Crazy idea

[Quintillus]

I've thought of another one of those dangerous, crazy ideas! It's likely too far-fetched to become reality, but we can dream, right? You can probably blame/credit sleep deprivation and Empire: Total War (with its regions of the world) for this one.

The thought is, how can Civ3 be made more epic? A bigger map, of course! And let's ignore the speed issues with current big maps. From a file format perspective, there's no reason you couldn't create a 900x900 BIQ... the only problem is the game can't go beyond 65,536 tiles. And unless someone wins the lottery and wants to send myself, another programmer, and an artist somewhere warm to re-implement the game for a year or two, that isn't changing.

But the idea is, what if we work around that by making a giant map, and having the overarching game be played across four separate - but connected! - sub-games? Here's what I'm thinking:

- Create a really big map, say 600x450. Divide it into quadrants. At this size, each quadrant would be about 32,000 tiles - twice as many as a Civ3 Vanilla Huge map, but hopefully still few enough to avoid the 512 city limit.
- For an Earth map, these are easily divisible into hemispheres. Have the northwest be basically North/Central America, going a bit past the dateline; southwest would be South America and perhaps New Zealand; northeast would be Europe, Asia, and Mediterranean Africa, and southeast would be sub-Saharan Africa and Australia.
- Approximately a 30-tile east/west/north/south swathe would overlap between each quadrant.
- In the early game, you may have each quadrant be totally separate - perhaps for the Ancient Times, as an example.
- Later on, as the edges are explored, you would have periodic sync points. For example, play five turns in NE, then play five turns in SE. After the NE turn, an external program would sync the units to the prior SE save, so civilizations with a presence in both areas would be able to have units in the overlapping zone be used in both theaters.
- Continue in that fashion as the game goes on, alternating between the quadrants.
- Because not every civ would be in every quadrant, you could have more civs as well. Perhaps 16 per quadrant, or even 24. You'd have to leave a few free for new entrants to the quadrant, but would have more overall.
- For units in the overlapping areas, there's a question of "does that mean they get double moves?" Up for debate, but one option would be to set half of them to have their moves set to zero for each quadrant, perhaps biased in favor of more moves in a quadrant that has a war going on.

Since there's no way to have the AI auto-play in other areas (unless you perhaps have "totally isolated Human Island" in the areas where you aren't playing), it might work best with multiple players. Or you could play as different civs in different areas. Or have a way to play each quadrant's set of 5 turns independently, and then resolve the quadrants at the end. Perhaps ideally, there might be a mutiplayer game with several players per region, eventually spilling over into neighboring regions as well.

The five turn rotation idea is a compromise between a more-accurate one turn rotation, and the tedium of reloads.

From a technical standpoint, it's theoretically doable, but an awful lot of work (not least having an available implementation of a SAV reader/writer; those that have been done before are closed-source, and I'm only partway to a reader). From a "how would the AI handle this?" standpoint, who knows... but it's only really the overlapping areas that would cause significant questions.

There are other potential options, too... maybe some sort of a research synchronization for a civ across its quadrants, or resources varying by quadrant, or specialized terrain variants. Tundra in the north and savanna in Africa, perhaps.

Yes, it's probably a bit too ambitious for a 17-year-old game, but it's fun to think of the possibilities. And for a future game, something like that could be a way to allow scaling to larger map sizes, without overwhelming the AI with way too many tiles to consider each turn.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Piggy backing a crazy idea on a crazy idea - time travel or alternate histories. The maps are identical, but the external program syncs and makes adjustments in later era maps based on what happens on the earlier era maps. If we could adjust the teleport or charm functions of units & buildings to pop them from one map to another ...

 

[Civinator]

It was always the dream of a modder to improve the current Civ 3 game, be it with a new unit, new graphics or sometimes even with a new game mechanism or a new editor. The idea of doing 'something new' was - and is- the motor of keeping Civ 3 still alive over such a long time.

Yes, it's probably a bit too ambitious for a 17-year-old game, but it's fun to think of the possibilities. And for a future game, something like that could be a way to allow scaling to larger map sizes, without overwhelming the AI with way too many tiles to consider each turn.

This idea was not too ambitious for a more than 20 years old Civ game, that now is in a wonderful renaissance: Civ 2 ToT. This game of the civ series provided the multiple map feature from its start, but suffered from a terrible documentation and even more terrible graphics.

Create a really big map, say 600x450. Divide it into quadrants. At this size, each quadrant would be about 32,000 tiles - twice as many as a Civ3 Vanilla Huge map, but hopefully still few enough to avoid the 512 city limit.

I experimented a lot with random Civ 3 maps up to 362 x 362 and 31 AI players while creating CCM. The 512 city limit was always exceeded very soon, if there were no limitations in founding cities by only allowing to build them on a special city terrain ( and this needed a preplaced terrain on a fixed map so the map was no longer 'random'). There also wouldn´t be enough players for a 31 multiplayer game and even the only AoI multiplayer game with 31 players was, if I remember well, never finished.

 

[Balthasar]

At this size, each quadrant would be about 32,000 tiles - twice as many as a Civ3 Vanilla Huge map, but hopefully still few enough to avoid the 512 city limit..

I experimented a lot with random Civ 3 maps up to 362 x 362 and 31 AI players while creating CCM. The 512 city limit was always exceeded very soon, if there were no limitations in founding cities by only allowing to build them on a special city terrain ( and this needed a preplaced terrain on a fixed map so the map was no longer 'random'). There also wouldn´t be enough players for a 31 multiplayer game and even the only AoI multiplayer game with 31 players was, if I remember well, never finished.

I can't find the link to Antal's stuff, but he was modifying some game limits with his exe files. Was the city limit one of them?

This idea was not too ambitious for a more than 20 years old Civ game, that now is in a wonderful renaissance: Civ 2 ToT. This game of the civ series provided the multiple map feature from its start, but suffered from a terrible documentation and even more terrible graphics.

The Multiple-Map function spawned some very creative mods. Underwater and underground terrain could be on the bottom map, terra firma further up, a cloud layer or a space platform, perhaps, on the topmost layer, but there were endless variations on that. The game came with an Alpha Centauri map as the goal. At least that's how I remember it. Really, really, really super cool idea.