[MapScript] Erebus Continent

[[to_xp]Gekko]

thanks

another minor suggestion I have is to have the mapscript place a couple "oddities" on the map here and there just for added flavour, for example ancient forests, penguins, mushrooms... a volcano with a couple tiles of burn forest nearby... jungle altars... maybe even pirate coves and necrototems

 

[Seven05]

I should be able to do something like that, might be kind of fun to have an ancient forest region. Penguins and mushrooms are easy enough with the script (in fact I could place just about anything like city ruins, etc) but I need to be careful since those are pretty common once the game gets going.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

oh, I forgot another possible oddity: the Ancient Skeleton ( the one that looks like dragonbones but is just cosmetic, could look nice in deserts or ice maybe )

 

[K7avenged]

I'd just like to say, this is quickly becoming one of my favorite map scripts. Thank you!

 

[Seven05]

No problem

If there is anything that you think would make it better feel free to chime in. Right now it generates exactly what I want for a map with the ocassional excpetion thanks to random numbers but I'm always open to ideas and suggestions to give it some more flexability.

 

[Bartholomew]

All righty, Seven, you asked so here are my issues! I'm alternating between yours and lonkero's MountainCoast script at the moment trying to figure out which I like better, so obviously a lot of this has to do with my own warped personal preferences. But here they be:

(1) Dang it, too many rivers. I'm having this problem with MountainCoast now, too, but don't remember it in the past. Does it have to do with me cranking up the number of "peaks" and "mountains" in the preferences? Lonkero suggested that little rivers result from the increased elevation. But I like mountains.

(2) I like pangaea landmasses, having never been impressed by the AI's ability to get at me across water. Your pangaea (high cohesion) maps are sweet, but I don't like how everybody starts along the coast and sort of "races" for the center. Furthermore, on my usual sea-level settings (medium) civs often start on peninsulas, making the placement seem even MORE artificial. I guess I just like everything a little bit more random, with some poor jerk starting off right smack in the middle of everybody. I like being that jerk.

(3) Not enough resources! I think one of your posts above says that you modify resources in starting plots according to the "living room" you have around you, but generally I'm finding my capital to be in a pretty uninspiring place.

Any tips on how to tweak your settings to better to suit what I'm looking for above, or am I just being difficult? Big props to you and lonkero for creating these scripts, and to cephalo of course for starting it all (hm, to put it in FFH lore terms, it's as if Cephalo is The One and you boys are his angels, applying his base script to different worlds. This isn't going to end well.)

 

[Seven05]

Right... just wait until I destroy all of... erm... nevermind

1) Rivers can be controlled to a degree, unfortunately due to the way they're generated 'less rivers' also tends to mean 'shorter rivers' which I don't always like. Let me see if there is a way I can skip a lot of the very short rivers, as an option of course. If you don't mind shorter rivers you can tweak that in the python file relatively easily. You'll want to find this line:

self.RiverThreshold = 2.0

Increasing the threshold will decrease the number of rivers. I would set it to 3.0 and see how you like that result and adjust from there.

2) The landmass itself is the source of many headaches. I also prefer single landmass maps for the same reasons and the fact that I personally do not like naval invasions in FfH. The shape of the landmass will have a huge impact on starting locations, since the center of a large landmass tend to be rather unimpressive (lots of desert, mountains and plains) starting locations in that area get cut from the list quickly. I was thinking of a way to place civs regionally last night which would probably help with what you're looking for as well, since you could force individual civs to start in a specific area of the map (north half, southeast quadrant, etc) as part of the flavor code. I also need to tune up the starting area values since they still aren't wuite perfect for FfH. Playing on standard sized maps with 12 civs I tend to find the civs clustered on the various 'good parts' of the mainland leaving most of us room for 3-4 cities before having to go to war without our 2-4 neighbors. Again though, it depends very much on the shape of the main landmass. I'll see what I can do to decrease the importance my code gives to having room to expand.

