Standard (80x52) World Map TSL

[Veneke]

Aye, even standard-sized maps (especially landmass/civ heavy ones) slow down to a crawl towards the end. Pretty sure that the problem is the game engine but be that as it may, that's what we're working with.

In terms of a small map, thinking as I type, perhaps ~10-12 Civs:
- America and Brazil are easy picks.
- Zulu is a shoe-in as well. Go for another civ in Africa? Probably.
- Only one European Civ I imagine and they would have to be from mainland Europe, not the Baltics nor the British Isles. Not sure who to put here really, a Civ like France or perhaps something different like the Netherlands, Austria or Poland?
- Russia, India and China are easy inclusions.
- Then 2-4 more... Assyria probably, Mongolia maybe? Perhaps Siam and cut the number of city states?

Which brings us to the City-States.
- Jerusalem and Panama are more than likely.
- One-tile CSs that don't impact terribly much on major landmasses, like Manila and Jakarta are probably okay.
- Everybody else, with potential exceptions to Almaty and Lhasa are probably space dependent.

I'm far from wedded to any of these by the way. So if you've thoughts, feel free to jump in.

The drop from standard (~4200) to small (@2800) is pretty significant so it'll be a challenge to fit everything in. I'll have a look at what other people have done but from what I recall the smaller maps tend to look horribly disfigured. I went through the old posts and I think that ComradeKristov was on the right track. Unless I find something better I'll probably use that for inspiration. Natural wonders and resource distribution will hopefully stay the same.

 

[Lachlan]

You could limit the map to Ancient World area, you cut Americas, Australia, South Africa...

Only north hemisphere, Suez Canal zone would become major importance...

If not you could rest on your standard handmade Earth map , because i could upgrade my computer...
And so, Standard Maps could be fully playable !

And your Scenario 1000AD, is it outdated ?

I sugest for your map a 500 BC Scenario...

 

[Veneke]

I could but ultimately I won't. There are others out there who like cutting things out to make the map more playable but I prefer dealing with the big, complete and ultimately messy picture.

The 1000AD scenario is well outdated, never really worked and is certainly no longer supported nor receiving updates. My experience with scenarios was not pleasant and I very much doubt that I'll return to them.

On a BNW note, with Indonesia and Morocco confirmed I'm pretty sure that Morocco will be included for the BNW map. I'll drop Songhai for them and nerf Songhai's starting position (which was well OP even by the map's standards), that'll leave the Zulus, Egypt, Ethiopia and Morocco in Africa with M'banza-Kongo and Zanzibar/Mombasa as city-states which is a nice mix although Ethiopia is kinda cramped.

Indonesia, unfortunately, will probably be left out. After our misadventures with Polynesia I simply don't see Indonesia faring any better. If I was to cut into the city-states in Southeast Asia it would be for Siam, given that there is an alternative to the inclusion of Indonesia, Civ slots are already tight on the ground and they're likely to underperform I just can't see it.

For South America Buenos Aires is definitely in and for the Middle East I'm thinking to add Kabul where Persia is now and use Persia's Civ slot for Assyria. That would still leave Byzantium and Arabia in the Middle East both of whom will stay depending on what the last two civs are. Kabul, however, leaves Assyria with no decent second city spot so that will have to be addressed, somehow.

 

[Omega_Kabob]

Would you mind if I use this map as a reference for my Asia map?

 

[Veneke]

Work away mate.

 

[Barak]

I really like this map. Any plans to update for BNW?

 

[Veneke]

Yep! I had planned on having it done earlier but having run into a few errors with worldbuilder I gave up on it to concentrate on actually playing the expansion. Fortunately, those errors were resolved when I updated to the beta version of the SDK/World Builder.

The good news is that it's up on steam now, so if you're subscribed to that it should auto-update for you. There's detailed changelogs and what have you in that and I'll update the OP accordingly with a new manual download including the BNW map.

The bad news is that I'm a little concerned about turn times given that they've slowed down already in BNW and I went a little nuts with all the new city-states. The map now has the maximum 22 civs and 24 city-states. Some things may have to change; Indonesia for example might do very poorly in Southeast Asia. As far as new Civs go though, the only Civ not included is Venice which I thought was pretty good going (although I have taken some serious liberties with Poland's starting position). I probably could have squeezed Venice in there, somehow, but for much the same reason that I dislike Austria I am not particularly fond of Venice - the ability to permanently remove civs or city-states from the game is too much. If you could raze everything, including capitals and city-states then I'd have less of a problem with it, as is I'm not exactly devastated by their non-inclusion.

