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

You and Flintlock are the Jesus Christ of Civ 3.

When I saw your try of 420x316, my modding senses started tingling.

When I confirmed that your tool is like the gospel Revelation of John for Christians, I started photoshop and google earth.

Started from scratch, piece by piece (using print screen method) start developing the map.

After making a lot of adjustments on photoshop and finally got the result I had in mind, I used your bmp to biq functionality.

And voila. I had something to work on civ 3 editor.

When I fired up that monster map and played a couple of turns, that's it. I had the confirmed result I wanted after 2 weeks of hard work.

That day I did not slept adding resources to the map.

The next day I started play testing. And it works as I always wanted.

I am telling you man, we are going to have epic battles on this map.

Better get that cpu upgrade fast, things are going to get hot.
Haha, well, that may be a little excessive of a comparison, but thank you. If I'm going to live up to that, I'm going to have to at least bring my gameplay level up to Deity, and that sounds like a tall order!

As it is, though, we all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. The most obvious example for the utilities I've made is Steph, but as important were earlier members of the forum (and of Apolyton) such as Gramphos and Dianthus who pioneered making CIv utilities in general, and wrote about what they learned. Without their work, I likely would not have ever had the expertise to build what I built, and I definitely would not have in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

But that's great to hear that Google Earth + Photoshop + BMP to BIQ worked so well! I think there have been one or two other people who've made use of it, but you might be the first to follow through on it so thoroughly.

It'll be a couple weeks yet before I buy that new CPU... AMD has new ones at the end of September so I can't buy now until I see the reviews for those. That leaves time for additional feedback and tweaks though!
 
Haha, well, that may be a little excessive of a comparison, but thank you. If I'm going to live up to that, I'm going to have to at least bring my gameplay level up to Deity, and that sounds like a tall order!

As it is, though, we all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. The most obvious example for the utilities I've made is Steph, but as important were earlier members of the forum (and of Apolyton) such as Gramphos and Dianthus who pioneered making CIv utilities in general, and wrote about what they learned. Without their work, I likely would not have ever had the expertise to build what I built, and I definitely would not have in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

But that's great to hear that Google Earth + Photoshop + BMP to BIQ worked so well! I think there have been one or two other people who've made use of it, but you might be the first to follow through on it so thoroughly.

It'll be a couple weeks yet before I buy that new CPU... AMD has new ones at the end of September so I can't buy now until I see the reviews for those. That leaves time for additional feedback and tweaks though!
Kudos to Gramphos and Dianthus. Without their help we would not customize the best civ of the franchise, civ 3 (everything after that is trash, sorry fans).

Credits have to be given, because without other modder's hard work we cannot have this map, or RRAR, or so many other fantastic mods.

A friendly recommendation. Intel cpus have much better single thread performance.

That means you will have a good boost on some applications and especially old games like civ 3.
 
I need some opinions from you people.

I will take into consideration Yoda power's Giant map and WW2 Global scenario.

As far as mountains and hills, I will take into consideration both maps, but google earth helps a lot. I prefer to use more google earth and less the mentioned maps.

The problem is the rivers.

I have to select either Yoda power's map or WW2 map. I don't know which map is more precise.

Google earth does not help on this matter.

As you saw on this version of the map, rivers are too few.

I do not want to make many rivers, since it counts in my logic as a strategic resource, but also I don't want to create an unrealistic or unplayable map.

The solution is in the middle. I have to select on a map and copy the river topography by 60-70%.

Which one do you recommend?
 
Kudos to Gramphos and Dianthus. Without their help we would not customize the best civ of the franchise, civ 3 (everything after that is trash, sorry fans).

Credits have to be given, because without other modder's hard work we cannot have this map, or RRAR, or so many other fantastic mods.

A friendly recommendation. Intel cpus have much better single thread performance.

That means you will have a good boost on some applications and especially old games like civ 3.
They generally do have better single-threaded performance, although the gap is not what it used to be, but... Civ3 is probably the only program I run that leans heavily on single-threaded performance. More often I'm doing software development that likes a blend of single-threaded and multi-threaded, or file compression work (such as for my Civ scenario compilation) that is all about multi-threaded. And lately, AMD has been winning on power efficiency, which I care about particularly in the summer where my westward facing windows let in tons of late-afternoon light - great, other than the heat. Although Intel has narrowed the power-efficiency gap with Alder Lake. I wouldn't go near a Rocket Lake due to the poor performance-per-watt.