3) Yeah, they're hit or miss. The main resource it tries to add is food but then only if you don't have enough but the code to select the starting plots tries to make sure you have enough food. This does take rivers into account so reducing the number of rivers will have the side effect of increasing added resources. I'll play around with this a bit too, I can set the threshold where it decides to add food higher so it will be more likely to add at least one or two resources around the starting plots.

I'll dig around a bit tonight and see if there is anything you can tweak to adjust the starting postions more to your liking. Try the river tweak and see how that works and what effect that has on the resources. And, thanks for the feedback

 

[cephalo]

Right... just wait until I destroy all of... erm... nevermind

1) Rivers can be controlled to a degree, unfortunately due to the way they're generated 'less rivers' also tends to mean 'shorter rivers' which I don't always like. Let me see if there is a way I can skip a lot of the very short rivers, as an option of course. If you don't mind shorter rivers you can tweak that in the python file relatively easily.

Yesterday I finished some new river code for PW2 that is a huge improvement. I'm very excited about it! When the new map is released you should be able to paste the code right in there as it works with the existing river code.

It's good that the river system follows accurate drainage patterns, but the problem was always that the random height map was full of pits. I figured that the real world was also full of pits resulting in lakes, so I left it that way, but in Civ lakes also have to be the end of a river. Therefore, the wrinklyness of the terrain makes it almost impossible for a river to traverse a continent, which is obviously a lot less fun.

So what I'm doing on the new map is to silt in all the pits so that the rivers can keep going. Once I've gotten rid of the 'natural' lakes with silt, I can then control more directly how many lakes there will be by making little dents in the hightmap. The result has been some very awesome looking rivers. I'm happy with it! Hopefully finished next week.

 

[Seven05]

Nice! Once again you're saving me a lot of work. I had a test version of some erosion code I took from a different project that applies a few different passes of erosion to simulate fluid, thermal and (gah, brain fart) whatever the fancy name is for wind erosion. Unfortunately, the results just aren't the same due to the limited number of tiles but I was able to get some interesting results, particularly with large areas of land using a combination of thermal and wind erosion. It really slowed things down though since I was having to generate the climate, erode the map and then re-generate the climate. In the end I just cheated, since it's being cut down to one of three types of land (flat, hill, peak) and most of the cool effects were lost. So I can't wait to see what you came up with, and promptly steal it

 

[Gelvan]

This is so cool! Thanks!

Im not sure which map size is recommended? I always play small because even small is quite big, but I like to have about 10 Civ's so there's a bit of diversity religionwise. In my first game with this script I had 7 Civ's on a small High Cohesion map - which was good, but everyone had RoK shortly after I invented it. In my actual game I play with 10 Civ's on a small standard cohesion and it got VERY crowded from the beginning. Lead's to more warfare but RoK (AI) and OO (me) are so far the only religions on this continent - on another they went for FoL. Well not sure what I want so say with this lol
The distribution of forests and hills is quite well - not so much like on Erebus or standard civ4 maps but also "enough" to make it fun.

I suppose I have to play around regarding the map size / cohesion which is best for me.
The creation of the landscape is very good.

 

[Seven05]

I use Standard size, medium sea level, high cohesion maps with 12-14 civs. There are a couple of ways to control the amount of usable land as well as the map size.

Setting the sea level to high will shring the land quite a bit making it about half-way between the current maps size and the next smaller size in terms of usable land (low sea level does the opposite). You can run with deserts set to 'massive' which will result in a lot of useless deserts and less usable land for everybody, useful if you like everybody to be spread out but not neccessarily have biger empires (more cities). If you use 'more' mountains it will have a similar effect due to more peaks being spread around the map, this will also increase the chance for choke points and other natural barriers which can help slow down early expansion and exploration. Using increased or massive tundra will make the northern protion of the map useless for most civs, most of the time this will mean the civs in the game will be more likely to start close to each other since the starting plot code puts a very low value on tundra and snow. Increasing the jungle amount can slow down the early game for civs that start deep in the jungle, once jungles can be cleared you end up with a lot of open grassland to use.

