[Development] Alternative Map during 1.17

Harappans always build the Pyramids before Egyptians do in this version.

 

For the nth time, the map branch is not yet playable. It's bothering to see gameplay-related posts here when the branch is really not meant to be played. There aren't even settler and war maps here yet, and many other factors such as modifiers, AI behavior, and scripted events tied to map tiles/regions are not yet adjusted. While technically we can all play on this map, it's still very buggy, and it's all up to you if you really want to make it work for now, unofficially. But for now we have not yet reached that part of development, and so it's not yet time to address those concerns. (I sincerely hope we reach the gameplay part of dev't and testing soon though, as we've been waiting for years now.)

Source: been there, done that; there was even a whole thread on it--

 

Sorry about that.

 

Question: in general, are oases on the map intended to represent real places, or are most of them placed in a somewhat random manner? I was thinking of maybe researching oases and making sure to represent the important ones.

 

Sounds good, I'll see what I can find. Since I'm not in a position to check right now, can anyone remind me whether we can found cities on oasis tiles? And/or on desert tiles next to oasis tiles? The underlying question is: should an oasis be placed on the tile that best matches the location of the associated city (if any), or on the tile next to that city location?

 

Any good tile adjacent to the oasis (normal terrains + desert), but not the oasis itself. In other words, you make all of the desert around the oasis settleable by placing one, but its tile is not.

 

Seems like it would work better as the opposite for DoC.

 

That's true. In the current implementation, an oasis enables as much as 8 city locations around it. It would probably make more sense to limit it to a single location, to better represent how scarce water can be in desert regions.

 

Except Taklamakan already has the river Tarim, so it would have no effect on the possibility of founding a city since they can already be founded even without the oases. In fact, in that particular location, letting players build cities on oases would increase the number of possible city locations.

 

I think I agree with most commenters here. An oasis is a very small geographical feature. It even looks small on the map, occupying maybe a quarter of a tile. If you founded a city 1S or 1W of an oasis tile, it wouldn't even look like the city was adjacent to the oasis, which breaks immersion somewhat. And then, the thing to do with your oasis is to build a cottage on it, turning your small oasis town into a large urban area, which isn't very thematic. Finally, I haven't looked in game, but I suspect that a city built on an oasis tile would look nice and thematic, with the buildings surrounding the water.

If we want a large area of a desert to be settlable, the way to do it is to put a lake or river, as is already the case in the Taklamakan, the Nile, Lake Chad, the US southwest, etc.

I'd like this to be definitely resolved before I make oasis suggestions, though.

 

I seem to recall finding a map of resources in Africa that seemed to have the location of major date production in the Sahara matching the placement of oases on our big map. But I might be recalling incorrectly. So perhaps they were placed to match places of higher food production in relation to the surrounding desert? I'll see if I can find that again.

EDIT:
This map.... Seems that oases were put in places this map marks as agricultural (whether or not this was the original reference). So that could answer your question at least as far as the Sahara goes.

Spoiler :

For comparison the political borders map I made for some suggested edits (I don't believe I added, removed or moved any oases in my suggested edits so it should still be accurate).

Spoiler :

 

Is this the latest version of the map? I don't think it is... but at the same time I want a copy of the map with the current political borders hmmm

 

It's definitely not the latest version though I don't think much has changed in the Sahara, I modified terrain on this one but not oases. I think most of my suggestions were not included. Regardless, if the question is "do I have a political borders map compatible with the latest version?" the answer is "probably not" but I'll try to check a little later.

 

Yeah, appears that my WB file "Whole World Borders" will open but not my game save file "Whole World Borders" and both are required to view the borders, oh well. It's a great method for map development but it is time consuming and the "game save" half becomes obsolete after the map branch is updated unfortunately.

 

Well the cultural borders aren't on my WB save so it appears not the way I did it. I always saved the WB file first then the game file but the borders are not there on the WB save.