Large and Huge Maps - Not Tested?

[Stid]

Hi,

I've recently been focusing on large and huge maps to see how this impacts the gameplay and I hate to say it, but there have been many issues I've encountered which makes the gameplay not fun at all which is mainly due to extreme micromanaging. I've gotten to the point now where the game isn't fun at all in Modern so I often leave at the middle ages now and worried about complex fixes when the easiest ones should be stairing the devs in the face.

I've listed a few of the issues below and potential solutions which may have already been discussed (apologies if so):

• Ships taking too long to get around landmasses - Canals. These were in previous games and dont know why they have been missed from this (either as improvement or wonder). I like to place my cities on 1 tile that separate two large bodies of water so the 'function' of canals is already there via cities.
• City state colours not changing when at war - Change the colour of units to their master. Basically I have no idea what city states I am at war with when at war with their master. I can't believe this wasn't addressed in early testing.
• I can't find my planes - unit cycling should include these. I'll be honest, no idea how aerodromes work but I cant seem to stack them (certainly not easily) and therefore avoid planes unless I have carriers.
• Can't wake all units - have a wake all units key. On large maps, this is particularily an issue when you have 50+ units and need to wait for an enemy to 'wake them' for you.
• Gaps all over the large/huge maps - allow settlement scaling based on map size/only count cities and not towns/Increased AI civ number options. This is a biggy for me, gaps all over the map which mean I can quite happily settle very far away from other civs and never go to war throughout an entire game. Makes it rather mundane
• Roads not going to 'key' places such as bridges - allow manual building of roads (not including just to/from settlements via the 'fastest' route)
• No idea where my railways are - add a way to include railways as an overlay perhaps? I always forgot I have them when using units as I simply cant find them with so much detail on the screen.

 

[cbum]

I also find the eye candy overwhelming. Bring back the tactical map view please!
And find a way to tell me which hexes cost what movement/ which sides of hexes are impassible - impossible to tell by looking at them in complex terrain. I constantly overlook some terrain item/property and my moves keep getting truncated.

 

[Krikkit1]

I also find the eye candy overwhelming. Bring back the strategic map view please!
And find a way to tell me which hexes cost what movement/ which sides of hexes are impassible - impossible to tell by looking at them in complex terrain. I constantly overlook some terrain item/property and my moves keep getting truncated.

Corrected and Definitely (also friendly Urban land tiles should never stop movement, enemy Urban tiles should always stop movement... regardless of underlying terrain)

 

[Gorbles]

People wanted larger maps, people got larger maps.

Are there going to be issues adding larger map sizes that didn't exist for the entirety of the game's development? Probably! I don't think this indicates anything about how much testing was done, though. Some of your complaints / suggestions (wake all, for example) could plausibly apply to smaller map sizes.

I love Huge Pangaea myself, but I'm an anecdote of a single person, and I haven't tried other map types as much.

 

[Gedemon]

well, yes, that confirms the game was designed from the start for tiny maps only, something I also noted from units movement hard coding.

 

[King Flevance]

The game should have been designed with larger maps in mind considering most of the player base primarily uses larger maps. I gotta say, this was short sighted. Occassionally, we all might play a smaller game but most of the fanbase plays civ for the epic map with a bunch of civs primarily.

 

[aenima]

i only play with huge map (epic duration) because i like to start all alone, and not meet civ too early. So i play huge map with only 4AI .... and you know what? they are all close to me!!! At each time. And in this case, all the civs are in the same world than you, no civ in the "new" world. It would be nice to be able to set a minimum distance between starting positions.
I also think that the city limits should depend on the size (and maybe the number of starting civs)

 

[Siptah]

i only play with huge map (epic duration) because i like to start all alone, and not meet civ too early. So i play huge map with only 4AI .... and you know what? they are all close to me!!! At each time. And in this case, all the civs are in the same world than you, no civ in the "new" world. It would be nice to be able to set a minimum distance between starting positions.
I also think that the city limits should depend on the size (and maybe the number of starting civs)

This is because you (involuntarily) decided to have all civs in the homeland and none in the distant lands. In the "player" menu of the game setup, the civs are listed as #1 (player) #2–x (homeland) #(x+1)–y (distant lands). So, if you delete AI controlled empires there, you always delete the distant lands civs, while keeping all the homeland civs (until you delete more than x).