You can also use combinations of settings to achieve something more specific. For example with increased deserts and more mountains you'll have less land to work with and getting around the map can be tricky if the mountain ranges end up blocking access. You can also do the opposite and step down to a smaller map and run with no tundra, no desert and no jungle. In that case almost all of the map will be useable with the worst land being plains so the civs should start fairly evenly spread out.

If you want to mess around with the differen cohesion settings too you can drop down to medium or low cohesion and low sea level to see how you like the landforms. You can also try things like going with a large map size, high sea level and then using desert & tundra to control the amount of usable land. That should get everybody to spread out a little more without really giving you that much more land to work with.

I get maps every now and then were the continent is divided almost in half by a massive wasteland of deserts & peaks and those turn out to be very interesting for the first 200 turns or so. It also tends to divide the religions based on who is close to each other at the start with none of the religions spreading across the desert in the middle.

I'm going to play around with adding some more controls to the starting plot functions other than just basic flavor. I should be able to make it possible to setup an alignment based 'team' game of sorts, putting the evil civs on one side, the good on another and the neutrals in the middle, for one example. By the same token it should also be possible to try to force it to start each civ next to another civ of a different alignment. I can also run it like a 'new world' game on one continent by starting everybody in one area with the big open wilderness on the other side, or even starting everybody clustered near the center of the map or spread out as far form the map center as possible. Anyway, each of those should give you a lot of variety in starting conditions so it might be fun, and I should be able to combine some so things like everybody starting close to the map's center but preferably next to civs of different allignments. Of course a few nameless leaders with different allignments than the other leaders for that civ will break that but since they're the exception and not the rule if should still work out fine.

Well not sure what I want so say with this lol
The distribution of forests and hills is quite well - not so much like on Erebus or standard civ4 maps but also "enough" to make it fun.

So, I'm curious, do you think having options for forest & jungle density would be useful? It's easy enough to impliment but I don't want too many options in the game or the script gets confusing.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

a new world option like the one in perfect world would be awesome, even more so if you can then choose if you want to have all civs on one continent, or spread them on both continents evenly ( again, just like perfectworld ) . yes, I'd love to be able to generate a map with a few large continents separated by ocean ( coast is too easy, too early ) without having to resort to medium or low cohesion ( which looks too archipelago-ish imho ) , as I feel it gives ships and commerce over oceans the importance they should have. yet again, perfectworld has a nice option that allows to choose between allow pangeas or break pangeas, which would be awesome here as well
ideally, you would have a couple of smallish ( small, not tiny/useless. something you can settle a decent city on, about 10 tiles? ) islands near a continent, separated only by coast so that you only need early ships to get there, AND large landmasses far away, separated by oceans that you can only explore with lategame techs and ships. this would really give the whole range of ships a use, so that both early ships and ocean-capable ships feel like a useful asset instead of a leftover from vanilla civ4 ah, the thrill of finally getting to a faraway land and meeting the folks dwelling there... to wipe 'em off the face of Erebus forever

 

[Seven05]

a new world option like the one in perfect world would be awesome, even more so if you can then choose if you want to have all civs on one continent, or spread them on both continents evenly ( again, just like perfectworld ) . yes, I'd love to be able to generate a map with a few large continents separated by ocean ( coast is too easy, too early ) without having to resort to medium or low cohesion ( which looks too archipelago-ish imho ) , as I feel it gives ships and commerce over oceans the importance they should have. yet again, perfectworld has a nice option that allows to choose between allow pangeas or break pangeas, which would be awesome here as well

It already does the new world bit using code I had original done to modify Perfect World for my Civ4 mod, so it picks the largest continent and assigns that to the 'old world' and then check to make sure the old world has at least 70% of the total land plots, if not it continues adding continents until it does with some restrictions on the minimum size of continents that it will allow. Anything else is 'new world.' On the off chance that you end up with a few medium sized continents rather than one large one it will behave exactly as you described, putting different civs on different landmasses with minimum size restrictions.

