Identical Map Generation (not random!!)

[Pie-es-Tasty]

First game, I was Isabella/Spain.

Second game, I got Isabella again. I assumed it was wild chance, and restarted again *without quitting the application*, and got Alexander / Greece.

Third game (which was after restarting the application), I got Isabella, Alexander, and finally someone else.

I asked a friend, who was ALSO "randomly" Isabella in his first game.

Hey I had the same thing! I've gotten Isabella three times from "random" civilizations. Also, I've gotten Egypt twice. Other times I've gotten Asoka and the Aztecs, which leads me to believe it is biased towards Spirtual civs.

 

[KevinTMC]

Just to add my experience to the list...

I am currently in my fourth game (after having first played the Tutorial, of course). Here's how each started:

1) Play Now, all settings default. I did not get any of the maps pictured in this thread.

2) Play Now, all settings default except for High sea level. I got the map that SuperBeaverInc. pictured. (Except that, with the high sea level, the coastlines were receded a bit...for instance, turning the southeastern continent into an archipelago, and that chunk at the western end of the northern continent into an island.)

3) Custom Game, all settings default except for eight civilizations instead of seven and Raging Barbarians. I did not get any of the maps pictured.

4) Custom Game, all settings default except for Large map with 11 civilizations, High sea level, and Raging Barbarians. I did not get any of the maps pictured.

Hope that helps.

-- Kevin​

 

[Frimlin]

I have not yet seen a map I recognise from a previous game, and I have played about 30 games since receiving Civ4 [Edit: this does not mean I haven't played on the same map twice, just I didn't necessarily notice! ]. I too, however, use different map settings each time. I did notice that many of the enemy Civs I was up against in my first few games were often the exact same set of Civs. I don't get that issue at the moment at least, because I hand pick my enemy Civs from the Custom Game screen now -- in my first few games I always used "Play Now".

Maybe if you're playing with the same map settings, the game is sometimes or always using your last map's seed value -- or that of a recent previous map -- to influence the random number for the new map's seed value? That's about the only commonality I can find from what people have posted: people who play with the same settings getting occurances of non-random maps, while those who change settings aren't experiencing it. Might have missed some reports to the contrary, though.

 

[DaveShack]

If anyone is still seeing the problem of repeating maps, it would be helpful if you could turn on logging and post the random number seeds.

Also I wonder if the Python library could be the culprit? Did anyone with repeating maps already have Python installed? Mine seem random and I did have Python already but it's a complex issue and this is just one data point.

 

[Randle]

Hey I had the same thing! I've gotten Isabella three times from "random" civilizations. Also, I've gotten Egypt twice. Other times I've gotten Asoka and the Aztecs, which leads me to believe it is biased towards Spirtual civs.

Perhaps this is related to the difficulty setting; certain civs might have more difficult trait combinations and therefore are reserved for harder difficulties. I know I didn't end up as Montezuma until I played on Prince.

 

[Adam7Eight]

I was starting to get suspicious after several new "random" games on Noble and I kept getting Isabella. I've also gotten Saladin quite a bit. There's definately something going on here. Perhaps Randle is right. If he is, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of choosing "random", does it not?

 

[spa]

You know I have almost never picked random. I want a random option so I go to the play now civ selection screen and roll a dice twice. The first roll tells me which group I'm with (roll of 1 or 2 for the first 6 civs, 3 or 4 for the next and 5 or 6 for the last 6). I then roll again to find out which civ of the group I'm playing. I go through this because there is no random option on the custom game screen and I want to play with modified conditions. So I have limited experience with random but the few times I have done it, I have come up with Isabella more often than not. I didn't think anything of it as sometimes random will generate the same when it only has 26 possible outcomes until I saw the posts here also reporting a tendency towards Isabella. Seems map generation isn't the only thing that's not as random as it appears. As for the map issue, I have yet to see the infamous continental map that people are reporting or any duplicate maps, but then again I haven't played a whole lot of different games yet.

 

[burleigh]

V good game, BUT....
1st 4 game attempts generated Isabella (played one of them)
5th gave Saladin (in mid second game.... how on earth has anyone got round to finishing 80!... lack of wike/ family I suppose!)

Does look as if there's a problem- on the other hand, I've THE MAP to look forward to- haven't had that yet!

 

[jeremiahrounds]

I would turn on logging and get the random number seed but i dont know how to do all that.

However i ran into a duplicate map this morning even after the patch so this is still around. I had a game in between too.

I think for my second full game I did all the play now settings with roman/monarch/standard for one game. This map was different then a map i had done before. Then i did a inland sea map for a game. Than I did a all the play now settings with roman/monarch/epic and got the same map i got before the inland sea map.

 

[Borya]

Sirian, look at the map #5 you got - it's the one from the screenshots above!
^---------------
Sorry, this has already been mentioned. Didn't see the topic had 4 pages.

 

[jeremiahrounds]

restarting my computer got me a new map. I leave my computer on for days and days at a time. I dont think thats a glitch in my computer [based on the other reports] I think who ever designed your algo might have made some assumptions that arnt true for every player.

 

[Borya]

I would turn on logging and get the random number seed but i dont know how to do all that.

You enable it in CivilizationIV.ini, by setting

; Enable the logging system
LoggingEnabled = 1

 

[Mewtarthio]

restarting my computer got me a new map. I leave my computer on for days and days at a time. I dont think thats a glitch in my computer [based on the other reports] I think who ever designed your algo might have made some assumptions that arnt true for every player.

LeoV's hypothesis seems to be validated here. Does everyone else that winds up with SuperBeaver's map leave their computers on for extended periods of time? And does rebooting always fix the problem?

 

[uniteatteri]

I've played 5 games, and i've got Beaver's map once.

 

[Cartouche Bee]

The demo also demonstrates this behavior, I've played games as India, from settler to monarch with each and every game with the same map. Thought it was part of the demo release until I read this thread.

 

[Swiss Bezerker]

Ive played that map there to!

 

[Monker]

I just got the game recently. The first time I played I had this same map. I had seen this thread already, so before the second time I played, I changed MapRandSeed to a random 8 digit number, as Sirian suggested. Then when I started another game, I had the same map again. I'm confused.

 

[Eyeoftiger]

I had this happen to me. I started a story at another forum, and 3 other users reported the exact same map that I had. Some proof. The top is my map, the bottom is another player's

Wow...looking at that map, I played on that same exact map as France just two days ago, and took over the southern island from the Americans...

That is weird.

 

[azzaman333]

I've had 2 games on SuperBeaver's map, both with me as isabella in the exact same spot with the exact same opponents. (i'm assuming that all the opponents wher the same since i quit when i found out that i was next to Qin Shi again)

 

[Monker]

LeoV's hypothesis seems to be validated here. Does everyone else that winds up with SuperBeaver's map leave their computers on for extended periods of time? And does rebooting always fix the problem?

Rebooting doesn't solve it for me.

I just started my 3rd game and got this same map again. I was hoping that changing the world size to large from standard would change it, but it didn't work. I just got the same continents with more tiles.

Is Sirian's fix not working for anybody else? Maybe I'm just doing something wrong...