But looking at the longer term, I also like AMD's platform support. If I'd bought into Ryzen in 2017, I could be upgrading to a 5800X3D today. And that's one that I'd be really curious to try with giant Civ3 maps. CFC member T.A. Jones used to swear that Cedar Mill Pentium 4's were the best for Civ3, despite their questionable reputation in general, due to their large 1 MB L2 cache. If it holds true in general that Civ3 loves CPU cache, then in theory the Ryzen 7 5800X3D might be a great choice for Civ3; Intel's Broadwell chips with the Crystalwell L4 cache might also perform better than expected.

Don't get me wrong, my Sandy Bridge Intel has been a fantastic value, much better than a Phenom II or Bulldozer would have been... but I think that given recent history and my workload that errs more towards multi-threaded tasks, aside from Civ3, AMD is likely the one that's going to give a similar long-term value to my current 2011 Intel. I'm more likely to be running an AM5 system that I buy in two months in 2032 than an Intel system that I buy in two months, primarily because I can upgrade the CPU in 2025 or 2026 while keeping everything else the same.

In theory I'd love to set up a Civ3 performance-testing lab. Set up an Alder Lake system, Ryzen 7000 once it's out, a Ryzen 5000 system with a 5600X and a 5800X3D and see if there's a big difference. Go a bit old-school Intel with a Skylake and a Broadwell and maybe a Devil's Canyon, test the newest of the three architecture versus the L4 cache versus the high clock speeds.

In practice I'm not that into building (and then reselling) that many computers. Although at one point I did have a thread here that got some limited results for multiple people testing one of my slowest save files on multiple systems... but that was circa 2010, so all the chips in that thread are obsolete now.
 
I need some opinions from you people.

I will take into consideration Yoda power's Giant map and WW2 Global scenario.

As far as mountains and hills, I will take into consideration both maps, but google earth helps a lot. I prefer to use more google earth and less the mentioned maps.

The problem is the rivers.

I have to select either Yoda power's map or WW2 map. I don't know which map is more precise.

Google earth does not help on this matter.

As you saw on this version of the map, rivers are too few.

I do not want to make many rivers, since it counts in my logic as a strategic resource, but also I don't want to create an unrealistic or unplayable map.

The solution is in the middle. I have to select on a map and copy the river topography by 60-70%.

Which one do you recommend?
I have more thoughts about hills/mountains than rivers, because I've thought about hills/mountains more.

In my opinion, hills/mountains should primarily indicate areas with moderate/high amounts of elevation change, respectively. This doesn't necessarily correlate to absolute elevation, though it can - but flat plateaus are not hills or mountains, though they may neighbor them.

The actual proper way to do this would be to use topographic maps, including factoring in which areas have significant differences (not just high flat terrain).

A few months ago I was looking at creating maps for Railroad Tycoon II and III, which have variable height terrain, not just flat, hills, and mountains/volcanoes. Thus, it has utilities that allow you to use actual topographic map data to set the in-game elevations. It's very powerful; it needs some tuning to get serious mountain ranges such as the Alps both realistic-looking and playable in-game - you might not want them to be an absolute barrier with no passages, but you want them to be problematic - but overall it makes it relatively straightforward to create the height part of maps accurately. I was able to figure it with a couple evenings of fiddling around with programs, topographic maps, and settings.

Not everything can carry over to Civ, of course, but there's a good guide to the process in general at http://hawkdawg.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=3708 . The most relevant part to what you are interested in is likely getting topographic map data via BoundingBox (https://boundingbox.klokantech.com) and Earth Explorer (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov).

I wish I'd written up more notes on how I did it this spring; in part I was following an older guide (http://web.archive.org/web/20050302.../bowlby/rrt3/tutorials/Microdem/Tutorial1.htm) as I hadn't seen OilCan's newer one. But I know I got GTOPO30 Digital Elevation Model maps, and used the U.S. Naval Academy's MICRODEM program (https://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdem/microdem.htm) to view and transform those maps. Its interface is a bit clunky as it's been around since 1984, but it does work. For your purposes, the Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs) and a program to view them would give you a more accurate view of elevation changes than just a sateillite view from Google Maps. I would probably try Quantum GIS before MICRODEM, since it probably has a better user interface, but if it's not working, the Navy's there to help.

