[MapScript] Erebus Continent
- Thread starter Seven05
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![[to_xp]Gekko](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/74/74677.jpg?1475248346){kind=avatar}
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
yeah, found the description in the first post 
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
nice work on the northern plains setting, but it needs some tweaking to be "softer" , right now it looks really artificial and ugly. check this picture, it's a huge map and you immediately notice something's funky 
aside from that issue, I like it a lot. provides a sensible way to avoid getting a huge desert with no need to edit anything individually. bravo
aside from that issue, I like it a lot. provides a sensible way to avoid getting a huge desert with no need to edit anything individually. bravo
Did you ever turn logging on so you can give me the random seed for funky maps like that?
I never ended up with anything like that in my tests even with some massive deserts. I can easily add some randomness to the transition though so that's not a problem.
I never ended up with anything like that in my tests even with some massive deserts. I can easily add some randomness to the transition though so that's not a problem.
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
didn't enable logging yet, but I got that same behaviour the other times I tried it as well, with various sizes. I'll enable logging and give you that info next time, sorry :\
I love random numbers 
I generated about 20 maps but never once ended up with a desert that large at the most obvious temperature transition so I saw a lot of good, natural looking breaks from desert to plains (especially near mountains). It's not a big deal for you to enable logging, It would just speed up testing for me if I had a random seed that I knew generated a 'bad' map, I tend to only save the ones that generate cool maps
I generated about 20 maps but never once ended up with a desert that large at the most obvious temperature transition so I saw a lot of good, natural looking breaks from desert to plains (especially near mountains). It's not a big deal for you to enable logging, It would just speed up testing for me if I had a random seed that I knew generated a 'bad' map, I tend to only save the ones that generate cool maps
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
enabled logging, will try generating some more huge maps to see if I can shed some light on it
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
it worked, it worked!!
and on the first try too, lucky me.
same settings, got a similar map with a similar desert in a similar position, with the similar ugly sudden transition desert -> plains in the north
here's the file you need
and on the first try too, lucky me.
same settings, got a similar map with a similar desert in a similar position, with the similar ugly sudden transition desert -> plains in the north
here's the file you need
Ok, 2.61 is up, just a quick fix to add some fuzz to the transitions with the new option and renamed the 'Northern Plains' to 'Great Plains' since it's not always in the north thanks to certain people who insist on playing with y-wrap enabled but shall remain nameless even though they have unexplained letter combinations like TO and XP at the beginning of their name.
I suppose I could have changed it to steppes too... hmm, maybe I'll do that later once everybody is used to 'great plains'
I suppose I could have changed it to steppes too... hmm, maybe I'll do that later once everybody is used to 'great plains'
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
thanx! will try it out and let you know how it works as soon as I get a chance. didn't expect you to change northern plains to work with toroidal maps, very very kind of you
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
quick post to let you know that the Great Plains option works great now
one suggestion I have though is to increase the strength of the smart flavour effect that adjusts deserts depending on the shape of the continent. at minimal effect, even with great plains on, you can get a HUGE desert right in the middle of the map, untouched by Great Plains. it can be seriously huge and take up a huge percentage of the land, so I'd recommend that smart climate should make it smaller than it does now
Minimal Flavour means that everyone except the Malakim loves grassland, right? I would remove that as it means that it makes clumped starts way more likely, and also messes up 2 of the smart climate options. making sure that illians and doviello don't start in a huge swath of crappy tundra, and placing some decent terrain around all starts is enough to make sure starts are decently balanced, right now it's overdone
Modify selection also seems overdone, I guess it can only change chosen values by 1 step but somehow it's way too strong. for example, I generate a huge map with malakim, no orcs and no doviello/illians. I get a decent amount of desert for the malakim to start in, and yet it feels like that should be how it behaves WITHOUT malakim, i.e. less desert. when I look at jungles and tundra, I often get none at all or just a tiny tiny amount of them. instead of looking like "less jungle/tundra" , it looks like "WAY less jungle/tundra" . the kind of behaviour I would expect from "override selection" . not sure how easy it is to change this, but I would change override selection to the way modify selection currently works ( because completely disabling some climates looks artificial, and worse yet means some resources will not spawn. for example, no deer for Fyrdwells. not good imho ) , and change modify selection to have a subtler effect.
