Dynamic Fauna and Flora, interactive environment ideas, Spherical map.

[Lazy sweeper]

I had this ideas from a long time, and yet only some features had been tried so far.
Let's do a recap:

We got some mods and some Dlc' that improved in dynamic environment.

Continuous bush fires
Rising Sea DLC, which also included raising temperatures and Ice caps melt, Snow tiles into tundra and eventually into desert or wasteland.
Capture herd or plantation and regrown-move the herd elsewhere. Special unit required.

What we haven't got.

Moving all animals of all kind, from Seals to crabs, from Whales to Cows and Buffalo, Horses, Deer, Giant Panda, Lions, Elephants, etc...
Barely any but the smallest species are not natural wanderers. Seals moved further north into Greenland tip the more Vikings disco party in those land...
Monkeys in India populate all realms, they venture into town and cities, as other animals do, including Elephants, Tigers, Water Buffalo, etc. althought some Tiger species
as Mountain Lions (Puma) in the America prefers to stay in some more human-less biomes, but most just travel all year round, following specific migration routes.

The way C4 implemented animals as barbarians variants was somehow the nearest thing to dynamic animals we got.
Humankind implemented moving animals also, but it used it for game only. Once humans evolved past Hunter gatherers, they all disappear, sadly.

Whales especially feels very un-natural to send working boats to a sea tile and they stay there all the time... working boats should naturally evolve also naturally to be allowed to move around...
Sea resources are a massive increase in population growth, and we are to the point of competing with whales for Krill!!

Past the Animal realm, water, fire and Ice are the next big thing...
Underwater vulcanoes can grow full island chain in very little time... giant lava flows can create liveable Islands in a few hundred years, further human intervention can speed up the process
of turning wasteland into a living biome, Iceland is just such an example.

Dynamic water, growing Ice, is also a really hard talk, if we consider just 12.000 years ago, Northern America and Europe were covered from miles thick Ice caps...
All we ever got in Civ is some Water tiles turned into Ice, but never saw big glaciers slowly receding... nevermind giant miles high ice dams with oceans of water also miles up, waiting for
disaster to happen... this is part of what a dynamic world could look, if devs ever tried implementing this- A giant terraforming live environment, with miles high icebergs that would sink early Titanic's and squeeze to death all explorers crazy enough to venture into the Ice realms with anything but Nuclear Icebreakers...

Of course all this makes sense if finally Civ moves to a complete spherical map... one in which there are two poles...


Do you think it's time for Spherical map??

 

[Lazy sweeper]

I'm wondering... why so many people dislike the idea of a spherical map???

What is wrong with that??? 62% of voters are against it... what happened to Civ 4 spherical map lovers???

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

I'm wondering... why so many people dislike the idea of a spherical map???

What is wrong with that??? 62% of voters are against it... what happened to Civ 4 spherical map lovers???

Spherical Map for the better part is impossible to do, and is nothing more than a visual gimmick. Civ 4 "spherical" map didn't exist, it was just a visual trick, a image of the map projected onto a sphere, but the north/south poles were nothing more than a fake texture, you couldn't access it.

Furthermore, it's virtually impossible to actually do a sphere using hexagons, you need pentagons, but if you end up using pentagons to fill in the gaps you ruin the coordinate system, the game uses a X,Y coordinate system, it's how the game knows where each tile is, with a pentagon, this is no longer feasible, because the pentagons don't align properly. It's already hard to actually do the X,Y coordinate system correctly (sort of).

I mean you could *still* just project the texture onto a sphere and call it a day but again, it's just a gimmick, I don't think it's worth wasting resources on that.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Spherical Map for the better part is impossible to do, and is nothing more than a visual gimmick. Civ 4 "spherical" map didn't exist, it was just a visual trick, a image of the map projected onto a sphere, but the north/south poles were nothing more than a fake texture, you couldn't access it.

Furthermore, it's virtually impossible to actually do a sphere using hexagons, you need pentagons, but if you end up using pentagons to fill in the gaps you ruin the coordinate system, the game uses a X,Y coordinate system, it's how the game knows where each tile is, with a pentagon, this is no longer feasible, because the pentagons don't align properly. It's already hard to actually do the X,Y coordinate system correctly (sort of).

I mean you could *still* just project the texture onto a sphere and call it a day but again, it's just a gimmick, I don't think it's worth wasting resources on that.

No no no no no no.... both North and South do works exactly like the Mercator map projection.... So they are there...

You can wrap a Mercator projection map over a sphere and it will work but you should add triangles on top and bottom...

There has been many examples of functioning options with some small overlaps and "holes" that can be worked around easily by
mirroring the nearest edges...

Imagine Earth I think it uses just triangles to do that... Hexagons already "broke" the old XY system... the Hexagon XY is a zig-zag gimmick compared to the OG squares.

The camera view is what it is important here, it has to do a basic "photoshop lens distortion" wide angle fix and voilà...
Now you have complete freedom to go wherever and the world as seen through the camera will always look like the
usual "isometric" view, maintaining all objects proportions equals throughout the field of view.

One of the biggest advancements possible in games worth investing resources is graphics.
Better graphics = more sales. HK has considerably better graphics than any other 4X game and that is why it has
sold so much. Even if Old World is a better game, probably, the graphics look dated, like Civ V graphics.
And it has sold less than what devs hoped.

wasting resources...

 

[evonannoredars]

Moving resource tiles would be a hassle have to relocate and would probably require the whole improvement system to be redesigned.
A 2D map is easier to visualise and comprehend than a spherical one.

