[Development] Map Suggestions

[Enyavar]

Okay, I have read enough of this thread to know I have to install this git branch to participate.

But could someone kindly point me to a HowTo of getting a runnable develop version without destroying my current Civ install?
I searched the forum for a while, but seem to be blind enough to not see it.

 

[1SDANi]

Okay, I have read enough of this thread to know I have to install this git branch to participate.

But could someone kindly point me to a HowTo of getting a runnable develop version without destroying my current Civ install?
I searched the forum for a while, but seem to be blind enough to not see it.

Easiest way is to have the folder named something else, and rename the RFC Dawn of Civilization.ini file and within the mod folder and Dawn of Civilization line within each of the scenario files to the new name of the folder.

 

[Leoreth]

Don't worry about your Civ installation. What you are getting from Github is another copy of the mod directory. Rename the existing one to something else while you aren't using it, and you can always go back to it.

 

[TJDowling]

So, I think our best bet going forward to finally address all regions of the map, not just those that interest particular people, is to go one by one creating a feature thread for each region. The current thread has 16 pages of random unrelated suggestions a few big suggestions on limited places (Russia/China) and many smaller disjointed suggestions on many different places.

So what's my proposal for dividing it up? If you feel that it's too many/few regions or if I'm missing something or we should prioritize differently let me know. This is just based off of my personal observations of what has been covered and what hasn't. Each of the following regions could probably be handled as their own thread:

Highest Priority:

1. South America (highest priority, important for gameplay and virtually no suggestions so far beyond Canonical cities)
2. Mediterranean/North Africa (Important for gameplay and few suggestions, especially on the North Africa side)
-I think these two should be looked at together because they are far more related to one another than North/Sub-Saharan Africa
3. Sub-Saharan Africa (Important for gameplay, one substantial suggestion on landmass so far)
4. Australia (Not a high priority for gameplay reasons but because there has been almost no discussion)


Medium Priority:

5. Middle East/Central Asia (Still few suggestions here)
6. India (Still few suggestions here)
7. South-East Asia/Indonesia (Good number of suggestions but not a lot of discussion on landmass)
8. Central America/Caribbean (Good number of suggestions but not a lot of discussion on landmass)
9. US/Canada (Good number of suggestions)
10. Japan (Not sure the landmass was ever resolved but a few suggestions have been put forward)

Least priority:

11. Europe/North Atlantic (outside the Mediterranean) (Good number of suggestions, especially concerning landmass)
12. Russia (European) (Very detailed suggestions already but contributed by a few users)
13. Siberia (Very detailed suggestions already but contributed by a few users)
14. China (Very detailed suggestions already but contributed by a few users)
15. Oceania (Not important from gameplay perspective and a lot of suggestions already made for New Zealand and Hawaii specifically)

EDIT: Europe may be a higher priority than I'm suggesting. Now that I think about it most of the suggestions have been Canonical and some terrain suggestions.

 

[Crimean Lord]

SO... Let's speak about South America which have HIGH level of priority

PART I: ARGENTINA

CURRENT SITUATION and ISSUE:
Сurrent Plains have limited potential of represence all types of Argentina's land, so I have used Vegetation Map and add new terrain - STEPPE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetation#/media/File:Vegetation-no-legend.PNG)

MY SUGGESTIONS:
A) Argentina has awesome MEAT INDUSTRY - which can be reflects by three/four COWS (+ its unique bulding)
B) On the other hand: Argentina produce a lot of Sugar, Tobacco, Corn, Wheat etc - so I suggest to add them to Coast tiles which in generally correct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Argentina#Cereals)
C) HORSES: there is only why reason why they are here is UU (the same situation as Greece' Companions)
D) Argentina's mountains near CHILLI - is land of enomerous row materials (IRON + COPPER + URAN + ALUMINIUM)
E) Potato - which help to grow cities near montains;
F) More Tundra and Peaks in Patagonia and also few Grasslans tiles;
+ OIL in Bahia-Blanka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina#Industry)

+ Very Small Suggestions:

*** Fish to B-A Bay;
*** Coast near Whales in Patagonia;
*** More arctic coast near the Folklend (Malvinas Islands)
*** Marshes in the Argentina's north border go NE one tile;

 

[TJDowling]

SO... Let's speak about South America which have HIGH level of priority

PART I: ARGENTINA

CURRENT SITUATION and ISSUE:
Сurrent Plains have limited potential of represence all types of Argentina's land, so I have used Vegetation Map and add new terrain - STEPPE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetation#/media/File:Vegetation-no-legend.PNG)

