One of the lessons of testgame II was that the logic how trade resources can be distributed had to change. The old logic was that trade resources can only be used in cities near the location of the trade resource. That limitation just didn't feel right when playing and sometimes just added useless micromanagement where you cycle resources around when new resources become available. If was not much of an issue in the early game but the problem became quite obvious in the lategame with many cities. The new logic is pretty simple: if a trade resource can be distributed, you can distribute it to any city. If it cannot be distributed, you can only use it in the city where the trade resource is located on the map. I have also changed the interface for trade resources. It shows all cities now and you can easily drag and drop resources.
The screenshot also shows another problem. The logic to spawn trade resources was quite bad and while there are 25 trade resources in the game my late game empire had only access to 9 of them. Most of the mapscript logic was more of a placeholder logic so I replaced it with a proper mapscript. I had not tinkered with mapscripts before but it turns out that most games that create procedurally generated maps use a similar algorithm. Compared to civ games I am doing a few things differently.
- The geography is more chaotic. Most of the later civ games have mapscripts that are build around multiplayer balance. You mostly know how a pangea map or a continents map or an inland sea map looks like. I always loved about civ1 that the map was truly random and you never knew if you started on a small island or a big continent.
- Biomes can be anywhere. In civ maps deserts are mostly restricted to the middle of the map because that is how earth looks like.
- Some regions on the map have a high density of resources while other areas have barely any. This increases the value of exploration as some areas of the map are way more valuable as other areas and also encourages to spread out cities more and not build them next to each other in min distance.
- There is still the wilderness function that I added in MoM. Wilderness controls how dangerous an area is. In current Master of Mana mod wilderness increases more or less linearly with distance to start locations. In the new mapscript there are areas with high and low wilderness and they have more of a random shape. I will also add more customization options so players can decide how tame or dangerous they want the map to be.
For the new mapscript I also needed ocean graphics. Since I had to deal with all the terrain graphics anyway I also improved quite a bit of the existing terrain graphics stuff based on what I noticed in testgame I and testgame II.
Here you can see new volcano at day and at night.
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