Ocean coverage less than 60%
- Thread starter Bagatur
- Start date
I do not think that that is possible, generally speaking. You could maybe generate a map in the editor that has sea on one side and use Steph's editor to crop the map to remove the most sea-covered area, but that would be annoying to do every time you wanted to start a game.
Tell me what you think of these maps (attached). Do they seem to have significantly less water than a 60% map?
These were all generated by Civ3 for a standard, non-scenario game, with the goal of having noticeably less water than in standard maps. I am not sure whether I have in fact achived this goal, or if these are within the standard variance of 60% water maps. To my eye, the first and third appear to have noticeably less water, with the second perhaps being borderline.
I'd like to obtain a measure of exactly how many tiles are water. CivAssist II unfortunately doesn't appear to be able to give me the % water on the resign screen, and as I don't have a method for generating such maps in the editor, I can't turn on Debug Mode. There is of course the option of playing through a game and researching sateillites (or exploring the whole world), but that is a rather time-intensive process. I may see if I can conjure up a quick and dirty way of counting the blue pixels in an image editor.
I'll note that the process I used to get these maps does not seem to be all that reliable. About 40% of the time I get these maps that appear to have noticeably less water. If we can ascertain that these maps do have noticeably less water, I'll post my method. If someone does have detailed statistics on the water composition of 60% maps (particularly Continents) in practice, that would be a great help in determining whether these maps are within the standard variance of not.
These were all generated by Civ3 for a standard, non-scenario game, with the goal of having noticeably less water than in standard maps. I am not sure whether I have in fact achived this goal, or if these are within the standard variance of 60% water maps. To my eye, the first and third appear to have noticeably less water, with the second perhaps being borderline.
I'd like to obtain a measure of exactly how many tiles are water. CivAssist II unfortunately doesn't appear to be able to give me the % water on the resign screen, and as I don't have a method for generating such maps in the editor, I can't turn on Debug Mode. There is of course the option of playing through a game and researching sateillites (or exploring the whole world), but that is a rather time-intensive process. I may see if I can conjure up a quick and dirty way of counting the blue pixels in an image editor.
I'll note that the process I used to get these maps does not seem to be all that reliable. About 40% of the time I get these maps that appear to have noticeably less water. If we can ascertain that these maps do have noticeably less water, I'll post my method. If someone does have detailed statistics on the water composition of 60% maps (particularly Continents) in practice, that would be a great help in determining whether these maps are within the standard variance of not.
KingArthur
Searching for the Holy Grail
I think the MapTweaker utility will give you the number of terrain tiles on a map broken down by terrain type.
Thanks, but it looks like MapTweaker only works on bic/bix/biq files. I only have a .SAV, as these are randomly generated within Conquests and not based on a scenario.
However, I have performed an analysis of the first map. To do so, I reduced it to a 4-color, indexed, PCX formatted file with the GIMP. This was sufficiently few colors that all water tiles were the same color, but not so few that land tiles were the same color. Then I ran it through a program I wrote (mostly modifications from code I'd already written) that gave me the frequencies of each color in the PCX file (ignoring those that have frequency 0). This allowed me to view how much of the map was water.
And as it turns out, the first map I posted is approximately 40.95% water. Possibly a bit more, as there was a tiny bit of border around the image that wasn't indexed to water. But, approximately, 40% water.
Thus, it's time to share the method. Although I did it the hard way, there's actually a surprisingly simple one. So here it is:
1. In Conquests, go to the New Game page, and select Archipelago, Continents, or Pangaea, whichever you wish to play. The water setting you choose will not matter, as you will be changing that shortly. Also choose climate, temperature, and age as you wish.
2. Click on the "O" twice to start the game. This will NOT give you a map with less water than normal, but it will save all the settings you wish to play (don't worry about the water setting, we'll change that later).