MY SUGGESTIONS:
A) Argentina has awesome MEAT INDUSTRY - which can be reflects by three/four COWS (+ its unique bulding)
B) On the other hand: Argentina produce a lot of Sugar, Tobacco, Corn, Wheat etc - so I suggest to add them to Coast tiles which in generally correct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Argentina#Cereals)
C) HORSES: there is only why reason why they are here is UU (the same situation as Greece' Companions)
D) Argentina's mountains near CHILLI - is land of enomerous row materials (IRON + COPPER + URAN + ALUMINIUM)
E) Potato - which help to grow cities near montains;
F) More Tundra and Peaks in Patagonia and also few Grasslans tiles;
+ OIL in Bahia-Blanka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina#Industry)

+ Very Small Suggestions:

*** Fish to B-A Bay;
*** Coast near Whales in Patagonia;
*** More arctic coast near the Folklend (Malvinas Islands)
*** Marshes in the Argentina's north border go NE one tile;

Good start, some of these will obviously be resource spawns but corn, potato and minerals can probably remain as they are unlikely to be much benefit to any civ until the Argentine spawn anyway. I like the addition of extra minerals, the current map is quite weak on production.

Also, a more general question for everyone related to the issue of production, I'm wondering if it's deliberate that there is no coal in South America outside Colombia and Brazil? Current map and big map. I understand that relatively speaking coal historic coal deposits in Argentina/Chile are small but they are still significant in the countries' industrialisation. Would anyone be opposed to adding maybe one coal resource in Chile or Argentina? I think it's especially appropriate considering this is a bigger map so greater detail can be represented. I imagine more coal resources have been or will be added to China/Russia/USA. Canada has one extra coal, there is extra coal in Central Asia and Indonesia has two coal on the big map.

Also, I'm going to take a look at the shape of South America to see if there's anything that needs to be done there.

 

[TJDowling]

I took a crack at South America's shape. I used the method ozqar used (for Africa) drawing the cultural borders on the map based on my knowledge of the coastlines. The shape is pretty good but eventually I ran into the problem that there wasn't much space left for Brazil. Additionally, I feel that Argentina/(hypothetical) Chile could be given more room to grow. My solution was to shift parts of the continent 1E, narrowing the gap between South America and Africa (con) but more accurately representing Brazil's southern states and the Southern half of South America.

As you can see, Brazil's Southern portion is pretty tight. Paraguay is already pretty squished in this representation and even if you take out Argentina's little panhandle and give it to Brazil, it's still tight. The same goes for the Guyana's to the North so I figured my proposal would solve both these problems.

Spoiler :

So what I did was to shift everything in Brazil east of the Red Line from Cayenne to Uruguay, 1E. In order to reconcile the difference this made in the shape around Uruguay I shifted everything in Argentina/Chile east of the Green Line from Santiago de Chile to Antarctica 1E. Shown as follows:

Spoiler :

Additionally I tweaked the topography a little bit. I attempted to make a Magellan Strait but it is, I think largely impossible to represent neatly though I did alter it for aesthetic purposes. I moved a few mountains to accommodate the new changes in the Chilean/Argentine border. I may have been too generous to the Chilean side but I think it's fair to add some hills between the shore and the mountains at least in some cases. As far as the mountains which change to hill on contact it can probably be the mountain between Concepcion and the rest of Chile and hopefully there will be a Mapuche settlement there to prevent the Spanish immediately settling.

By no means am I suggesting this should be the final placement of hills and mountains if we choose to adopt this method. I wasn't too sure how to adjust the topography and Here is the finished map with geographic changes, topographic changes and modern cultural borders:

Spoiler :

EDIT: "South America Andes" WBSave for "finished" product
"Cultural Borders South America Andes" savegame with cultural borders to lay over the above map
"Cultural Borders South America" savegame with cultural borders for the default bigmap

 

[Leoreth]

Paraguay still looks small, is that accurate?

 

[TJDowling]

Paraguay still looks small, is that accurate?

Yeah, it's still a bit small but I'm not sure what else to do about it, except to mess with the whole east coast shape. Perhaps the mid/south section of the continent still needs more width. Or perhaps I oversized Bolivia to accommodate the details of the border, which isn't really necessary. It seems that Paraguay from NW to SE should be almost the same length as Bolivia from NW to its nearest border with Paraguay but I have Paraguay at 3 tiles diagonally and Bolivia 5 or 6. I'll take another look at it. To be fair, the Argentine portion of the Three Borders Area should take up less than a full tile width IRL which would give a LITTLE more space, but that still doesn't account for it.

