind of thing that will take modders to fix.

 

[Victoria]

I had this issue earlier today, on a large landmass, sailed about 15 tiles out to sea and settled without thinking....no extra unit for Vicky, wtf?,, this 15 tile island 15 tiles from the landmass was part of the same continent. It's rare I see it this bad.

 

[bcaiko]

I had this issue earlier today, on a large landmass, sailed about 15 tiles out to sea and settled without thinking....no extra unit for Vicky, wtf?,, this 15 tile island 15 tiles from the landmass was part of the same continent. It's rare I see it this bad.

I had a game where Germany was on it's own mini continent, completely made of tundra and separated from mine via ocean. I didn't discover him until later in the game (after I'd found two other continents which were connected by land to mine), and his capital was being sieged by Barbarians - his only neighbors.

Of course, he was on the same "continent" as me.