I think the U.S. Geologic Service (which runs Earth Explorer) also has maps that highlight the difference in terrain rather than the absolute terrain, or maybe I figured out how to do that with an option in MICRODEM (it has a lot of options to choose from). That would also be useful since it solves the high plateau problem.

It gave me the idea to add some sort of Digital Elevation Map capability to my editor, to supplement its current satellite-image capabilities, but realistically not a ton of people are using it to create maps, and it would probably be a lot of work. If this were 2005, I'd probably do it. And shortly after playing around with Railroad Tycoon maps, I got swept back into the C7 project.

Rivers... those are hard to see from zoomed-out satellite images. I am sure others will have more opinionated opinions, but I would probably look for maps that show e.g. the rivers of Africa or the rivers of Europe, and if they're from a reputable source they're probably a good guide. Or in areas that I know decently well, fall back on my geographic knowledge. If we're talking Europe, the Danube has to be the first choice. Then maybe the Rhine or the Loire? The Don and the Volga farther east. The Po if there's space for it in Italy. I'm more uncertain in northern Europe, I think of the Spree first but that's probably only because I've traveled on it.

In North America, it's the Mississippi, followed by the Missouri and the Ohio. Rio Grande would be nice, and the Colorado, it's had some rough years with overuse but historically it is a major river. If there's room, maybe the Hudson?

----

Edit: Okay, so I got out my Rand McNally World Atlas. I should really get this book out more often, it's better than I remembered! It has topographic maps of all six inhabited continents, color-shaded, great for reference, and pretty detailed. So if you have a topographic atlas, or your library has one, that could be worthwhile. The USGS ones are great if you need it to feed into a computer program, like for Railroad Tycoon, but a paper atlas may be just as good when you're updating the map by hand. Certainly easier to open a book.

I should also note that if you haven't tried it, one of the features I put some thought into in my editor was river editing. I'd always found that frustrating in the Firaxis editor, accidentally placing rivers along tiles that I didn't want them. So in my editor I made sure to code it so it's based on which tile-edge you click on, and that it doesn't place a river if you click too close to a tile edge. The thresholds are also configurable (Ctrl+P, map tab, "River sensitivity options") if you find it too eager or insufficiently eager to place rivers. Finally, on the right-side pane, you can manually toggle rivers on or off on the tile edges, great for fine-tuning river placements or removing a stray river.

Looking at your map, this fine-tuning could help with some rivers that seem to wind up just short of the seas/oceans (checking in the Firaxis editor as well to be sure). Such as the Po, which just meanders around northern Italy, or the Mississippi, or that river in Georgia (the U.S. state) that doesn't reach the ocean.

Focusing specifically on the U.S., where I live, a few things I notice:

- The Rio Grande doesn't reach the Gulf of Mexico
- There are a couple rivers in the Rocky Mountains that don't go anywhere. I think they're the westernmost parts of the Missouri; if so they should connect up with the Mississippi. There's also one of those farther north in Canada.
- The eastern U.S. probably needs a river beyond the St. Lawrence Seaway. I'd favor the Ohio; admittedly I am biased, but it arguably is the most important river east of the Mississippi. The Hudson in New York being second, and if you want more, perhaps the Potomac in Maryland but that would probably be too many for game balance.
- In the western U.S., probably add the Colorado, and maybe the American River in California, which is not nearly as long but is important for agriculture and irrigation, which is relevant in Civ.

For mountains/hills in the U.S., subjectively speaking but probably also objectively, the Rockies seem a bit flat. They're big, they stretch a long way north-south but also a significant distance east-west, but in the map the Appalachians look like the more serious barrier. I love the Appalachians, but I'm not going to pretend that they're anywhere near as hardcore of mountains as the Rockies.

Also, the Sierra Nevadas appear to be a range of hills, they should really be mountains. Or maybe they're the range that's east of that desert (Death Valley?) and they're just too far from the coast? Here's a picture of what I'm trying to say.

1663394490137.png


I also kind of think that either the U.S. west coast juts out too far west, or Baja California is too far east, or maybe Mexico in general is too narrow? Or maybe the mountains are just throwing off my point of reference; cross-referencing my atlas, the slope of the western North American coast is generally correct, at least within the bounds of what Civ3 allows. Probably the overall problem is that the mountains east of the "Sierras" in my screenshot are more or less where the Utah/Nevada border is, which is high elevation but not a major range. Maybe some hills there, but mostly desert; hardly anyone lives there but not due to mountains.

