[Development] Map Suggestions

[Tab911]

Tab, where would you propose putting the African rice? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryza_glaberrima

It is low yield and has mostly been replaced by Asian strains today. It is culturally significant to the Jola people in Senegambia hence its placement there. I do not think any others should be added as they are represented well enough by generic farm improvements.

 

[Tab911]

Part III

Spoiler Suggestions :

Nubia/Funj/Sudan

Semidesert and plains added in colored sections
Stone added to reflect architecture and trade from Nubia
Gold added to Sennar, also a traded resource to Egypt

East Africa

Seconding the added marsh suggestions and other resource placements
Colored sections - marshes are in blue, savanna in light green and grassland in dark green
Free up Rwanda tile given its historical importance, placed jungle to the west to add natural border between East Africa and Congo
Moved Tanzania coffee to the Mbeya region, there might actually be too much coffee in East Africa at the moment
Elephant ought to be added on the highlighted tile to add production to Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam or Kilwa

Congo

Seconding suggestions here as well

Mozambique

Jungles should be added to these sparsely populated areas to prevent cities
Seconding other changes

Zimbabwe

Seconding marsh changes
Added savanna trees to the Okvango Delta
Opened locations for Zimbabwe/Shona civ or city states
Added stone (stone walls and architecture)
Added cow to Bulawayo as the Shona were a very pastoral culture
Elephant moved closer to salt flats, its a big area for poaching
Kalahari desert changed to mostly semidesert, the Kalahari is more of a semi arid, Sahelian climate

South Africa

As previously suggested, I really think South Africa needs another row of tiles, I shifted the western part of the river south and re-allocated everything accordingly
Tiles changed to better reflect climate

 

[Leoreth]

Are you quoting someone here? It is very hard to tell what the delta is between those two proposals.

 

[stormogulen]

Spoiler Punjab, Kashmir :

-Added copper at Khetri, important source of Indian copper since ancient times. It is one of the likely major sources of Harappan copper along with Balochistan/Afghanistan and Oman. I'm not really sure about the one in Kashmir, it does not seem to be a major source of copper but I could of course have missed something.

-Changed Multan tile to desert and wheat tile 1N to desert + floodplain to represent the Indus Valley Desert (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Desert).

-I believe the Dera Ghazi Khan uranium deposits are only of very minor importance, but giving Pakistan nuclear access might be interesting.

-May or may not be a good idea, but I tried moving the stone north to free Multan. Also because Punjab's most significant limestone sources seem to be located around the Salt Range in the north.

-Gilgit-Baltistan consists mainly of high, snowy mountains and dry valleys, so the sheep tile might be more accurate as plains (semidesert/tundra maybe too harsh) than grassland.

-From reading a bit on the Karakoram Pass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakoram_Pass), Aksai Chin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksai_Chin) etc. it seems that there could be a route between the Tarim Basin and Ladakh (Leh) which also gives access to Tibet. So I added such a path by turning some peak tiles in the Ladakh area into hills.

-Not on the screenshot, but I think it could make sense to add salt north of Lhasa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet–Nepal_salt_trade_route).

Spoiler Gujarat :

-Added red gems representing carnelian from Gujarat and Deccan, exploited since Indus Valley Civilization era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etched_carnelian_beads). Could maybe remove the gems slightly SE instead.

 

[Dracosolon]

(again, h0spitall3rz's original screenshot here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/attachments/civ4screenshot0378-png.534786/)

Revisiting my proposal for city names in France I realized a few things:

-It would probably be more accurate to the local region if the Loire river was moved North over not just the Châteauroux tile but also the Tours (which really shouldn't be coastal but whatever, that's diagonals for you) and Nantes ones. In addition, this also makes Brittany a bit more farm-friendly (a resource like a Pig on the Brest tile could also prevent a city here, since that much sea tiles and less overlap with Paris makes it very tempting otherwise), though I understand if we don't want the West to grow too huge in population. Would the solution of applying temporary marshes to the Brittany tiles we don't want settled or worked too soon be acceptable, or would that be too much?

-There's a slight distortion in that the Strasbourg tile is way to the West of Nice compared to real life, so moving the Rhine East could fix that. But from what I understand the main interest of the new map in Europe is more place for cities to the East of that, and France has been generously enlarged already so we really don't want to move Strasbourg at the expense of German or Dutch cities, so the current situation looks acceptable to me.

 

[Leoreth]

Yeah, the Rhine is difficult to handle because it is historically a very populated region and it's difficult to get all the historically important cities there. I think it works best the way it is, and in either case the Rhine needs to accomodate Germany more than France.

Is there a problem with Brittany being settled too soon? It took a while to be integrated into France but the region itself has always been fairly populated, hasn't it?

 

[Dracosolon]

Yes, it's just that a city in that area of the map will already benefit from a relative abundance of tiles unavailable to any other city so it's really more of a hypothetical fix if it grows too big in playtests.

 

[Leoreth]

You mean grabbing a lot of coast tiles?

 

[Dracosolon]

It's not that big of a deal, I'm just a bit worried that Brest would look slightly more attractive than Nantes on account of having less tiles shared with Paris and Bordeaux (mostly mediocre coastal tiles, but still). If the Loire is moved North that's more farm tiles too. So the solution is either:
-1) Leave it as it is and risk the player settling Brest or Rennes instead of the more important Nantes,
-2) Put a resource there (probably a food resource too) which could maybe make the settled city a bit too big in addition to the Fish,
-3) Put a land food resource and delete the Fish, a bit inaccurate on account of the huge importance of fishing in the region,
-4) Combine a resource and marsh on the two Brittany tiles for each to compensate for the other, possibly delete the marsh later.
My preference would probably be 4), though 1) is of course an acceptable break from history.