However, with this script I did not put in any code to force continental divides since FfH naval combat is pretty horrid and the AI simply can't handle it. Even then, my old modified Perfect World had a hard time enforcing rules to divide the continents because of the way continents are created in the first place. So being able to define the number of continents you want is something that will never happen with this script since it requires a completely different method of creating the world in the first place. Sorry

 

[Gelvan]

Thanks for the insights!

No, I don't think Density as an option is needed, the options available are enough. In Perfect World, there are too many options that have to be chosen everytime... Just make it so, that not everything is covered in trees, but also not without them at all. Maybe forbid tree creation on ressources - that would make Bronze Working less of a must have. But after all I think treedistribution is good as it is.

I'd recommend a readme file, where is written how exactly the Cohesion and Sea levels are calculated. Not for me though: I just read your post.

Because well that's exactly what I want, a map with 10 AI where you can build 7 cities without warfare, then conquer someone to have 14 cities, and then an epic "we have to destroy the Veil / the Order" middle-to-endgame.

The idea with huge deserts is great. A seperation that is not a seperation like ocean, which the AI can't handle. Also it's good to know that Tundra is not used for starting locations (even though I think that Illian and Doviello should start there, maybe even the Clan).

what impresses me most with this map is the diversity (being side by side) of grassland, plain, hill, tree, deserts, tundra, small lakes... that makes it feel "realistic". Oddities as Gekko mentioned them, would be nice too.

my only complaint so far would be that sometimes Civ's get crowded, but other areas are nearly unsettled, what makes it great for the one or two civ's who start there, but not so good for the ones surrounded by enemies.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

no problem really, being able to choose the number of continents of the map would be unnecessarily specific I guess, better to leave it somehow random. still, high cohesion seems to always give me pangeas, although with interesting shapes. does a higher sea level give a higher chance to have separated continents? right now I'm using low sea level so that I can have a decent amount of land even on duel maps.

 

[Gelvan]

high sea level indeed splits pangaeas

I was testing a bit and thats the result:

High Cohesion, High Sea Level, Standard Map = 2-3 (or more) continents but small land size in total.

High Cohesion, Low Sea Level, Standard Map = 1 really big Continent but with interesting shape

Middle Cohesion, Low Sea Level, Standard Map = 1 huge Archipelaegeo-Pangaea (quite of), much ocean and coast tiles, but still quite "one" continent

And so on

The idea to seperate sections of a huge continent with desert works fine, although I suppose the AI still will settle these regions, therefore it will be a long game.

Maybe I switch back to small map size with maybe high cohesion but middle sea level. I suppose most often that will give me what I want.

btw. it's not so bad with that many rivers - thanks to them Lumber Mills have a reason now. a riverside hill with forest gives +1 commerce and +1 production with a lumbermill - choping the forest and building a mine gives only +1 production (unless I make a mistake here

 

[Seven05]

I should update my screenshot grid since the sea level is handled a little differently now. But yes, the way Gelvan described it is how it works, increasing the chance to break up even high cohesion maps. The combination of sea level and the water 'margin' around the edge of the map are used for cohesion, so a high cohesion map has a larger margin area than a medium cohesion map giving the land on medium cohesion maps a little more room to spread out (and break into little pieces).

I do have some very low chance to not place a forest or jungle when the temperature and average rainfall says there should be one. I think it's 25% for forests and 10% for jungles, I can increase those slightly and you'll end up with more scattered open area at the start. They may fill in quickly as trees grow but I can't help that so much

I do have the Illians and Doviello set to prefer tundra (and snow for the Illians). However the way I setup the 'flavor' code was more just to get them to take a start up there if one existed so nobody else got stuck with it. It doesn't explicitly create a starting plot in the middle of snow and tundra. The only exception to this is the Lanun as they are required to take a coastal start if one is availabel so their rule is more strictly enforced. You can add or change these values relatively easy, they're all near the end of the file just copy one of the existing ones and edit as needed.

