The Monstrosity - Earth map 500x262 & The Monstrosity - Marathon edition

[Volman.me]

The Monstrocity v3.0 Release Notes

There are changes and specific design philosophy on resource allocation, terrain allocation (grassland and plains), sea zones, etc.

Terrain allocation
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Plains terrain refers to areas where the climate is not ideal for high quality resource placement (I am referring mostly on luxury resources and high yield food).

For example, Siberia where the temperature is very low, the type of terrain is strictly plains.

The resources on this terrain is usually game, some cattle and a dissent amount of minerals.

Resource allocation
--------------------------
The bonus resources depend on the type of the terrain they placed on.

Luxury resources are placed based on real information on production of these resources. I used mostly wiki information to get top 10 production countries on each luxury.

For example you will see the wine is concentrated mostly on France, Spain, Italy, US and the territory south of China, up to east of India.

This way specific areas of the map provide specific advantages, but without limit your advancement of your civilization.

Luxuries is a good source of gold and happiness.

On the other hand, strategic resources are evenly distributed.

This way all civilizations have equal chances to win the game.

I made a spreadsheet so I can have a better control on distributing these resources.

It's the Distribution tab here:

Civilization 3 - Marathon Vanilla

docs.google.com

I use the spreadsheet to calculate values of buildings, units, etc on the Marathon edition of Mostrosity.

Sea zones
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The water terrain tiles has 3 types: 1.Costal, 2.Sea, 3.Ocean

The coast tiles have 1 tile width. That's the normal.

The sea tiles have 2 tile width instead of just 1 tile width.

Modders can use this to adjust the speed of sea terrain and give a boost to ship navigation.

For example on Mostrosity Marathon edition I use movement 1 for coast terrain, 2 for sea and 4 on ocean.

Using sea terrain, after getting the permission of the civilization that controls these sea tiles, I can arrive to my destination sooner.

Accuracy of map
-----------------------
Volcanoes: 100%.
I used top 50 volcanoes of the world and insert them to the map.

Rivers: 60-70%.
I used 15% of the biggest rivers as shown on wiki.
That's about more than half of the most known rivers of the world.
My goal was the map to have a river every 10 tiles.
I tried to replicate the flow of the rivers as accurate as possible, that's why I give only 60-70% accurancy.
I will post updates to raise this number even higher.

Mountains: 30-40%.
Mountains have many uses, like hills, and I did not wanted to be limited by how accurate is a mountain on the earth map.
I needed some space to make things interesting.

Hills: 0%.
Hills are used, in cooperation with mountains to give specific patters on a wide area that contains either elevated ground, mountain range, etc.

Deserts: 100%.
I used the top 50 widest deserts of the world (again from wiki).
When you see a desert, it's a real area that you can see on earth map.

General Notes
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The map, overall, has about 3-5% more space for cities.

I manage that by adding grassland and plains on key areas. (like India)

The mountains and hills formation also make it possible to actually use that space for building cities. (compare Himalaya mountain range before and after).

 

[Volman.me]

An update for the marathon edition of the map:

There are many issues with civ engine that I believe most of them I have solve them.

First issue is the economy. Whatever the situation, most of the civs have very little or no money for anything.
As a result, they waste time constructing buildings and later on to disband them because of they have no money to pay for maintenance.
Another result is they have small army (by my standards 30-40 or 60-70 max units is not an army).
Also when you trade technologies, they usually have no real money to pay.

Second issue is war awareness.
When I used the debug mode, I saw massive unhappiness because civs fight each other all the time.
The solution is to disable war awareness. This is the second feature that I disable because AI does not know how to handle. (the first is polution).

Third issue is units.
No matter how much money resources worth (at some point I set gold resource worth 74 gold) and civs still had no money!
Obviously raising the value of resources was not the solution.

An update for the regular map:

I have made small changes to resource allocation.

I need to make some more so the RARR version fits perfectly.

I will release the updated maps the next 1-2 weeks (plus the RARR version of the map).

I need to edit the changelog because I forgot some important features I added to the map and give credit to members that helped with recommendations and ideas (I have not forgotten you guys).

 

[vmxa]

At Sid and probably DG or higher, the discount is high. That allows them to make any structure quickly. This in turn means they have only units to build for much of the game. So they go broke as they keep hitting the support cap. In late game, you see they have disbanded all or nearly all workers and cannot clean pollution nor make improvement to tiles.

 

[Volman.me]

At Sid and probably DG or higher, the discount is high. That allows them to make any structure quickly. This in turn means they have only units to build for much of the game. So they go broke as they keep hitting the support cap. In late game, you see they have disbanded all or nearly all workers and cannot clean pollution nor make improvement to tiles.

Unfortunately this is not the case.

AI does horrible job in managing gold.

There are many times that for a few turns they have no gold and that moment start to liquidate everything. Buildings, units and workers.

There is a debug feature the magician added and I examined some cities of nearby civilizations while gaming.

Cities that had enough mines and maximum population, when I conquered them they had 2 or 3 buildings.

The resistance before capturing the city was 20 - 30 units. That's nothing.

The magician can help even the bad management of AI's gold, but from my part I gave some treats to AI so, at all times, civs have minimum amount of units and a nice small boost to their economy for creating enough wealth.

The result is about 60 - 70% of what I would like.

I hope that extra 30 - 40% the magician will cover.

I currently faced a German army of 350 units (160 artillery), Byzantine army of 200 units (80 artillery) and all cities I captured had 3 - 7 buildings.

Before the fixes the numbers where under half, which is disappointing.

Such a big map with so many resources and civs had 100 or maximum 150 units? That was embarrassing.