Random game

[dalgo]

When I play a random game it is because I am prepared to play whatever I'm given, not because I don't want to know about it. Is there any way to find out what the parameters of my game are at the start? Obviously I know what civ I have, but what about the rest?

 

[vmxa]

Well there may be some things you coudl do. If you have Space enabled, you could use F11 to see what civs are in the game.

SeedBeast and CAII will give that info and the game settings like the map size and type. I just cannot recall, if that is all available at the start or not. Soon you can get the little popups that tell you the top 8 civs in different status like wealth or happiness.

 

[dalgo]

It's mainly world size, land mass, barbarians etc that I want. I haven't used CAII for a while, I'll see what I can get from that.

 

[shl7070]

You can get a good hunch about many parameters at the first 20 turns:

Map size: Just look how large your explored terrain is on the mini-map and with enough games on many sizes you'll know it immediately.

Map type: Easier to grasp for smaller maps, explore toward the center of the map and if the land continue it's pangea. If you start near center it's almost always Pangea and almost never continents.

Climate: look at your latitude in the mini-map, find what terrain type is appropriate and explore in north-south direction to see how the terrain changes. If you see tundra at low latitude it's cold, if you see that there is almost no desert in the supposed desert belt it's wet- not that I believe this parameter is so game changing.

Age: Relatively obvious with little exploration, If you see mountain blocks in early exploring its 3bn, If eleveted terrain is rare and scattered it's 5bn.

AI: A good grasp is the the F11 screen that show the top 5 cities which are always capitals for all first turns and of course the "historical" pop-ups.

The only parameter that is hard to know is water coverage and one can get confused because of an island start. With island start there is the rule of thumb that in the case the island is near the center of the mini-map it's archipelago as is the case of neighboring tiny islands. Island starts in other settings are usually near the fringes of the mini-map. Water coverage can be grasped early only on pangea by the proximities of coasts from two opposing sides and by proximity of several AI relative to their total number and map size.

The total number of AI can be seen in the victory status screen if conquest victory is on.

 

[Raliuven]

I'm not sure how you are going about your random game, but assuming you are going into the New Game and selecting 'Random', the settings will appear in the picture. So you will know the landmass, climate, temperature, and age. You'll know the size by the number of available civs on the 2nd screen. Random barbs is the only setting I think you can't figure out from the start, but the best bet is that there will some type of barb on the map.

 

[dalgo]

I'm not sure how you are going about your random game, but assuming you are going into the New Game and selecting 'Random', the settings will appear in the picture. So you will know the landmass, climate, temperature, and age. You'll know the size by the number of available civs on the 2nd screen. Random barbs is the only setting I think you can't figure out from the start, but the best bet is that there will some type of barb on the map.

You are right about the number of civs on the 2nd screen indicating the map size, I should have worked that out. However the land mass/water coverage picture always defaults to the leftmost of the nine images below it when random is selected. i.e. Pangaea 80%.

 

[Raliuven]

You are right about the number of civs on the 2nd screen indicating the map size, I should have worked that out. However the land mass/water coverage picture always defaults to the leftmost of the nine images below it when random is selected. i.e. Pangaea 80%.

Hmm. You are right. I am almost sure it used to work this way, but I tested it in vanilla, PTW and C3C and it came up the same every time. I thought maybe I was rememberig an earlier version or something. Guess I can't help there.

One interesting thing I did note is that if you have it on random and change any one of the three bottom selections (temperature, climate, age), the other two default to the middle setting. Just an interesting bit of useless information.

 

[vmxa]

I checked and CAII will give the details on a 4000BC save. Go to the world map and right click. Select properties. You get all the civs and water, size, seed, climate, temp. age, barbs and aggression.

This save was not recent and may be from a custom map though, so I am not sure if that matters.