well this post wasn't so quick after all. sorry for the nagging, hey you know how much I love your script, right?
one suggestion I have though is to increase the strength of the smart flavour effect that adjusts deserts depending on the shape of the continent. at minimal effect, even with great plains on, you can get a HUGE desert right in the middle of the map, untouched by Great Plains. it can be seriously huge and take up a huge percentage of the land, so I'd recommend that smart climate should make it smaller than it does now
Minimal Flavour means that everyone except the Malakim loves grassland, right? I would remove that as it means that it makes clumped starts way more likely, and also messes up 2 of the smart climate options. making sure that illians and doviello don't start in a huge swath of crappy tundra, and placing some decent terrain around all starts is enough to make sure starts are decently balanced, right now it's overdone
Modify selection also seems overdone, I guess it can only change chosen values by 1 step but somehow it's way too strong. for example, I generate a huge map with malakim, no orcs and no doviello/illians. I get a decent amount of desert for the malakim to start in, and yet it feels like that should be how it behaves WITHOUT malakim, i.e. less desert. when I look at jungles and tundra, I often get none at all or just a tiny tiny amount of them. instead of looking like "less jungle/tundra" , it looks like "WAY less jungle/tundra" . the kind of behaviour I would expect from "override selection" . not sure how easy it is to change this, but I would change override selection to the way modify selection currently works ( because completely disabling some climates looks artificial, and worse yet means some resources will not spawn. for example, no deer for Fyrdwells. not good imho ) , and change modify selection to have a subtler effect.
well this post wasn't so quick after all. sorry for the nagging, hey you know how much I love your script, right?
Minimal flavor does a few things...
Civs that prefer tundra and/or snow are changed to no longer prefer tundra or snow. No change is made for civs that prefer anything else- desert, plains, hills, forests, etc. Civ specific preferences for north/south and east/west are ignored and everybody's preference for the map edges is reduced by one, for most civs this makes their edge preference -1 so they gain a preference for the map center. Tundra and snow can be replaced with grassland within 3 tiles of the starting plot (simple 7x7 square), the chance is highest adjacent to the start plot, the chance is higher on riverside tiles and plots with resources (or unique features) are skipped.
The smart climate is pretty simple so there are 'bad' cases that can occur. Desert, Tundra and Jungles are evaluated to see if you have civs that prefer them. With 'modifiy selection' on, it starts at -1, so one setting 'less' than where you had it and with 'override selection' it starts with them off. Each civ that has a preference for desert, tundra or jungle will increase the value, how much they increse it depends on how many civs are in the game. Using 'modifiy selection' one civ is normally enough to push the the selection change from -1 to 0 unless you have a lot of civs in your game, two may not be enough to push it from -1 to +1. So if you start with increased deserts but end up with no desert civ using 'modifiy selection' you'll get the default amount of deserts, not reduced. The final value for 'override selection' is a little different, it's quite a bit more precise and uses the actualy settings within the selctions rather than modifing the selection itself. So if you have a desert civ this setting will will calculate the difference in desert threshold between the minimal and maximum settings and adjust it upward by a percentage of that difference, the exact percentage depends on how many desert civs you have compared to how many total civs you have. Tundra and jungles are special cases because they depend so highly on where the land is, not how much of it there is. You can still get fairly large tundra regions even with minimal tundra if the random numbers decide to setup the map the 'right' way. It's unfortunate that FfH and subsequent mods of FfH have decided that deer and beavers only live in the tundra (and dye and sugar require jungles) but there isn't anything I can do about that without hardcoding resource values which I won't do.
The minimal smart climate setting will take any terrain that you turned off and set it to 'reduced' (not minimal) if you have at least one civs that prefers that terrain.