3. Quit to the main menu. The game you just started has too much water for your tastes, it's time to fix that.
4. Open conquests.ini, in your Conquests folder.
5. Go to the line that contains WorldOceanCoverage in conquests.ini
6. Change whatever is after the "=" sign on that line to some value between 3 and 5. I used 5 to create the maps I posted.
7. Save the file.
8. Start a new game in Conquests. You'll notice that your selected landmass will no longer read, for example, "Continents (60% water)", but rather, something like "Continents (Pangaea)". This indicates that you have made the proper change. Your landmass type will match the first value, not the one in parentheses. The value in parentheses just indicates the "improper" water coverage value.
Note that you may have to add a line WorldOceanCoverage=5 to conquests.ini if there is no line about WorldOceanCoverage. I do not believe it matters where you place this line; mine follows WorldLandmass.
Also note that I haven't had 100% success with this method. This may have been due to my using a hex editor to modify the values in RAM, before realizing that it would be a whole lot easier (and probably more reliable) to do so in the conquests.ini file. With my error-prone hex editing method, I was getting 50% or slightly more maps with significantly reduced water. I seem to be getting much more reliable success with the conquests.ini method. But it may happen that despite using the conquests.ini method, you still occasionally get a map that doesn't have noticeably reduced water.
Another thing to note is that I seem to be consistently getting maps with a similar level of water coverage regardless of the value I use for WorldOceanCoverage. 0 means 80%, 1 means 70%, 2 means 60%; those are the standard values. Changing them does produce noticeable changes; if you change only that setting and use the same game seed, other than 0, you often can notice a similarity in the maps (but not always). Theoretically, 3 would mean 50%, 4 would mean 40%, etc., up through 8 meaning 0% water. But in practice, all the values I have tried, including 8, have yielded the types of maps I have posted above, which seem to have roughly 40% water. There may be a requirement of a certain amount of water in the map generator, since water in some quantity is rather important in the Civ games. I suggested 3-5 above as that's what I tested with most, and it's also the least radical in theory.
Hope this helps. You can also use this in scenarios, as long as there is a custom map, using the same method described above. I don't think there is any way to create a scenario that will use these settings by default (unless it's possible to possible a custom conquests.ini with a scenario?), but it does appear to have the same effect on scenarios.
Attached is another map I generated, with Pangaea this time. That's one big, honking Pangaea!
Optional
Deity
You sure? I got something a lot funnier than that:
I was surprised and amused when I got that. I was just starting to fool around a bit myself. I filled in a value of 125 and then I got this message.Quintillus, your post and method interests me. I was aware of those lines of Worldoceancoverage in the .ini, and had experimented a bit with putting in different values myself in the past, but never got anywhere with it.
My aim for fooling around with it was to get a water percentage of something like 75% or so, but I never even realized before that 0 = 80%, 1 = 70%, etc. I don't think you can put in decimals, though, so something like 0.5 wouldn't work, that would just read as 80%.
Personally, I like my maps with lots of water, but a downside of 80% water I find is that those maps get very cluttered with resources. The amount of resources seems to depend on the size of the map, not the size of the landmass - I think this is a bit unlogical, and that Firaxis could have done this differently, but that's an aside.
75% water would seem very nice to me; the difference between 70% and 80% is still huge, a middle value would have made sense.
I would like to make an observation about maps with just 30% water or so, considering what I said before about how resources get distributed; expect bonus resources to be thinly distributed, and I wouldn't no of a way to compensate for that.
That would just go for bonus resources, as the distribution of strategic resources can be influenced by the editor.
General 666
Culturebringer
Funny result.
btw ,we have a thread somewhere on the forum where eastereggs are listed. This belongs being posted there.
btw ,we have a thread somewhere on the forum where eastereggs are listed. This belongs being posted there.
The parameters actually used to generate the map are also part of the sav format.
So I could at least display them to check the result (I can't edit them, as once you got the sav... it's too late).
So I could at least display them to check the result (I can't edit them, as once you got the sav... it's too late).
Optional
Deity
I would just like to confirm that Quintillus method works, and I found it working consistently; I always got these big landmasses.
