Hello. Because I have way too much free time and I am way too obsessed with geography, I have embarked on a task to design a hypothetical map of Earth, namely - divided between sensible territories, and covered with sensible resources.
This has been quite hilarious task, as I don't know what will be the upper limit of map size, what exact resources will the game get, and so on, but whatever, I did this anyway. I have divided Earth on 130 territories and covered almost every one of them with luxury and strategic resources (roughly 80% of them are realistic placements, rest of them are put for balance reasons). The interactive map is accessible below. You can click on each territory to see its area size, name and luxury resources. There are two layers, the basic one, and the Strategic Resources layer which displays 180 strategic resources on the map.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1rL2_zE9uvJin9XyO3g6ssgrKtwY55S2X&usp=sharing
The game does have Copper, Iron, Horse and Saltpeter confirmed, and I assume Coal, Oil and Uranium will be strategic resources as well. As I said, most of them are based on actual real life locations, with the exception of Saltpeter which was very annoying resource to place and I have mostly just invented its deposits to cover the world equally.
When dividing map among territories, my rules have been:
1) Similar area of territories within geographical regions.
2) Roughly fitting modern borders or administrative divisions, if possible.
3) Making historical, geographic and/or cultural sense.
4) Distributing a lot of resources everywhere, because it is harder to find up regionally appropriate resources than delete them later if the density was too high.
You can already see that there is an obvious problem with obligatory True Starting Locations Mod for such map: extreme asimmetry. Currently we do get only one culture in Americas, one in Subsaharan Africa, just two in Oriental Asia, one in Europe, and five! in the Middle East. So it would take some time before such map was actually playable in a decently balanced way - we'd have to wait for mods and expansions adding some more ancient cultures. Personally I think Caral, Etruscans, Halstatt, Slavs, Nok, Bantu, Missisipi, Scythians, Yamato and Funan would be a perfect next ten of ancient cultures for covering the world 'equally'. But oh well, why worry about that at the moment.
Feel free to comment the way I have divided the world in territories and the way I have distributed resources.
Also, my another thread https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...t-cultural-transitions-a-mod-synopsis.664319/ ponders on the ability for modders to restrict cultural transitions in 'historically realistic ways'. Either that, or a version of civ's Historical Starting Dates mod ('new civs appear in later ages according to their historical era of arrival') would be amazing in a combination with a huge map of Earth.
This has been quite hilarious task, as I don't know what will be the upper limit of map size, what exact resources will the game get, and so on, but whatever, I did this anyway. I have divided Earth on 130 territories and covered almost every one of them with luxury and strategic resources (roughly 80% of them are realistic placements, rest of them are put for balance reasons). The interactive map is accessible below. You can click on each territory to see its area size, name and luxury resources. There are two layers, the basic one, and the Strategic Resources layer which displays 180 strategic resources on the map.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1rL2_zE9uvJin9XyO3g6ssgrKtwY55S2X&usp=sharing
The game does have Copper, Iron, Horse and Saltpeter confirmed, and I assume Coal, Oil and Uranium will be strategic resources as well. As I said, most of them are based on actual real life locations, with the exception of Saltpeter which was very annoying resource to place and I have mostly just invented its deposits to cover the world equally.
When dividing map among territories, my rules have been:
1) Similar area of territories within geographical regions.
Spoiler :
2) Roughly fitting modern borders or administrative divisions, if possible.
3) Making historical, geographic and/or cultural sense.
4) Distributing a lot of resources everywhere, because it is harder to find up regionally appropriate resources than delete them later if the density was too high.
You can already see that there is an obvious problem with obligatory True Starting Locations Mod for such map: extreme asimmetry. Currently we do get only one culture in Americas, one in Subsaharan Africa, just two in Oriental Asia, one in Europe, and five! in the Middle East. So it would take some time before such map was actually playable in a decently balanced way - we'd have to wait for mods and expansions adding some more ancient cultures. Personally I think Caral, Etruscans, Halstatt, Slavs, Nok, Bantu, Missisipi, Scythians, Yamato and Funan would be a perfect next ten of ancient cultures for covering the world 'equally'. But oh well, why worry about that at the moment.
Feel free to comment the way I have divided the world in territories and the way I have distributed resources.
Also, my another thread https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...t-cultural-transitions-a-mod-synopsis.664319/ ponders on the ability for modders to restrict cultural transitions in 'historically realistic ways'. Either that, or a version of civ's Historical Starting Dates mod ('new civs appear in later ages according to their historical era of arrival') would be amazing in a combination with a huge map of Earth.
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