coral atolls in the cold

[glider1]

Eh Thal thanks for all the hard work on VEM. My main focus on 106.9 beta was to check that the 105 save game crash has been fixed and it has been and everything seems stable alongside infoaddict, willard mods. Looks like your changes to AI city placement seems to be working because the AI actually settled away from me, preferring a river location. I am getting coral atolls down in the very cold south and I doubt that the water would be warm enough to support atolls, but the benefit is that on what was a very poor tundra start on the coast, the atolls did help to give me a boost, otherwise I would have had to re-roll.
Cheers

 

[Ahriman]

Atolls in tundra areas do seem pretty lame. I think the tundra zones should be pretty awful, but that the game shouldn't start you there as an acceptable starting zone.

 

[Thalassicus]

This is an unintended vanilla bug I've been searching for a cause. I think atolls might be placed before ice, so it doesn't know ice is nearby when placing atolls. It didn't show up often in vanilla because the atoll placement was more restrictive (required land on an adjacent tile). I've recently allowed atolls to be placed further offshore, which unintentionally increased their likelihood of appearing near ice.

For maximum realism I'd replace the existing system with the averaged weights like I did with strategic resources. Basically, each ice or snow tile would reduce likelihood of atolls appearing on all tiles within a certain radius, and tiny islands would increase likelihood. The current system only checks immediately adjacent tiles. I've got it on my todo list for when I have time.

Update: My hunch was correct... Sirian added atoll placement before other features, so atoll placement didn't know what features were nearby. I swapped the order of these operations and it greatly reduced appearance of atolls in polar regions.

 

[Ahriman]

Cool! Good job.