Nikas Kunitz
Chieftain
I hope this discussion will get attetion of various players, including mapmakers and modmakers.
While slowly finishing my maps for publicaion, a question I wanted to ask long ago came again to me. As mapmaking per se is kinda a hobby of mine, I actually played quite little on maps I made over the years. Instead, I mostly played on improved maps with various mods, and playthrough rarely reached modern era or victory (except for RFC mods). In strife for greater detail and representation of real geography (and many important cities for history) along with beauty, maps tend to become bigger and bigger. As such, they become more and more burdensome for the game itself to sustain and for player to play, and that all was noted in some mods (most notably in RI). So, I wanted to ask about limitations we have regarding maps in Civ4.
The first one is, of course, about map size. Here I came to conclusion that anything beyond width of 200 tiles (and proportional height ranging between 100 and 200) surely is on limits. This, of course, essentially depends on the map itself - land-to-water ratio, how much land is really usable and will be settled and so on. Also, I noted that tiles east of 210-220 column start to have a visual glitch - they appear shadeless, like freshly placed terrain in world editor. So, what limits regarding map size do you guys know? Is width of 200+ tiles really the effective limit?
While mapsize can be a tricky measure considering what is stated above, I think the more useful is the city limit. Actually, this is the main question I wanted an answer to. Is there a hard-limit on number of cities on map? I certainly remember changeable one while tinkering with RFCDoC - is this a vanilla thing? Is it 50-100 cities by default? And, if it is changeable, how much can we really have on a map to still keep it playable/running? 300 cities maybe, more, or less?
While slowly finishing my maps for publicaion, a question I wanted to ask long ago came again to me. As mapmaking per se is kinda a hobby of mine, I actually played quite little on maps I made over the years. Instead, I mostly played on improved maps with various mods, and playthrough rarely reached modern era or victory (except for RFC mods). In strife for greater detail and representation of real geography (and many important cities for history) along with beauty, maps tend to become bigger and bigger. As such, they become more and more burdensome for the game itself to sustain and for player to play, and that all was noted in some mods (most notably in RI). So, I wanted to ask about limitations we have regarding maps in Civ4.
The first one is, of course, about map size. Here I came to conclusion that anything beyond width of 200 tiles (and proportional height ranging between 100 and 200) surely is on limits. This, of course, essentially depends on the map itself - land-to-water ratio, how much land is really usable and will be settled and so on. Also, I noted that tiles east of 210-220 column start to have a visual glitch - they appear shadeless, like freshly placed terrain in world editor. So, what limits regarding map size do you guys know? Is width of 200+ tiles really the effective limit?
While mapsize can be a tricky measure considering what is stated above, I think the more useful is the city limit. Actually, this is the main question I wanted an answer to. Is there a hard-limit on number of cities on map? I certainly remember changeable one while tinkering with RFCDoC - is this a vanilla thing? Is it 50-100 cities by default? And, if it is changeable, how much can we really have on a map to still keep it playable/running? 300 cities maybe, more, or less?