The other thing that could help with anchoring references in the map discussion is adding some dummy resources which are simply labels of relevant places. A few maps have done this with "resources" that are actually just "Mauretania" or "Po River" or something like that. When looking at the Rockies and Sierras, I found myself thinking, "where is this area in relation to Los Angeles?" Not saying you should add cities, but labels for mountain ranges and rivers might help frame the discussion, and provide some geographic education for players.
 
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My last post is now too big, so a small new post on the much-discussed subject of starting locations.

I noticed that the starting location for the Americans is in upstate New York, which is really where the Iroquois should be, and eventually found the Iroquois up around the Yukon Territory, the Maya in southern Venezuela, the Aztecs in Mayan lands, and the Inca down around the Pampas area of Argentina. It's definitely valid to select locations so as to not have all the civs scrunched together, but I think in the long term a better pitch is to either not assign locations and place them for gameplay reasons, and pitch it as a "Play on a realistic Earth map, with balanced gameplay", or to select historically accurate starting locations but perhaps tweak the lineup of civilizations.

The scrunched civs are a problem for gameplay and you've done a great job adjusting the canvas to minimize that, but as it is every time someone wants to play the Inca, they're going to ask why they start almost at the South Pole. Or if they play Russia, why they start out around Perm rather than Novgorod, Moscow, or Kiev? It's great for the Dutch-Poles and their ability to expand eastward, but it doesn't seem natural.

That could also help with the eternal conundrum of, "what do we do about civs that start in the same area but different time periods?" The Ottomans/Byzantines/Hittites, and French/Celts being the biggest offenders, but America/Iroquois applies too. Maybe America is swapped for the Sioux or Apache and the New World is pre-Columbian? Maybe the Hittites get the Anatolian spot, the Turks represent someone like the Ghuzz who can be in between Russia and Mongolia and slow both down a bit, and the Byzantines are swapped for a civ in an under-represented area, perhaps Mali or Khmer. I see there are actually two Celtic start locations, one in Iberia and one around Mali, so perhaps you were already leaning that way a bit.

I wouldn't personally be bummed about a Dutch/Pole swap though, if you aim for a 1600-ish setting in the Old World, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a major power, and I think the Polish geographic position is better for avoiding the "too many civs in a small space" problem than the Dutch one.

Not that any of this should be done in the short term, the map contours are more important. But since there was already starting location discussion, I got swept in once I noticed America was in Iroquois lands.

---

One question that perhaps should be asked sooner rather than later, what are your thoughts on this map and the 512 city limit? It is inevitable that it will be reached on such a large map if the AI is left to its own devices. Knowing the Civ3 AI, it's going to colonize northern Canada and Siberia and the Sahara, and Australia might not have a single city because 512 will be settled elsewhere before anyone reaches Australia. I suppose the low-tundra approach means those northern Canadian and Siberian cities will not be two-pop useless tundra cities, but from a demographic/agricultural perspective it seems not ideal.

My philosophy over the years has gravitated more towards a high-tundra/desert approach, with both terrains disallowing cities, to actively prevent the AI from wasting settlers on those terrains, and rein in the city count a bit. I'm also at least theoretically partial to the idea of using Marsh as a "city location" terrain, and having it be the only terrain that allows cities. That one is controversial, in part because it reduces player choice in where to build cities, but if you've got a map with enough space for 1000 cities, and you can only have 512, I don't think it's a bad option for ensuring that the cities get built in reasonable locations.

You'll probably also have to consider ways to reduce the trade networks, as that's a major cause of slow AI turn times. Civinator is one of the experts in this, but some common techniques include significantly limiting how many cities can build harbors with trade connections (usually letting the default building add food production, but requiring another one that's limited via Small Wonder status or local-resource requirement for trade connections) and disallowing air trade. Personally, I'm more likely to play a large map that has paid attention to turn times than one that hasn't, as turn time optimization can reduce AI turn times a lot more than overclocking can.

I wouldn't really recommend large rule modifications (unless that's part of your vision), but small tweaks to ensure the map remains playable after 1000 AD, without having enough time to cook dinner between turns, are probably advisable.
 
