Map Help/Map Request

[Delta_Strife]

Playing around with ideas since it is summer. I have seen some maps where you have space/land mixed together. What I want to do is make something like this:

Except bigger land mass for the earth and the moon. I also like the idea of defined space corridors. What I want to know/would like is there a map terrain that already fulfil this requirement or one that can be modified, and anyone interesting helping me make this happen?

 

[Kirejara]

Balthasar has done something similar with his Lost World.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/lost-worlds-map-2-0.9452/

It has tiles with normal earth, space and mars terrain.

Maybe you could use this as base.

Spacelanes could either be marked as unpassable or blocked for wheeled units.

 

[tom2050]

Yea, first things that come to mind are the Star Trek and space mods that had similar terrain in a lot of different ways.One with oceans inbetween the space routes, one with oceans as the routes, etc. I'd have to look up the links to try to find them again though.
With one of those, you might be able to get by with just inserting some new terrain/town graphics here and there.
If all land based; for the roads, you could do something similar as Vuldacon did with EFZI roads, or base those lines in similar directions as his to get something together quickly.

And for the 'outlines' Territory.pcx, you cannot get it completely color filled, but you can use a large portion of each tile to create a light civ color glow similar to the different colors in the pic.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Space terrains:

Leaven's
Lukree's
Flamand's
Pounder's
NavyDawg's
Vadus'
Beer Engine's

Multi-tile planets with unique appearances can be custom built - with the caveat that it can make some chunks of the terrain sets unusable, and placement on the map can be tricky.

 

[Delta_Strife]

Very helpful!!! I like Balthasar's work. I think that can be modified for what I have in mind. Probably need to combine it with some others. Now I need to do some more models to take advantage of such a map.

 

[Blue Monkey]

While searching for info regarding changing the dimensions of the city pcx (for another project) stumbled across this remark:

Hence, a nature civ, could provide an overlay landscape of sorts.

Which sparked a train of thought about planets as cities.

That whole thread is worth a look. Several people posted templates to work from. Loosely summarizing the technique:

• Cities can be larger sizes - even vary within the graphic.
• The game engine searches proportionally for which specific city within the graphic to use. 1/3 down for the third city in the first column for example.
• Center each in its part of the whole. The game engine places the city on the map as if it was only one tile with the rest of the larger-than-standard graphic spreading out into the surrounding tiles.

Don't depend solely on this brief summary. It's only based on a brief speed-reading and may be inaccurate. Also, a lot of important info is scattered across many posts regarding the effects on/of appearance of units, resources, fog of war and so on. Again, it's important to read through the whole thread for those nuggets.

Were I to get involved in making a robustly useful space terrain set I'd proceed this way:

• Use the terrain technique for the majority of planets.
  • Control ability to "colonize" with appropriate terrain flags.
  • Stars of various sizes as well. Using impassable terrain for the stars would prevent units landing on or transiting through them.
  • One important caveat: this technique will not work with random maps.
• Use the cities for habitable planets.
  • Take advantage of the underlying terrain to vary cities' level of production, wealth, etc.
  • One important note here is that the same graphic needs to be reused in order for planets to look the same when control changes to another faction. Although ...
  • ... adding something like an orbital station to the city graphic could indicate a change of control.
  • Change in eras could show as an "upgrade" to whatever is in orbit.
• Only the central tile counts as a city in terms of actual game play. Turn that to advantage:
  • Place the city where the graphic extends beyond the underlying land terrain. This way it visually covers the surrounding space terrain tiles. Then ...
    
  • Using the invisible color in the palette to let the space terrain show through makes it possible to have things such as communication satellites and docking stations that are actually part of the city graphic.
• Combine some kind of "terraforming" tech as required for era change with a change in the planet graphic. Progressing through multiple eras will show the gradual progression of terraforming.
  
• Overlays such as marsh, jungle, etc. can be used to give the look of rings or other features.
• Pollution / Ruins could be used to simulate the effects of planet-busting attacks. By incorporating elements that match the general look of the space terrain parts of the planet can look completely "vaporized".
  
• Want an animated unstable planet effect? Place the planet Krypton over a volcano or volcanoes. The pollution shows the after-effects of an eruption.

These are all just half-formed brainstorming ideas of things to try by combining base terrains, terrain overlays, and city files to get a flexible varieties of sizes and types of planets. There are bound to be many more possibilities of ways to use these techniques. Not sure I could commit to producing any polished sets within a reasonable timeline, but would be happy to help produce some "quick & dirty" pcx for experimentation. Cutting and pasting pre-existing planet images into properly formatted pcx files, for example. Let me know if any of this would be of use to you, Delta_Strife.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Here's a quick & dirty example. Mars as 4-era city.

1. Already had an image of 4 stages in terraforming Mars on hand.
2. Cut, rescaled, & arranged the images on a template downloaded from the cities thread linked above.
3. Did a bit of contrast and color saturation work.
4. Indexed and exported to pcx format.

"Quick and dirty" meaning hour & a half's work. Each city image covers roughly a 9 tile region, with the actual "city" being the central tile within those 9.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Although these could be used for eras, the original concept was to use variations on what's in orbit round a planet to show who controls a planet. So no pcx this time, just a preview. In practice, adapting a civilopedia image of a unit belonging to the culture group might be most useful. And one last thought - the planet itself wouldn't change, but changing the orbital could indicate population growth/city size.

link to full size image

 

[Delta_Strife]

Interesting ideas and tips! I could use that for the space colonies that orbit the earth. I wish this computer had my usual photo program so I could get started on the work but will have to wait. Just work out what the tech tree could look like in the mean time.

 

[Delta_Strife]

Ok started my map but running into a bit a trouble. Here is what I did I made LM mtn in the middle of ocean. Then I removed all the coastline squares around it. However there is still some on the LM mtn tile itself. Is there a way to rid of the coastline? If I can get rid of it will it mess up the coastline I have on earth?

 

[Blue Monkey]

The way to get rid of it without messing up the coastline is to make sure the mountain graphic covers the whole tile. You can do that by adding some of the same "deep space" background.

Memory not so good atm, but in another thread recently there was discussion on mountains & iirc some images were posted showing what I mean.

EDIT: Found it.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Another thing to keep in mind - "Coast" is a water terrain. Normally anywhere land and water meet the water is coast. That tile is going to have some part of it that looks like land. You cover that bit by making the mountain slightly larger than needed to cover 1 tile.

 

[Delta_Strife]

Thanks for the help Blue Monkey! Balthasar also gave me some tips and I am much happier with the results!

 

[Delta_Strife]

Things are now progressing trying other ideas first up Side 3

 

[Delta_Strife]

Even more Progress!

 

[Blue Monkey]

Glad you had a breakthrough. Balthasar's much more experienced at custom terrain. Made complete sets for one thing.

 

[Delta_Strife]

Random question but is it possible to have the Year displayed in game as 0078 instead of 78? Or is this a hardcoded thing. I changed the Label.txt so BC is UC.

 

[Delta_Strife]

NVM turns out just had to put 00 in the labels like this: Week $NUM1, 00$NUM0 $UCAD0

 

[Bluemofia]

NVM turns out just had to put 00 in the labels like this: Week $NUM1, 00$NUM0 $UCAD0

The problem I see with that is if you reach year 100, then it will be 00100, 00101, 00102, etc. But that might not be a problem depending on your needs.