One fairly big change to the map though is that Mongolia was cut. I've absolutely no idea what this will do to the development of the map over the course of a game but I really wanted to get Indonesia in there. If Indonesia flops I'll drop them and put Mongolia back in but, for now, that's how we're rolling.

Oh, and raging barbs was turned off - cause barbs in BNW are terrifying enough with it off.

 

[Barak]

Thanks for the update! I fear that with no Mongolia it will leave China too much room to expand and no one to keep them in line.

 

[Veneke]

That's a distinct possibility and, frankly, I'd expect to go through a couple of games and versions of this until I'm happy with it. The Vanilla and G&K versions went through three to four reasonably major changes before they reached their pre-BNW state.

At the moment, however, I'm banking on barbs and Kyzyl to slow down any potential Chinese spread through Siberia. There's also the point to be made that, pre-G&K at least, the AI did not regard Siberia very highly. Russia typically conquered Europe (or was, in turn, conquered) and China kinda sat there while the Mongolians as a fairly mediocre middle power. It should, I hope, give China a nice boost though as, in my experience, they rarely have sufficient weight to put up a fight against the (inevitably) united Americas or other major Eurasian power. My experiences with BNW so far have led me to believe that the AI will go tall until Industrial and then go nuts expanding and, in theory, I think that'll work out fairly well for China and Siberia.

It's also worthwhile pointing out that the addition of so many CSs will also have an impact, though how significant that will be is a bit early to say. It's an extra 7 I believe, which cuts down on potential city sites by quite a significant margin.

In short, BNW changes so many things and introduces so many things that, given the restrictions I've set myself (standard map, no changes to the base game), there are fairly decent odds that the map will require at least one major overhaul. Hopefully that can be avoided but I'm distinctly aware of the possibility that it may take several attempts to get it right.

 

[Barak]

I have played many run throughs on your map in G+K, and i really like it. It runs fast, and forces some interesting conflicts. The middle east is a tad overcrowded, and adding Assyria leaves no good second city locations for the Byz Assyria or Persia.

That said, I will give it a try as Arabia and see how aggressive Assyria is.

I always found that China had 3 good city spots, as did India, Sweden and England. Some civs struggled to find a good second spot. Which usually mean the Europeans fight lots of wars until someone wins

 

[Veneke]

I have to admit, I am rather happy with how the maps have developed. There's always a tweak here or there which might make it better but, on the whole, it seems to stand up pretty well. Speed (or more accurately, turn times) is something that I place a premium on - I've a feeling BNW will not help in that regard, nor will my happy-go-lucky approach to City-States for the BNW map.

Also, I should probably have mentioned that Persia was swapped out for Kabul (the map in the OP will be updated as soon as I can get WB to stop crashing on me...). It's still very crowded in the Middle East; it's like Europe really, but even smaller. Kabul though will hopefully mean that Assyria can avoid building for settlers and instead take a good spot by going warlike early which thematically I find quite appropriate. Same with the Zulus, they've no good second city spots nearby but 4 decent city-states to conquer.

If the BNW map plays out anything like the G&K one, there should be an absurd number of dig sites once Archaeology comes online.

 

[Barak]

I played about 150 turns as Arabia, and the only DOW that I saw was when I declared war on Assyria. Their starting spot needs some work, as their is only 1 pearl and not enough production for them to really work on anything. I read somewhere that the AI is not DOWing enough due to the effect on their economy and their reliance on trade routes.

 

[Veneke]

Good catch, I beefed the Assyrian start with Gems (robbed from Kabul) and Incense (newly placed). There's still no decent second city spot for them though, there's potentially one in the Caucasus but no obviously good way to fit it in there without harming the potential city spots on the northern end, near Russia.

I also fiddled with Melbourne/Sydney and gave Panama City a starting position - I'm still not sure how that didn't make it in.

As for the AI, there's unfortunately not a huge amount I can do about that. Previously they could be counted upon to take neighbours out. If they don't do that, I'm not sure trade routes will provide enough of a boost to their economies in the longer term.


Edit: Also, attempting to put an Assyrian city down to display the name (like it's done in OP) causes WB to crash, consistently, so I'm afraid an overview like that will have to wait until I find a workaround or they fix it.