 

[marius_kaparius]

I've always been fascinated about the ability for resources to move around. Herding animals, moving seeds. We have hints for this in the narrative system where tiles can become a resource or you have choices around collecting seeds but I would love for something like that. I don't need it but I found the spherical map in Civ 4 entertaining.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Diffusion Bee used Hexagons

This instead is Grok

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Moving resource tiles would be a hassle have to relocate and would probably require the whole improvement system to be redesigned.
A 2D map is easier to visualise and comprehend than a spherical one.

Devs could still unwrap it like Q-Bert, four on top and four on the bottom, if they wanted to keep a strategic view and for X-Y sustainability...
the reality is that a Z axis should be introduced and basically it would be a giant Minacraft-like sphere made of cubes.
Making cubes as basic 1Unit would simplify the adoption. Q-Bert is an 8-bit era semplification if it had to compile on 256 bytes...

It WOULD look 2D because of the camera distortion correction trick.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

I was just thinking... where is the Antarctic continent in all of those Giant Earth maps... North and South pole are two completely different beasts... on a 2D map it could be included trying to stretch the map a bit more horizontally and cheat a "tiny" bit on the latitude-longitude aspects, and place it somewhere between Australia and South America....
Don't you guy miss the South Pole secret Nazi base scenario where you get a free U-boat and a forbidden tech??? Can we say Nazi, right? Nobody is offended here, right?
It can be Atlantis and no U-boats... anyway I like thinking they were there doing some mysterious stuff the US took over... or not...

 

[reddishrecue]

I was just thinking... where is the Antarctic continent in all of those Giant Earth maps... North and South pole are two completely different beasts... on a 2D map it could be included trying to stretch the map a bit more horizontally and cheat a "tiny" bit on the latitude-longitude aspects, and place it somewhere between Australia and South America....
Don't you guy miss the South Pole secret Nazi base scenario where you get a free U-boat and a forbidden tech??? Can we say Nazi, right? Nobody is offended here, right?
It can be Atlantis and no U-boats... anyway I like thinking they were there doing some mysterious stuff the US took over... or not...

That reminds me of a modern barbarian encampment in civ 6.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

That reminds me of a modern barbarian encampment in civ 6.

Ahahah, yeah, that would be kinda neat... hide the super-bounty hut in the middle of it, and all barbs camps around it in rage mode!!!

I tried to do it here but Russians got there first... Argh...

(I also completely forgot all the sea resources, maybe a randomizer rgeneration each turn? that'd be a nice mod to make...bye bye Nessie!!)

Thread 'My Tiny Atlantis Earth Map 100X100. Need help to make it bigger... And Randomizer feedback loop mod...'

Apr 11, 2025

Here is in all its glory...
I have included Atlantis.Antarctica but it's very small...
Someone with the knowledge to make it a bigger map, could please save it like 500x100? Or something like that?
I would like to try some Q-Bert pyramidion experimentation with the Y-axis but have no idea how...
maybe just cheating with some ice walls and thats it...

Also I would love cities could be built on top of mountain but either I have no idea how to enable it from the editor, or
if there is a modded editor somewhere is using... tnks.

STandard civs, no strange rules or mods, everything else is C3...

• Lazy sweeper
• atlantis map civ 3
• Replies: 0
• Forum: Civ3 - User-created Maps

 

[Taefin]

An x-y coordinate could work for representing all hexes. Depending on how they do their pathing (if it is it a graph of connected nodes, rather than utilizing math on the coordinates), the game might port to a spherical map quite smoothly.

The 10 non-polar pentagons would have a small impact on city sizes, with cities losing up to ~1/6 of their tiles, but not much more dramatic than the placement of mountains or water. Similarly, the pentagons would have fewer opportunities for adjacencies, but given how few buildings get above +4, this might barely be felt.

Graphically, mountains and natural wonders could be scaled/transformed slightly to look snug in different hex scalings, they would likely need to add a new scripts for generating mountains and other terrain on pentagons. Buildings and wonders are already just plopped into oversized spaces, and would probably look fine and district greebles would need to have their spacing made flexible to tile size and shape.

I’d rather they get AI using commanders and airplanes first, but a spherical map would be an exciting bonus in one of the expansions.

 

[Yzman]

I honestly don't see an advantage or have any excitement for spherical map. I'd rather gameplay be focused on.

 

[UWHabs]

An x-y coordinate could work for representing all hexes. Depending on how they do their pathing (if it is it a graph of connected nodes, rather than utilizing math on the coordinates), the game might port to a spherical map quite smoothly.

The 10 non-polar pentagons would have a small impact on city sizes, with cities losing up to ~1/6 of their tiles, but not much more dramatic than the placement of mountains or water. Similarly, the pentagons would have fewer opportunities for adjacencies, but given how few buildings get above +4, this might barely be felt.

Graphically, mountains and natural wonders could be scaled/transformed slightly to look snug in different hex scalings, they would likely need to add a new scripts for generating mountains and other terrain on pentagons. Buildings and wonders are already just plopped into oversized spaces, and would probably look fine and district greebles would need to have their spacing made flexible to tile size and shape.

I’d rather they get AI using commanders and airplanes first, but a spherical map would be an exciting bonus in one of the expansions.

Yeah, it's not #1 on my list of needs, but it would be cool. And there's definitely tricks that you could play to get things better. You can have a deeper cutout around the poles of impassable ice, for example. You could also play with the pentagons that you need on the map, and have them as like natural wonders/impassable terrain. In civ 7 everything is eventually workable, but if you had them as non-workable, non-movable tiles, you could find your way around them so that they don't impact things too much.

I honestly don't see an advantage or have any excitement for spherical map. I'd rather gameplay be focused on.

It's more for realism - when you shrink the poles, you get a better balance of tundra vs warmer climates like you have IRL. But with 7 making less difference in terrain so that even tundra cities are workable, that matters less now than it did in past civ games.

But yeah, combined with the coordinate system challenge that it would have, it's probably pretty low down on the list of things to aim for.