Owain's World, Gigaglobe v1.0

[Owain]

well, this is the projection I used to create this map:

Pierce Quincuncial Projection

I stayed true to the projection except I tried to make europe a little bigger and certain coastlines in general a little more acurate. Basically, you just can't take a globe and stick it on a flat surface without somne sort of problems... But if you notice the triangles sticking out of each side of my map, those are LM sea terain (in the RAR mod) which have zero movement cost... Basically each map edge is a single point which includes those triangles... So that means that from the "eastern" coast of Australia you can instantly reach the point of the triangle in the middle of the pacific.... or, you can make a little jaunt around Antarctica and then get to the southern tip of South America (probably the quickest way to get to the Americas from Aussieland...

Anyway, its all very confusing, but it seems to work ok.

btw, you may not realize this, but New Zealand is actually in the "northeast" corner of my map... but again, you are really just about next door to it from Australia by using the zero-movement-cost-edge. And its oriented so that its "north" is the map's "southwest." Basically, from each corner of the map, true north is diaganally towards the center of the map.... However, as soon as you vary from the center, things start moving around alot. Australia is slightly east from that center line, but since its so far in the south, this distorts it more in angle towards the north.... so while you'd expect Australia to have its northern points pointing directly towards the center of the map, just the slight positioning east of the center line distorts it in a clockwise manner.

 

[Hygro]

Owain, this is probably the coolest world map I've ever seen. And I haven't even played it yet.

Would I be right in saying this is the most "spherical" civ3 map there is?

 

[Owain]

Well, I guess you could say that... I think of it more as a two-sided plane myself... If you were to fold in each corner back to the center, you basically end up with a 2-D, square globe where the edge of the paper is the line of the equator.... the only real thing lacking in this is the ability to walk around the entirety of Antarctica... I could actually add that in by putting impassable terrain along the outer edges and turning x and y-wrapping on... but there really doesn't seem to be much point in it.

I just wish I could get some criticism specifically on resource placement, terrain placement, and civ placement... Basically on anything not related to the actual design of the land forms, which I'm pretty happy with (but still perfectly willing to change if someone points out my errors to me). I know there are problems with this map. I keep finding them all the time.

 

[Hygro]

I'll DL the map soon and look at the locations I know that should/shouldn't have resources.

 

[Owain]

Thanks

Here's a cropped version of my map... Cropped down to 176X170 from 256X256... I also fiddled with some other things.

Hopefully this should be a faster-loading map.

One thing I've noticed though... something to do with RAR destroys my zero movement cost edges... I don't really understand why, but when I play my maps now, the zero cost sea tiles still take movement cost... It works in my perosnal mod. I don't know whats gone wrong.

10/5/2004 - Updated Cropped Version

 

[Kyriakos]

Cool maps. Btw how can you create a bigger than 180x180 map? i have ptw, is it possible there?

Anenhotep: you have a few spelling errors in your spartan saying, better fix them

or rather here it is:

"Ω ξείν' άγγειλον Λακεδαιμονίοις ότι τήδε

κείμεθα, τοις κείνων ρήμασι πειθόμενοι"

 

[Hygro]

Thanks

Here's a cropped version of my map... Cropped down to 176X170 from 256X256... I also fiddled with some other things.

Hopefully this should be a faster-loading map.

One thing I've noticed though... something to do with RAR destroys my zero movement cost edges... I don't really understand why, but when I play my maps now, the zero cost sea tiles still take movement cost... It works in my perosnal mod. I don't know whats gone wrong.

Maybe there's something to do with every ship having or not having the "ignore movement" flag? Like, maybe RAR ships have ignore sea cost, therefore ignore the free movement of special seas?

Is your 176x176 map a shrunken map or one without the edges?

I took a look at the big map (downloaded and opened the editor) and I absolutely loved its design.

 

[Hygro]

re resources: Of the stuff I know, I'd say California's not quite up to par resource placement but that may be from my bias. (Then again we had massive gold deposites as well as still having some of the finest farmlands in the world, as well as huge forests of good wood, etc.)

My only real complaint is the sheer number of resources. Obviously things depend on how many players are on the map, but I'd cut back drastically. Whereas yes, there are coal/oil/whatever deposits in great numbers in those places, I feel resources in civ are more abstract and meant to represent real massive quantities. In a standard size world map, I wouldn't put more than 2 oils in Iraq for example, nor would I put more than a couple of other things like coal on the eastern USA (even though we have tons of it). Lastly, I wouldn't represent every deposite in the world at all. Oil can be found in some levesl in most nations. But not enough to make a real industry or economy around it. Therefore if I were to make my own map, (which I won't ), I'd mostly limit oil to OPEC nations. The same should be applied to the other resources--though I don't really know much of anything about them. An overabundence of resources takes away from the very awesome trade element of the game.

 

[Owain]

I share your feelings about the resources... There are just so many in RAR! It was hard to figure out where to put them... I realize now I have to scale down the tropical fruit. I thought it was a bomus resource, not a luxory.

Its just that my first couple attempts at playing this mod revealed to me how utterly screwed you are without a bonus food resource on higher difficulty levels. I didn't like the hamstringing of all the non-agricultural civs.

I'll see about cutting it down.

 

[Lachlan]

Hi Owain !

Damned ! Wath's all this barbarians in cropped map ?
The start is SLOOOW

Can you configurate how many victory points "il faut" to win ?

I discovered that enable victory points increase the violence of ai and she make war often, very often

 

[Owain]

haha... that's a bit of an experiment... I was experimenting with ways of controlling where/how civs expand... I'm afraid the cropped map also has impassable mountains if I remember correctly... This will probably be unreasonably frustrating if any resources happen to be in a mountain tile. I apologize for that... I'll fix it to be mor playable sometime this weekend.

 

[Kyriakos]

Very nice work, but this map suffers from the same problem all earth maps do: too little space for too many civs. other than that: nice tile placement!

ps: did you make it from scratch?

 

[Hygro]

I share your feelings about the resources... There are just so many in RAR! It was hard to figure out where to put them... I realize now I have to scale down the tropical fruit. I thought it was a bomus resource, not a luxory.

Its just that my first couple attempts at playing this mod revealed to me how utterly screwed you are without a bonus food resource on higher difficulty levels. I didn't like the hamstringing of all the non-agricultural civs.

I'll see about cutting it down.

Cool, I'd love to play a version with fewer strategic and luxery resources. Bonus resources I don't have much of a problem with.

 

[Vostos]

This map is amazing, I'm playing as Russia in RaR, the games is one of the best I've ever played

 

[Calcobrena]

I get a serious problem with the game crashing about 20 turns in every time it seems, I can't tell what is causing this, normal RaR works fine for me. :/

 

[Owain]

hmm... no error message or anything? I've ran this map in debug mode numerous times without any trouble and played a game or two at least 20 turns in. Were you playing as the same civ each time?

 

[Calcobrena]

Nope, different civs, and no error message, just a crash to the desktop. I would reload the autosaves and it would happen exactly the same.

(Edit: I just noticed i am running version 1.00 of Conquests, forgot to dl patch after I reinstalled civ, I'm betting this was my problem, I'll check it out)

 

[Calcobrena]

Yep, the patch fixed my problem good.

Love the map btw, its berry berry fun.

 

[Lachlan]

Owain ? your corrected map we have it when ?

 

[Owain]

Probably sometime late tonight. I work weekends and sometimes I find time to do maps at work, but I forgot my laptop today. :/ Tommorow during the day at the latest, I promise.

I spent all last night "testing" my map (ie playing it ). Sorry!