As an example, on standard map size, there are 8 players: #1 is you, #2-5 are homeland, #6-8 are distant lands. If you delete three civs, you have only homeland civs. If you want a civ to spawn far away from you, you need to have 6 players at least. I don't know what the numbers for large or huge are, but I would guess it's 10 players (6 in homeland) and 12 players (7 in homeland).

Hopefully, at some point, we can customize the players based on slots, e.g., have #1 as the player, #2–3 as AI, #4–6 empty, and #7–8 in DL.

 

[aenima]

ah ok thanks for that, i didn't notice this when i delete AI players. And so maybe this way the civs will be far each other in the homeland .... I will try it.

 

[Berrern]

i only play with huge map (epic duration) because i like to start all alone, and not meet civ too early. So i play huge map with only 4AI .... and you know what? they are all close to me!!! At each time. And in this case, all the civs are in the same world than you, no civ in the "new" world. It would be nice to be able to set a minimum distance between starting positions.
I also think that the city limits should depend on the size (and maybe the number of starting civs)

There is a mod that I believe is perfect for you called Players Slots per Hemisphere Picker, which lets you choose how many of the civs should start on the homelands / distant lands. Check it out!

 

[bbbt]

I think they launched assuming large and huge maps would more or less work in the future because they were using the Civ 6 engine, but planned to worry about the details and testing when they actually had enough civs to populate them without duplicates. And community demand had them flip that switch earlier than expected.

It's wild how much of the game feels like they ran out of time when it was the longest-in-development game.

 

[vorlon_mi]

• I can't find my planes - unit cycling should include these. I'll be honest, no idea how aerodromes work but I cant seem to stack them (certainly not easily) and therefore avoid planes unless I have carriers.
• Can't wake all units - have a wake all units key. On large maps, this is particularily an issue when you have 50+ units and need to wait for an enemy to 'wake them' for you.
• No idea where my railways are - add a way to include railways as an overlay perhaps? I always forgot I have them when using units as I simply cant find them with so much detail on the screen.

These 3 areas are pain points for me, even on "standard" maps.

Railroads: I've been reduced to manually mousing over tiles between my settlements and reading the tooltip -- whether it says "road" or "railroad". A workaround I have been using for a while (to work around a bug that has been mostly patched) is to build rail stations in my larger, non-capital, cities first. When they are just about done, I start the rail station in the capital. That build order seems to enable the important cities to find their way to the capital so that I can enable building factories. NOTE: that works best for cities in the Homelands (HL). I rarely build factories in my Distant Lands (DL) cities.

Wake All Units: Would love to have that option. Especially when I have pre-positioned troops and fortified them, waiting for the relationship to decay into "Hostile." Or I have parked my Explorers, waiting for the discovery of Hegemony so they can start digging for Antiquity artifacts. Way too easy to overlook some units, even on Standard maps.

Planes: Agree that they should be included in unit cycling. Yes, my biplanes / fighters are circling, waiting to intercept bogies. But if I sent out the bombers / trench fighters last turn, I probably want to send them out again this turn.
Some of what I've learned:

• Aerodrome Commander: works like an army commander, but is fixed in place in the district/building. It accumulates experience from the sorties of the planes based there. Fewer promotion slots; one of them increases the number of aircraft that can be based there. I have to click on it to see the planes.
• Squadron Commander: similar to the aerodrome commander, but it can move around on LAND tiles. When you build one, you can relocate it to a non-urban tile that is X hexes away from the aerodrome (I forget what X is, maybe 8?). Next turn, you can do that again, to make a forward-located airbase closer to the enemy. Same promotion options as the aerodrome commander. No, don't stack the first two commander types.
• Aircraft Carrier: similar to the squadron commander, but must move around on COAST/OCEAN tiles. Doesn't stack, but can be parked near one of the other commanders to provide a greater density of planes.