 

[Leoreth]

Yeah, intuitively the topography looks alright but Argentina is given too much space at the expense of its northern neighbours.

 

[ozqar]

Is it possible to enlarge Arg & Chile one tile south? As in, is there enough space before reaching the end of the map?

 

[Leoreth]

I'd rather solve problems by reshaping a continent instead of addressing everything by adding more rows/columns.

 

[ozqar]

Yeah, but I'm saying this not in the same spirit everyone had before where they'd shift continents in all directions so all Konigsbergs could fit in the map. I actually think the continent's map is not so accurate and that all of Patagonia is shortened north-south.

 

[Leoreth]

I don't see Patagonia as being shortened and if it is, that's a justifiable part of the map to be compressed in my opinion. Superficially South America has an alright shape in my opinion. Right now it seems that Paraguay is suffering anyways, which is not directly linked to the size of Patagonia. A different arrangement in the northern interior of the Southern Cone could achieve more than enlarging the entire continent here in my opinion, for which we don't have the space anyway from the looks of it.

 

[ozqar]

Well still, northern Argentina is a more important region than Paraguay. I don't know what rearrangement you're thinking of, but I wouldn't sacrifice space in Argentina to give it to Paraguay. Asunción should be a decent city, but other than that, there were no other historically important cities there.

 

[TJDowling]

Yeah, my arrangement already has it one tile away from Antarctica though that was a purely aesthetic choice to make the Magellan Strait and Tierra del Fuego look more distinct. Historically speaking the Three Borders Region is probably more important to address so perhaps that still needs some tinkering. At least we've discovered that Northern part of the Southern cone was lacking. The coastal portion seems to be resolved but not the interior. I think mostly the Paraguay on my map is lacking in the N-S direction not W-E so perhaps compressing Patagonia by one tile somewhere would do the trick.

@Leoreth, Do you think the problem is more a lateral or vertical space problem? Or both equally? I think we could achieve more lateral space by strategically adding a dozen or so tiles along the east coast from around Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo which would free up more interior space but I wouldn't want to mess up the shape too much, it's quite good as is. Alternatively we could adjust the Andes to free up space but there isn't a lot of room to wiggle there.

I still think it might be a perception problem, I mapped Bolivia before Paraguay and then adjusted Paraguay relative to the Eastern coast. Meaning Paraguay just ended up being sandwiched between my initial estimations on Bolivia and the map's realities. I'm not sure if this accomplishes anything but here's what it looks like if I'm a bit more modest with Bolivia:

Spoiler :

EDIT:
I'm not convinced there's a problem with the map so much as my initial representation of the interior... Here's another take compared to a map of major rivers and with a few river tweaks it looks pretty good. I just shaved a little off of Bolivia and shifted a few things around and it doesn't seem to have much effect on Bolivia but a big effect on Paraguay. Does the interior need to be enlarged for gameplay reasons? If not I think it's probably good.

Spoiler :

 

[FraggleJock]

Do you need a land border for Antarctica to prevent vertical movement or can you actually have ocean along the southern border and just assume Antarctica exists, to free up aesethic space for the straits.

 

[Publicola]

The biggest issues I see with the S. America changes revolves around Paraguay.

1) Check a map (any map) and you'll see that Paraguay's borders are bound by rivers -- the southeastern border by the Parana river, the western border by the Pilcomayo river. The same should be true of our map. To get the Parana shifted to the river, you'll need to move the Uruguay, but that river flows pretty close to the coast anyway, so it's easy enough to move its course a bit to the east as well.

Here's a map of the Rio de la Plata river basin. The final map of this area should incorporate the Rio de la Plata itself, the Uruguay, the Parana, the Paraguay, and the Pilcomayo as discrete tributaries. (Presumably the Salado should be included as well, but that's Argentina, which I'm less familiar with).


2) The geography of Paraguay is pretty easy to remember, and it's hardly at all reflected in the above map. The country is cut roughly in half by the Paraguay river. The region east of that river is called 'Paraneña', and it is identifiable as grassland hills terrain (and dotted with forests, not jungles). These hills descend as you move westward, toward the grassy floodplains of the Paraguay itself. Notably the hills of the Paranena are the same geological feature as the Brazilian Highlands that cover most of the southern coast of Brazil.

The region west of the Paraguay is called 'Chaco', and can be subdivided into two parts. 'Bajo Chaco' (Lower Chaco, or sometimes 'Humid Chaco') is furthest east (closest to the Paraguay) and is the only area that can be considered 'swamp' (at most a single tile; grasslands/floodplains is probably more accurate for the whole region). The rest is Alto Chaco (Upper or 'Dry' Chaco), and it can be depicted with plains or grasslands with no hills.