If only Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseille and Strasbourg are settled (to cover every French tile except Saint-Etienne 1W of Lyon), most of these cities will have a relatively large use of their fat cross except Strasbourg. On the current map, the resource and terrain allocation looks fine to me for population, but if a resource is added in Brittany, or if more cities are settled in the South, Nantes risks getting too big compared to the more important southern cities.

 

[Leoreth]

I haven't looked at the map yet, but I am worried that putting another food resources in Brittany might make a different location than Paris more attractive.

I don't know if marshes are justifiable from the local geography.

 

[Dracosolon]

There are a bunch of marshes all over but most of the wild interior would probably rather fall under "moorland" terrain. Ultimately it depends on how strongly you want to influence city placement. The most forceful option would be to move the Fish one tile south to only make it reachable by the Brest, Rennes and Nantes tiles, then find a way to further discourage settlement at Brest or Rennes for up to at least the medieval era. A temporary marsh on one tile is an option, a food resource (possibly on moorland if it's too much food) another one.

 

[johnfloyd27]

Copied from map thread at Leoreth’s request

Agree with the PNW feedback. I get the reason for the bend in the west coast, but the west bends outward in reality, so I think it’s ok giving it a straight coast extending north in this with a mountain representing the Olympic Peninsula (which is dominated by the Olympic mountain range) and a river separating it from Vancouver island.

I’d also thin the mountains and - if I’m interpreting the Columbia River correctly - put hills instead of mountains on its west side. (Though the rivers currently depicted up there aren’t making a ton of sense to me, so I might be misinterpreting them.)

 

[DC123456789]

Copied from map thread at Leoreth’s request

Agree with the PNW feedback. I get the reason for the bend in the west coast, but the west bends outward in reality, so I think it’s ok giving it a straight coast extending north in this with a mountain representing the Olympic Peninsula (which is dominated by the Olympic mountain range) and a river separating it from Vancouver island.

I’d also thin the mountains and - if I’m interpreting the Columbia River correctly - put hills instead of mountains on its west side. (Though the rivers currently depicted up there aren’t making a ton of sense to me, so I might be misinterpreting them.)

I don't entirely remember how diagonal tiles work, but wouldn't that cut off Seattle from the sea?

 

[johnfloyd27]

Seattle would have to access the sea by passing through a settled or fortified Victoria island or Vancouver. Which I think works. If Vancouver island wanted to shut down Seattle’s access to the sea, it totally could.

 

[trevor]

Didn't we have a multi-page conversation about this a couple years back? Seattle should be a coastal city & able to produce boats.

I think the problem here is that the map is Robinson & that emphasizes that California's westernmost point is further west than Oregon & Washington State as compared to Mercator/the edit of Mercator that Google uses. Is it worth an extra row of tiles however? Both San Francisco & Seattle are a couple minutes off the same line of longitude (122° W) while Los Angeles is a handful of degrees east (118° W). Why not remove the extra row of tiles in CA, shift the mountains east & narrow the desert around Las Vegas & Salt Lake City?

 

[Leoreth]

What do we gain by making California smaller?

 

[1SDANi]

What do we gain by making California smaller?

Ocean

 

[DC123456789]

Didn't we have a multi-page conversation about this a couple years back? Seattle should be a coastal city & able to produce boats.

I think the problem here is that the map is Robinson & that emphasizes that California's westernmost point is further west than Oregon & Washington State as compared to Mercator/the edit of Mercator that Google uses. Is it worth an extra row of tiles however? Both San Francisco & Seattle are a couple minutes off the same line of longitude (122° W) while Los Angeles is a handful of degrees east (118° W). Why not remove the extra row of tiles in CA, shift the mountains east & narrow the desert around Las Vegas & Salt Lake City?

I mean... is there a reason we want to move away from the Robinson projection?

 

[Leoreth]

At this stage of development, it's obviously impossible to move away from something as fundamental as the underlying map projection.

I don't mind breaking with the projection locally, if there is a good reason to do it. Any distortion on the map like Europe or Japan is a deviation from the projection, after all. The Pacific Ocean is much smaller than it should be, and Australia and New Zealand are off from their correct position because it orients better this way.

The American west coast is brought up a lot, and I think that's because North Americans are used to looking at maps of the United States in maps that are Mercator projected and centered on North America, while here it is at the leftward edge of the map that has a distorted curvature. If it was good for gameplay as well, I wouldn't mind breaking from the projection in this regard for aesthetic benefit. But in this case, it means nothing but cutting tiles from California, a region of significant economic importance and location of many resources IRL, whose importance is already insufficiently represented by its number of tiles as it is.

 

[DC123456789]

At this stage of development, it's obviously impossible to move away from something as fundamental as the underlying map projection.

I don't mind breaking with the projection locally, if there is a good reason to do it. Any distortion on the map like Europe or Japan is a deviation from the projection, after all. The Pacific Ocean is much smaller than it should be, and Australia and New Zealand are off from their correct position because it orients better this way.

The American west coast is brought up a lot, and I think that's because North Americans are used to looking at maps of the United States in maps that are Mercator projected and centered on North America, while here it is at the leftward edge of the map that has a distorted curvature. If it was good for gameplay as well, I wouldn't mind breaking from the projection in this regard for aesthetic benefit. But in this case, it means nothing but cutting tiles from California, a region of significant economic importance and location of many resources IRL, whose importance is already insufficiently represented by its number of tiles as it is.

TBH almost every map of (exclusively) the US I've ever seen uses some sort of conic projection... which has a curved west coast just like in the current map.