The AI also won't always settle in the desert, in fact they will normally avoid it unless there are some floodplains in there. If you go with massive deserts you can get some big sections that don't have any rivers or lakes and they can remain 'wild' for the entire game. I'll grab some screenshots from my current game which will show the effects you can expect, it's actually been very interesting with the civs divided into three primary 'clusters' and plenty of war to keep us all occupied. The Malakim were way ahead of the rest of us for some time, crappy desert starts (not!) It was also interesting to see Falamar wipe out Perp as Perp was getting pounded by the barb onslaught. And Orthus is hanging out in the city with Archeron and Orthus is a beast, ended up with the Timor Mask somehow and probably has 300xp. Fun stuff.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

good to know thanx, I'm gonna have to try a higher sea level then

still, it would be nice to have a few continents even with low sea level. as cool as it is, you cannot settle there so having lots of it on the map results in a smaller usable area..

 

[Gelvan]

In my actual game this world really rocks.

I (Clan) started north in the west, Amurites to the south, Elohim and Khazad to the east (Khazad is really good this time), there's an inland sea which seperates all of them from the Sidar, who have a desert between them and the Calabim, who are in the south in a niche. Then there is only desert and hills for a long time, until in the far east there are Hippus, Elves and Bannor. The Easterlings started in a very flat landscape but with plenty of forest which works perfectly with FoL. The Shaeim had bad luck and a Minister Koun event (they are south of that hill-desert area) so they're not that strong, but still alive, which is good, most often in my games they were wiped from the map long before they have had a chance to survive. Not so with this map. They were even able to research sorcery before me. I play at noble so that's kind of an achievement for the AI, I'd say.

I found OO which spread VERY fast - but only in the West. I really think I have to reduce the spread of all religions completely to zero. But so far nobody researched Veil, Order and so on, so maybe I'm to early with this assumption.

The map itself just looks great. Even though I'm running at 70% research due to the many cities I have, I do not have every resource by now. Especially the peninsula of the Sidar looks just: wow. I'm so lucky they are not the Lanun!

the distribution of mountains, lakes, hills and trees is wonderful. The only complaint is in the starting distribution of Civ's. I had to put the Amurites where they are now (south-west) because they started near the Shaeim, and I had to put the Hippus to the east, because they started near the Sidar. Also Elohim had a hard time inbetween me and the Khazad. The Calabim are quite weak, I suppose due to a Lizard Totem, which was north of them.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

a way to disable the "new world" code would be nice. right now the mapscript tries its best to place all civs on the largest continent, but I'd rather have them spaced around evenly. since that choice is available in perfectworld I hope it's not hard to add it here too. when I played perfectworld I always turned "new world" off the "break pangea with a meteor shower" option from perfect world would be awesome as well, for those that like high cohesion but still hate pangeas for example

not an issue, but something I dislike is that even with low cohesion, high sea level, all the continents are reachable by earlygame boats that cannot travel over ocean. this really takes away the usefulness of being able to "trade over oceans" with the Astronomy tech, Sailing it's all that needed. distant continents should be separated by oceans instead of simple coast imho.

oh, and again imho, the code that says "lakes are always less than 10 tiles so that they are freshwater" should be applied to all sea levels instead of low sea level only. otherwise it kinda takes away that "lake" feeling when you have lots of big lakes that are not freshwater

I can understand why you would want to keep the number of options showing up in the main menu low to avoid cluttering the screen, but I disagree, I think the more options available, the better. perhaps it would be possible to have as many options as possible, but have most of them only adjustable through manually editing the python file so that they don't clutter the screen? something that's easy enough to use that you don't have to learn python, just a simple "option xxx = true" in the python file that you can easily edit with notepad would be great. similar to how you can set Erebus to soften peak percent chance, or add wrappings

a couple more features from perfectworld that would be awesome to have here are altitude affecting terrain ( IF it's not in already, not sure it's great to see higher terrain being colder. right now you see cold terrain only near the pole, but very high altitude spots should have some as well imho ) , and having different resource sets on different continents to encourage trading ( so for example one continent gets cow and wheat, another gets pig and rice etc. )