Preserving the wildnerness

[lumpthing]

I love the wilderness exploration / barbarian-fighting aspect of Fall From Heaven. Problem is, I also like to play on small maps with many civs and obviously this results in wildernesses disappearing very quickly.

Any suggestions for a simple way to tweak the rules so that the wilderness is preserved for longer even on crowded smaller maps?

I was thinking of making it so that settlers require a specific technology to be built. However this would give a big advantage to whichever civ gets to that technology first, and the AI may not realize how important that tech is. So I was also thinking of making settlers buildable only at a certain arbitrary date.

I could also massively increase the cost of additional cities. Would the AI understand this? Also I wouldn't like to make conquest pointless.

I suppose the ideal would be settlers to appear with a random event, but might require effort to script.

Any other suggestions?

 

[Smakemupagus]

You could try the Wildmana modmod;i think it accomplishes a lot of what you are talking about, just by having the wild lands be more dangerous.

 

[Demus]

try advanced start + no settlers. This will give each civ a few cities to start with, but the only way to gain additional ones are through conquest (of barbarians or other civs).

 

[lumpthing]

@Demus: Thanks but I don't want to protect the wilderness forever, I just want to make it much more gradual, at least at the beginning.

@Smakemupagus: I'm giving Wildmana a whirl

 

[Lade]

Well, you could try tripling the price of settlers.

 

[Ekolite]

Wouldn't that cause problems with the AI? Surely they would sit there for ages trying to build settlers while you and anyone sensible would be spamming warriors to attack them while they've been preoccupied and neglecting to build units for defense?

 

[Neomega]

The answer is certainly widlmana

that or a tectonics lakes map... the deserts and hills stifle rapid expansion.

 

[Ekolite]

I'd suggest ErebusContinents as an alternate mapscript. They're a little bigger then other maps, but with large areas of desert, jungle and tundra to allow a degree of wilderness to remain throughout the game. You can modify the prominence of these features to your liking using ''custom game''. The mapscript produces very beautiful maps that look like real worlds, and you can use the ''Cohesion'' setting to have either a pangea, a few continents or many smaller islands.

All in all, a very nice mapscript.

 

[Zongo]

I'd suggest ErebusContinents as an alternate mapscript. They're a little bigger then other maps, but with large areas of desert, jungle and tundra to allow a degree of wilderness to remain throughout the game. You can modify the prominence of these features to your liking using ''custom game''. The mapscript produces very beautiful maps that look like real worlds, and you can use the ''Cohesion'' setting to have either a pangea, a few continents or many smaller islands.

All in all, a very nice mapscript.

Seconded. Just expect a large creation time, the script runs much slower than Erebus.

 

[lumpthing]

I actually use ErebusContinent already and I agree that it produces beautifully flavorful worlds. The best script around in my opinion. In my latest map using ErebusContinent I got a world shaped by long mountain ranges with narrow chokepoints. Very very nice.

Just a pity that FFH's terraforming powers means that everywhere ultimately gets homogenized and looses character.

 

[Andostre]

I've accomplished this by playing on a map with large islands. (This is maybe similar to what people are talking about with Erebus Continents. Does anybody have the link for that mapscript, by the way?) Explore your island, and when that's done, you can go and find an island that has been untouched by the other civilizations.

 

[WCH]

@Demus: Thanks but I don't want to protect the wilderness forever, I just want to make it much more gradual, at least at the beginning.

Eventually it all gets taken up anyway because Barbarian cities still randomly form and are then conquered.

 

[lumpthing]

Well it's easy to turn off barbarian cities via an XML file.

 

[WCH]

Yeah... but why would you if what you want is border spread which is delayed but which does happen eventually? With the barbarian cities it does end up getting eaten up, just it takes longer for that to happen, and you end up with a sort of "green belt" around your original cities: barbarian cities won't spawn where you have sight, so you end up with your core cities, a gap, and then whatever you conquered.

 

[lumpthing]

For me barbarian cities undermine the flavor - they're orc cities that, when conquered, suddenly magically lose all orcishness and become important cities integral to decidedly un-orcish civilizations like the bannor or luchuirp.

 

[Neomega]

For me barbarian cities undermine the flavor - they're orc cities that, when conquered, suddenly magically lose all orcishness and become important cities integral to decidedly un-orcish civilizations like the bannor or luchuirp.

that's pretty much like every other city.

 

[lumpthing]

Yeah but I just like their homeland to be made up of proper native cities, not originally orcish cities.

 

[Emptiness]

([...] Erebus Continents. Does anybody have the link for that mapscript, by the way?)

See this thread: [MapScript] Erebus Continent

 

[WCH]

Yeah but I just like their homeland to be made up of proper native cities, not originally orcish cities.

Well yeah... your homeland is the 4-6 cities you can build in the starting area in advanced start (give yourself lots of gold -- 5-8k is pretty good usually, depending on speed). Those cities are culturally pure, and represent your actual "nation." Then you have conquered lands... some of which conquered from orcs, some other civs.

 

[lumpthing]

I'm planning on playing on a small map with 12 civs, so the homelands will be considerably smaller than that. You can see why preserving the wilderness is going to be a challenge

Currently I'm happy with requiring the first two columns (excluding religion-founding techs) of the tech tree to be researched in order to build settlers. That should prolong the exploration phase a good while.

Now my challenge is that scouts tend to explore half the world before the barbarians appear. So I want to make the barbarians appear very early, but without them completely detroying any civs, which is what happened when I tested it.