Owain said:
Another thing I would like ot see is the possibility of the ocasional hill tile away from the places the plates meet. It may be realistic to have huge plains, but they are rather difficult ot play on initially... on huge maps anyway. Its not ar eally a big deal though, just a thought.
Actually, there should be at least some hills away from plate boundaries. Think about other forces besides direct mountain orogeny. Ancient techtonic folding and tilted beds, the natural rising or subsiding of one side or region of a plate, can and have created hilly regions, albeit no Rocky Mountains or Himalayas of course. Even the central regions of North America, though dominated by flat areas like the Great Plains, certainly contain hilly areas, and even a scattering of minor mountains.
It would be disappointing and probably annoying from a gameplay standpoint to have too much flat area. But I will download the script and check out a couple of maps before I pass any judgment though.
Very nice work, and keep it up! I'm always looking for a more Earthlike random map experience, and this looks to be it.
EDIT:
From what I've observed I would say that continental hills would be a great boon both fom a realism and a gameplay standpoint, especially on huge mapes where the great swaths of flat and unvariagated ground seem particularly unrealistic if not a bit boring. If nothing else, a few hills would be nice.
However, my main concern is with the icecaps: they are WAY too extensive and intrusive. Since the regions of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic serve no purpose in the game besides to be annoying, I don't think that they should be modeled at all. The polar regions aren't a part of the game. It's simply not necessary for them to be there on the map. If you look at the full world, there are already unreachable, untraversable polar caps set aside beyond the range of the actual playable "map" region, and it becomes obvious that the latitudes in the map script do not correspond to real-world latitudes. Certainly, a very narrow strip of ice at the poles would be fine and appropriate, but the amount of ice that's on the map now is unnecessary and messes with gameplay. I like that a continental mass can extend into the polar regions, as they do on earth, but if half of my continent is going to be covered in ice, well, then there's no point in even including that half within the boundaries of the map.