I can also confirm it doesn't make any difference what value you put in; a value of 3 doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but anything higher gives about the same % of land.
I've only checked by eye, so I don't know which water % we are left with, but it's considerably less than on a conventional map, that's for sure.
I can also confirm it doesn't make any difference what value you put in; a value of 3 doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but anything higher gives about the same % of land.
I've only checked by eye, so I don't know which water % we are left with, but it's considerably less than on a conventional map, that's for sure.
Deth McBones
The Inconsistent Modder
You sure? I got something a lot funnier than that:
I believe this is another example of shoddy coding. I bet they just used that integer as a pointer for a line in the labels.txt. Or something equally stupid.
You sure? I got something a lot funnier than that:
Quintillus, your post and method interests me. I was aware of those lines of Worldoceancoverage in the .ini, and had experimented a bit with putting in different values myself in the past, but never got anywhere with it.
My aim for fooling around with it was to get a water percentage of something like 75% or so, but I never even realized before that 0 = 80%, 1 = 70%, etc. I don't think you can put in decimals, though, so something like 0.5 wouldn't work, that would just read as 80%.
Personally, I like my maps with lots of water, but a downside of 80% water I find is that those maps get very cluttered with resources. The amount of resources seems to depend on the size of the map, not the size of the landmass - I think this is a bit unlogical, and that Firaxis could have done this differently, but that's an aside.
75% water would seem very nice to me; the difference between 70% and 80% is still huge, a middle value would have made sense.
I would like to make an observation about maps with just 30% water or so, considering what I said before about how resources get distributed; expect bonus resources to be thinly distributed, and I wouldn't no of a way to compensate for that.
That would just go for bonus resources, as the distribution of strategic resources can be influenced by the editor.
I think Deth McBones is correct on that one - upon incrementing the value by one, I was receiving values that it would make sense to appear consecutively in a table of strings, e.g., Arid, Normal, Wet, or 5 Billion, 4 Billion, 3 Billion. I'm sure we could come up with quite a few other funny results if we played around with the values! I didn't try anything beyond what would theoretically be 0% water (if changing the value by 1 equated to a 10% change in water percentage, across the board), so I didn't come across any such humorous messages.
Thanks for checking that, too, Optional.
The times I didn't get a consistent result must have been human error with the hex editor or lack of 100% effectiveness on its part, then. Glad there's an easy way to do this.Steph, good point about the map parameters. How accurate are these, though? I've loaded up three of these such maps and tested them, and in both cases the "PercentWater" is giving me 0x46, or 70 in decimal, but the map appears to be less than 50% water by eye. It doesn't seem to be showing the actual percentage of water tiles, which is what we would really want, but rather a value of what that percentage is supposed to be near, which doesn't seem to be all that accurate.
General 666, I always wanted to find an easter egg, but didn't even think of that when I came across this. Does it still count as an easter egg if it probably wasn't intentional on the part of the developer?
Bagatur, glad we could find a way to do what you wanted. Thanks for asking about it; otherwise, this might not have been discovered.
WildWeazel
Carthago Creanda Est
This isn't working for me, at least not the improper string. I tried both going back to main menu and relaunching the game with WorldOceanCoverage=5, and the setup screen still shows "(70%)" etc. I'm using the no-raze patch if that matters.
Optional
Deity
Don't do anything after having started up the first game; just leave your settler standing there and change the .ini before going back to setup.
No. It just adds one more water %. What you'll get is shown in Quintilus' pictures.
WildWeazel
Carthago Creanda Est
Ah, now it's working. But I can't seem to generate an archipelago map. With WorldLandMass=0, I still get a pangaea with a few small islands. Is it because the map generator can't keep land masses separated with less than 60% water? I was really hoping to get a denser archipelago for large maps with this method.
Optional
Deity
Even an ordinary 60% water archipelago already has much in common with a pangaea, so the map you want would be difficult to get.
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