 

[ariel552]

Hi Veneke,
Very good job on your maps!! I use them every day!

Well, I've found two bugs in version 4 and 5, with the VDK DLC map, it crashes a few turns before 1 A.D (somewhere between 600 AD and 300 AD, standard speed) and tryied twice with England and Cartaghe, same crash.

I hope you can finish the brave new world map, soon!!

And that Firaxis fixes the bug in the archeologies, the pop up window that cannot be closed crashed another of my games in late game, and cound't finish it!

Regards

 

[Veneke]

Glad you're enjoying them ariel552. The BNW map should be good to go, it should auto-update through steam but, if not, then unsubscribing and resubscribing should fix it.

I've experienced that kind of random crash on custom maps before (it's why I had to give up on smellymummy's interesting standard Earth map) but have never found a fix. I'll double check that map (and the others) later on tonight to see if there's anything in the set-up that might eventually cause it. Could you attach a save from a few turns before the crash? Who knows, maybe there is a fundamental flaw in the map that leads to an automatic crash under certain conditions? I don't think so, but that's the best I can do I'm afraid.

It might be an idea to delete old versions of the map pack, they shouldn't interfere but you can never tell. I've no idea why it would keep old versions around but I know it does - I had to delete my own old versions of both this and Gedemon's map pack because, for whatever reason, it refused to overwrite them like it normally did.

I've yet to encounter the archaeologist bug but it sounds particularly awful.

 

[ariel552]

All right Veneke, thanks! And if want to download the last version to have the BNW map, would it be the attachment Vens Standard Earth Maps.rar (46.1 KB, 465 views) in your page?

I'll use it and let you know, but actually I'm thinking the crash is not only with your map but also with Legendary Earth, and in both I was using the IGE. In this last one, a crash around 1870 AD that couldn't even load the autosave both from IGE and the civ itself...

By the way, in order to reduce the turn to turn time to 5-10 seconds, I put a montains wall between the urals in russia and north china/corea. No one can enter to found cities, so much less units = time and also sometimes I conquer Asia with the barbarians, whe they get too much tech than europe, to mantain history...

Cheers

 

[Veneke]

It's the attachment with 0 views on the OP 56KB or so (I've removed the old package to avoid confusion. The new one contains everything the old one did).

It's an interesting idea to cut out some sections of the map, although not one I'm currently keen on introducing to my map. There are much better gameplay orientated maps out there than this one, I'd recommend djvandyke's map in that regard which removes the less important areas of the map like Siberia and so on. Unfortunately, it's a large map so the boost to turn times will be relative to that.

 

[Spawnblade]

I'm a bit of a dunce with Civ 5 mods, but doesn't the new v6 archive need a .modinfo file in it to function? I thought the civ5proj files were purely for modding purposes?

 

[Veneke]

...

Yes, yes it does. Fixed. It should still have worked anyway as these are maps and none of the core files are changed but they decided a bit back that maps were mods for some reason.

 

[bwoww78]

1. really happy this map is still getting all the attention it deserves! (and is becoming BNW ready)
2. just had a chance to take a look at your placement of new civs, natural wonders, etc. really well done! i like the layout of Europe (here's hoping France moves eastward and the Poles make it interesting) and the crowded layout of Africa makes for early and often conflict, which will be interesting to see. I also hope that the Mongolian decision works out (there's always the idea of adding in Korea...?)
3. Here are my thoughts on potential changes:
* Switch Mayan and Panama's starting position to be historically accurate (unless you're doing this on purpose to give Brazil a challenge, and then it would make more sense...)
* If Indonesia goes the way of Polynesia (unfortunately...) and add back in the Incans (S. America is pretty vacant vis-a-vis Africa) while switching Panama/Mayans. I think this would make the western hemisphere much more interesting and historically accurate.
* If another Civ can go, I think it would be Carthage (gives Morocco more room to expand vs Songhai) and you could then add the Iroquois into the Cahokia slot (or further north, utilizing it's forest travel bonus) or add back in the Mongols, if that seems appropriate.

I plan to make a few of the adjustment types listed above and play as the US to toy with the new trade routes and tourism aspects on this map. if all goes well (and it may take me a long time to actually finish the game as the summer rolls on), I'll try and report back so you have some data on how those changes affect the map.

thanks again!