When the smart climate evaluates the continent it's tricky. The first step is to simply look at the percentage of land used by the largest continent, that determines if it needs to increased or decrease plains and deserts. This change is just a modifier of whatever you selected, it will adjust the final threshold by +/- 20%. The second check simply count the land tiles by thse north of the mid point and those south of it. The ratio of north:south controls how much tundra or jungle tempertures can be changed. This is one of those cases where you can look at a map and see things that it is very difficult to explain to the computer. It could be improved to be more intelligent but that would be significantly more complicated and slow things down considerably. In most cases it's good enough so I went with speed
Because I've tried to keep things as 'natural' as possible you will get some cases that completely break all of the rules, or appear to anyway. A large desert in the middle of a massive continent that is pretty well centered on the map will not be in an area cool enough for the 'great plains' to have an effect. The smart climate is working though, where you ended up with a single large desert the map most likely originally had one large desert and a few smaller ones, your 20% reduction to the threshold just condensed it all down to one place. When you have larger deserts you also get fewer desert tiles removed during cleanup when I make sure you never have desert adjacent to grassland. Since these cases are just a few of an infinite (or nearly infinite)number of possible combinations they slip through. If I strenghten the effect of the smart climate desert reduction you'll get no deserts on some maps.
Too many random things in there, try changing your PC clock before you generate your map next time
Civs that prefer tundra and/or snow are changed to no longer prefer tundra or snow. No change is made for civs that prefer anything else- desert, plains, hills, forests, etc. Civ specific preferences for north/south and east/west are ignored and everybody's preference for the map edges is reduced by one, for most civs this makes their edge preference -1 so they gain a preference for the map center. Tundra and snow can be replaced with grassland within 3 tiles of the starting plot (simple 7x7 square), the chance is highest adjacent to the start plot, the chance is higher on riverside tiles and plots with resources (or unique features) are skipped.
The smart climate is pretty simple so there are 'bad' cases that can occur. Desert, Tundra and Jungles are evaluated to see if you have civs that prefer them. With 'modifiy selection' on, it starts at -1, so one setting 'less' than where you had it and with 'override selection' it starts with them off. Each civ that has a preference for desert, tundra or jungle will increase the value, how much they increse it depends on how many civs are in the game. Using 'modifiy selection' one civ is normally enough to push the the selection change from -1 to 0 unless you have a lot of civs in your game, two may not be enough to push it from -1 to +1. So if you start with increased deserts but end up with no desert civ using 'modifiy selection' you'll get the default amount of deserts, not reduced. The final value for 'override selection' is a little different, it's quite a bit more precise and uses the actualy settings within the selctions rather than modifing the selection itself. So if you have a desert civ this setting will will calculate the difference in desert threshold between the minimal and maximum settings and adjust it upward by a percentage of that difference, the exact percentage depends on how many desert civs you have compared to how many total civs you have. Tundra and jungles are special cases because they depend so highly on where the land is, not how much of it there is. You can still get fairly large tundra regions even with minimal tundra if the random numbers decide to setup the map the 'right' way. It's unfortunate that FfH and subsequent mods of FfH have decided that deer and beavers only live in the tundra (and dye and sugar require jungles) but there isn't anything I can do about that without hardcoding resource values which I won't do.
The minimal smart climate setting will take any terrain that you turned off and set it to 'reduced' (not minimal) if you have at least one civs that prefers that terrain.
When the smart climate evaluates the continent it's tricky. The first step is to simply look at the percentage of land used by the largest continent, that determines if it needs to increased or decrease plains and deserts. This change is just a modifier of whatever you selected, it will adjust the final threshold by +/- 20%. The second check simply count the land tiles by thse north of the mid point and those south of it. The ratio of north:south controls how much tundra or jungle tempertures can be changed. This is one of those cases where you can look at a map and see things that it is very difficult to explain to the computer. It could be improved to be more intelligent but that would be significantly more complicated and slow things down considerably. In most cases it's good enough so I went with speed
Because I've tried to keep things as 'natural' as possible you will get some cases that completely break all of the rules, or appear to anyway. A large desert in the middle of a massive continent that is pretty well centered on the map will not be in an area cool enough for the 'great plains' to have an effect. The smart climate is working though, where you ended up with a single large desert the map most likely originally had one large desert and a few smaller ones, your 20% reduction to the threshold just condensed it all down to one place. When you have larger deserts you also get fewer desert tiles removed during cleanup when I make sure you never have desert adjacent to grassland. Since these cases are just a few of an infinite (or nearly infinite)number of possible combinations they slip through. If I strenghten the effect of the smart climate desert reduction you'll get no deserts on some maps.