The Chaco is known for a pastoral economy, so it might be good to add a few cattle there, with a few corn/wheat resources toward the west. Paraguay is the world's sixth largest exporter of corn, eighth largest exporter of beef, and tenth largest exporter of wheat, so agriculture should be a priority. There is a bit of iron production in the Paranena, as well as a significant uranium deposit, but I'm not sure either are big enough to really define that region.

 

[TJDowling]

The biggest issues I see with the S. America changes revolves around Paraguay.

1) Check a map (any map) and you'll see that Paraguay's borders are bound by rivers -- the southeastern border by the Parana river, the western border by the Pilcomayo river. The same should be true of our map. To get the Parana shifted to the river, you'll need to move the Uruguay, but that river flows pretty close to the coast anyway, so it's easy enough to move its course a bit to the east as well.

Here's a map of the Rio de la Plata river basin. The final map of this area should incorporate the Rio de la Plata itself, the Uruguay, the Parana, the Paraguay, and the Pilcomayo as discrete tributaries. (Presumably the Salado should be included as well, but that's Argentina, which I'm less familiar with).


2) The geography of Paraguay is pretty easy to remember, and it's hardly at all reflected in the above map. The country is cut roughly in half by the Paraguay river. The region east of that river is called 'Paraneña', and it is identifiable as grassland hills terrain (and dotted with forests, not jungles). These hills descend as you move westward, toward the grassy floodplains of the Paraguay itself. Notably the hills of the Paranena are the same geological feature as the Brazilian Highlands that cover most of the southern coast of Brazil.

The region west of the Paraguay is called 'Chaco', and can be subdivided into two parts. 'Bajo Chaco' (Lower Chaco, or sometimes 'Humid Chaco') is furthest east (closest to the Paraguay) and is the only area that can be considered 'swamp' (at most a single tile; grasslands/floodplains is probably more accurate for the whole region). The rest is Alto Chaco (Upper or 'Dry' Chaco), and it can be depicted with plains or grasslands with no hills.

The Chaco is known for a pastoral economy, so it might be good to add a few cattle there, with a few corn/wheat resources toward the west. Paraguay is the world's sixth largest exporter of corn, eighth largest exporter of beef, and tenth largest exporter of wheat, so agriculture should be a priority. There is a bit of iron production in the Paranena, as well as a significant uranium deposit, but I'm not sure either are big enough to really define that region.

My last map has the Paraguay in the right place so I think that's a good sign, the Parana and Pilcomayo are still off though but a simple enough fix. Note that I have done no terrain changes in that area.

We could really only fit one or two resources in the Chaco as is, is there any other resources in the Paranena? Or we can throw an iron in there maybe?

Edit: attached your suggestions implemented, is that better?

 

[Publicola]

I'd shift the Pilcomayo river down a bit, so Paraguay includes the tile immediately south of the cow. If the Chaco is going to have a swamp, it should be this tile, rather than the tile north of the cow (there's a very small sliver of the Pantanal wetlands within Paraguay's border, but so small it's hardly worth the mention). The other tiles, including the cow and at least one tile east of the central Paraguay) should be floodplains. (Don't forget to add a wheat tile as well, perhaps on the floodplain east of the river).

I'm not able to get a good depth perception, so I can't tell if you raised any of the Paranena region as hills. There should be a entire range of hills connecting to the those mountains in southern Brazil. (...Checking the map of Brazil, I don't see any mountains or mountain ranges supposed to be on that tile. Are they supposed to represent the Mantiquiera Mountains? If so, they should be closer to Sao Paolo/Rio de Janeiro).

As far as mining resources, the mineral industry of Paraguay is so minor I don't think it deserves much of one. There is a uranium deposit in Yuty, which could go on the far southeastern corner tile of the country. That would add a bit of commerce without much extra production, which should be fine.


Unrelated to Paraguay, but I did a bit of research on the Parana river in Argentina, and I really don't think there should be nearly as many floodplains as currently represented. There is one major wetland near the border with Paraguay -- that's the Ibera Wetlands in Corrientes, which can be represented by a two-tile swamp centered on the current tobacco tile + the current swamp tile immediately to its west. Everything else should be plains or grasslands (inland plains in the west, grasslands along the river), with the exception of one or two tiles at the Parana Delta (the mouth of the Rio de la Plata) which should be a grassland/floodplain.