[Development] Alternative Map during 1.17

First, I have to admit I haven't been keeping up at all with how the current map is going / what features there are. However, here is a rough idea of what the Amazon would look like with Marsh + Jungle:

Spoiler :

In my opinion that already looks 10x better. If the Jungle is removed from the Marsh, nothing changes in terms of yields. There are only two gameplay changes I noticed:
1) An improvement, a watermill, can be built on the base marsh terrain.
2) Cities can be settled on base marsh terrain.

(I think those two things can be easily changed though)

Also, this would be a perfect way to avoid unlocking prime cottage grasslands in the Amazon: Make more of the Amazon Marsh + Jungle - no more cottages!

 

Marshes

First 3 are already present. The 4th is new.

Spoiler :

 

Wow, what a thus far missed opportunity.

We could allow clearing of the Amazon and Congo marshlands but then it would have to trigger rapid regional (and possibly global) climatic changes.

 

Here it is.

I didn't change anything to the model in this image. The blue color is the result of the marsh terrain type.

Spoiler :

EDIT:
Some variations with some underbrush. I made 3 versions: only grassy underbrush, light underbrush and dense underbrush.

Spoiler grassy :

Spoiler light :

Spoiler dense :

Bonus: A WIP version with the shadow of the jungle. But that looks a bit too dark, so in the versions above I used the savannah shadows, which only uses the shadow of the trees, not the underbrush.

Spoiler too much shadow :

 

This is the no underbrush version on blue marble.

Spoiler :

 

I checked out the map branch and only the 3000BC scenario is playable with the new map.
Loaded that up as England and it blocks with 26 turns to wait. Tried it multiple times. If I hit space/enter I get a catapult at (0,0), where the Turks have a lot of units (settlers + crossbowmen + scout)
Same behavior for France, Russia, etc.

Is there anything I'm missing with the alternative map version or is the branch not playable?

Either way, thanks for the work you're putting into the mod

 

You're not missing anything. The branch is not playable yet. And finishing it to a point so it is playable isn't even in the planning for the 1.17 release.

 

Speaking of catapults, catapults spawn in the southwestern corner of the flipzone in the main branch as well. Ive seen that happen for England multiple times, and once for Brazil and Argentina as well.

 

I've actually been maintaining my own version of the City Name Map ever since work on the bigger map started. Everyone is welcome to make contributions and revisions. The map is around 60% populated with city names (based on # of non-Peak land tiles), although many areas of the map are not yet done, mostly because I don't know how to fill those regions up. There's a tCityMap worksheet which puts the quotation marks on each value, and this is the worksheet I export to CSV.

Main issues:

1. I still have to clean up the CSV before exporting it, because it adds a lot of quotation marks (maybe due to the implementation of the Excel formulas). Cleaning up can be done in just 3 find-and-replace steps, though.
2. Special characters (e.g. accented characters) here are escaped via HTML ( &#XXX; ), since Leo just mentioned about implementing Unicode strings instead recently. I'll convert these to Unicode within the day. (EDIT: Fixed as of 2:30 PM UT+8)
3. Some parts of the map not yet updated: Horn of Africa

EDIT: I read Leo's post above just after posting this; I think I can do away with the tCityMap worksheet for now thanks do the loadCityNames and saveCityNames modules (though I will keep it first just in case needed).

 

Speaking of city names: are we going for a 'Name every different tile' basis? or is '1 name for 2~4 tiles' encouraged?