Too many random things in there, try changing your PC clock before you generate your map next time
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
whoa, that's a load of technical details that needed digesting 
so let's see the things that I'm not too sure about:
changing Doviello and Illians to no longer prefer cold terrain seems overdone, making sure that they start adjacent to it instead of right in the middle of it should be enough
why do you have east/west/north/south preferences? doesn't seem very useful and potentially too predictable, shouldn't the preferences be based on terrain instead?
I thought minimal flavour also got rid of some jungle and marsh around the starting location, correct? if so, that is good
as always, thanx for the info
edit: btw, does the smart climate tweak tundra/jungle cosidering the map, or just desert and plains? if it doesn't, that might be a nice thing to add. I just got a map with a crapload of jungle with the usual settings O.o
so let's see the things that I'm not too sure about:
changing Doviello and Illians to no longer prefer cold terrain seems overdone, making sure that they start adjacent to it instead of right in the middle of it should be enough
why do you have east/west/north/south preferences? doesn't seem very useful and potentially too predictable, shouldn't the preferences be based on terrain instead?
I thought minimal flavour also got rid of some jungle and marsh around the starting location, correct? if so, that is good
as always, thanx for the info
edit: btw, does the smart climate tweak tundra/jungle cosidering the map, or just desert and plains? if it doesn't, that might be a nice thing to add. I just got a map with a crapload of jungle with the usual settings O.o
I was using 'north' to push civs toward the colder region without putting them in the tundra and snow. By the same token, I use 'south' for the Lanun to keep the out of the tundra since their preference for water makes tundra/snow starts possible. East & west are just in there because I could add it easily. Y-wrap, naturally breaks everything so y-wrap maps ignore north/south regardless of the flavor setting.
East/west makes it possible to add back in limited support for team games without completely breaking flavor, but as of yet I haven't added that.
Yes, minimal flavor cleans up marshes too, forgot about that
And yes, smart climate does some adjusting of tundra and jungle temperatures, that was covered in the long explanation before your reply
East/west makes it possible to add back in limited support for team games without completely breaking flavor, but as of yet I haven't added that.
Yes, minimal flavor cleans up marshes too, forgot about that
And yes, smart climate does some adjusting of tundra and jungle temperatures, that was covered in the long explanation before your reply
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
sorry if I forgot a little bit of your reply while posting, all that info almost made my head explode
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
yeah, that's what I'm trying now
I've just finished tweaking flavourstarts for wild mana, hope it works fine will have to check...
does reduced flavor still mess up smart climate modify settings? it shouldn't remove the flavour doviello and illian have for tundra, so maybe it works fine?
I've just finished tweaking flavourstarts for wild mana, hope it works fine will have to check...
does reduced flavor still mess up smart climate modify settings? it shouldn't remove the flavour doviello and illian have for tundra, so maybe it works fine?
It will still affect that, yes. Minimal flavor gives them a negative value for snow and tundra (like everybody else), reduced flavor gives them a zero value and gives them a preference for starting in the north. That's the trick to get them to start near, but not always in the tundra. Since the smart climate will, at most, reduce the tundra by 1 step, just bump it up a step instead of leaving it a default
[to_xp]Gekko
QCT junkie
yeah, tried that as well and it worked fine. not that I don't mind having less of it though
right now I'm generating a huge map with 21 civs, full flavour and override selection to see what happens
right now I'm generating a huge map with 21 civs, full flavour and override selection to see what happens
