The glorious Evolution of Master of Mana - The Red Desert of Cruoris / First screenshot of standalone version / Feedback needed

currently working to get the variety up for grasslands terrain and polish it for demo. I added some watchtower ruins now (no gameplay, just decoration). At day

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and at night:
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Improving the (grassland) hills now. They look nearly like mountains but this way it is easier to tell them apart from normal terrain.

small hills -> decoration
small stone formations without snow -> hills
massive stone formations with snow -> mountains

You can get a lot of stone from hills and a few stone and metal from mountains.
 
so as a little "easter egg" I added a decoration of 8 Monolith on a flower field.
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Alpha Centauri had a special location of 8 Monolith in a large fungus field. With green technology you were to build a super city inside it.
 
Alpha Centauri had a special location of 8 Monolith in a large fungus field. With green technology you were to build a super city inside it.
Hah I didn't know you could build a super city there.. cool.

Funny you should mention that too as I recently replicated that area (as best as I can in the limitations of the Civ2 engine) for my SMAC Civ2 scenario..

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I tried out the (new) water system. I will need it for the oceans later but it is also useful for lakes. This is the mountain lake from earlier with the new water system.
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thanks for these updates !!
IMO the hills look too mountainous.. I can't seem to differenciate the hills from the mountain tiles.
another comment (sorry), the hills/mountain don't seem to be in the same scale as any other landscape element, even trees (which go 1 by 1 or 2 by 2)... I know that this difference in scale existed in Civ4 .. but it was less jarring because trees went by a dozen at the same time "mini-forests". (and there were much less details on hills/mountains)

I wonder if hills being slightly rounder.. and mountains being the same, but stretched "higher" wouldn't change this.

another Question.
are the "resources", shown in squares related to things/resources one might SEE on the landscape ? or will you plan to have the resource only shown by the square ?
 
Thanks for the feedback. I tried to make the "hills" larger, I think it looks better that way. Included trees on the screenshot for scale.
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The mountains have a new look. Here is an (still unpolished) mountain for comparision. Because of all the snow it should be easy to tell them apart.
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The traderesources are currently only square symbols. I do not know how easy it will to integrate objects like ore minerals with the terrain but I would like to have a graphic representation on the map if possible. They would need to be on top of the mountain but if you terraform the mountain away they need to on the flat ground. Also what happens if you have juicy melons on a tile and then create a mountain? :lol:
 
I think it looks all really nicely~

Hmm, may be because we have no tiles etc visible here, but how is the "Visibility" of the type of tile?
I feel that its important to take a first look over an area and directly being able to identify certain things. Like the terrain type, if there is a forest etc.
Or will your game handle this whole concept of tiles etc different to Civ4 with fantasy mods? :)
 
I think it looks all really nicely~

Hmm, may be because we have no tiles etc visible here, but how is the "Visibility" of the type of tile?
I feel that its important to take a first look over an area and directly being able to identify certain things. Like the terrain type, if there is a forest etc.
Or will your game handle this whole concept of tiles etc different to Civ4 with fantasy mods? :)
I hope you will like it when it is all polished for the demo. The screenshots are quite promising but the desert and some other things still need a lot of work. haha.

I agree that readability of the terrain is very important. I go back to the oldschool way of handling terrain where you have only one important attribute per tile. So a tile is either a forest or a grassland. Like it was in old civ games or colonization or alpha centauri. In terms of visuals it means that I only need to add visual hints for either terrain or feature to a tile. If it is a volcano, it's not important to quickly see if the volcano is on plains or mountain area. In terms of gameplay I focus more to make each each terrain/feature different. You can only get metal from mountains, if you need a lot of stone/wood you really need to secure some forests/hills etc. The goal is that every player can easily recognize what each tile does without having to do any mouseovers and can focus on making decisions.

You can also see the tiles in the city view. The city view uses a fancy projection where you look at the tiles from above (square grid), but the tiles appear as if you look at them from a 60 degree angle so you can see more from a house than just the roof. Here I posted a screenshot couple month ago:
 
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