@Quintillus I benchmarked the map and when the city limit reached, it took 20 seconds each turn to play.

I own a 9900K @ 5 GHz.

Since the limit reached after about 150 turns, I presume after 300 turns where civs will have a lot more units the time for each turn will be 40 sec max.

Anyhow, you need a very fast cpu with top of the line single thread performance.

The 512 city limit is a major problem here.

I played as a Greek, expand my civ up to today's Ukraine land and Russians where 10 tiles away.

I had to conquer cities so I can have the right to build more cities (by destroying the conquered ones) and finally reach Russians.

The starting locations were bad. Just bad. I fixed them. I wont say more because it was embarrassing for me. :lol:

I am going to add some tundra and desert tiles, but not much. My main concern is to have as much room as possible.

I will take a look at the links you posted about mountains and hills topographic data. They look interesting.

I take into account the points you made for misplacing rivers.

I will post an update of the map with many small fixes (and errors like starting locations) today.
 
In my eyes Quintillus described the characteristics of your map very well. This is no map for normal settling, as the way the AI likes to place their settlements will leave much too much regions where no cities can be founded, as the 512 city limit will be reached very soon (and in my eyes it wouldn´t be an improvement of this situation if the city limit could be massively enlarged, as the additional micromanagement would kill the fun of playing on such a map for most civers). If using the monster map for playing a normal Civ 3 epic game, even with mods like RARR, additional massive work must be invested to limit the places where cities can be founded. As mentioned by Quintillus, terrain must be forbidden for founding cities (like desert and tundra terrain) but additional limitations are needed, like settling zones in the Giant Earth mod or city spot terrain for special places on the map, that only allow the founding of cities or as a third way to place all cities on the map as "barbarian cities" (the last one needs starting save-files for each playable civ). Each of these solutions needs a lot of additional modding work.

In my eyes this map could be ideal for scenarios with preplaced cities and no settlers in the game.

As Quintillus pointed out, the map contours are the more important part of the map. Then comes the question how to "fill out" the place between the land contours. This is why I suggested to set the cities (even when a map without cities as the final product should be intended) as coordinates into the map and here for the different regions different existing world maps (and the x and y coordinates of their cities) could be very helpful for finding the proper locations on your map. Per example for finding a fix of the starting location of Moscow I had a look to the WW2 Global and the SOE maps, noticed that in both maps the x-coordinate was identical with one tile at the east of the Black Sea and in the same way I found the y-coordinate of this city. As most bigger cities are located at rivers, this also can be a way to find the proper places for the rivers and hills and mountains in their neighbourhood.
 
In my eyes Quintillus described the characteristics of your map very well. This is no map for normal settling, as the way the AI likes to place their settlements will leave much too much regions where no cities can be founded, as the 512 city limit will be reached very soon (and in my eyes it wouldn´t be an improvement of this situation if the city limit could be massively enlarged, as the additional micromanagement would kill the fun of playing on such a map for most civers). If using the monster map for playing a normal Civ 3 epic game, even with mods like RARR, additional massive work must be invested to limit the places where cities can be founded. As mentioned by Quintillus, terrain must be forbidden for founding cities (like desert and tundra terrain) but additional limitations are needed, like settling zones in the Giant Earth mod or city spot terrain for special places on the map, that only allow the founding of cities or as a third way to place all cities on the map as "barbarian cities" (the last one needs starting save-files for each playable civ). Each of these solutions needs a lot of additional modding work.

In my eyes this map could be ideal for scenarios with preplaced cities and no settlers in the game.

As Quintillus pointed out, the map contours are the more important part of the map. Then comes the question how to "fill out" the place between the land contours. This is why I suggested to set the cities (even when a map without cities as the final product should be intended) as coordinates into the map and here for the different regions different existing world maps (and the x and y coordinates of their cities) could be very helpful for finding the proper locations on your map. Per example for finding a fix of the starting location of Moscow I had a look to the WW2 Global and the SOE maps, noticed that in both maps the x-coordinate was identical with one tile at the east of the Black Sea and in the same way I found the y-coordinate of this city. As most bigger cities are located at rivers, this also can be a way to find the proper places for the rivers and hills and mountains in their neighbourhood.
Micromanagement will be a ***** for a lot of cities, but you should be prepared for that.

The initial version will be the way I envisioned.

There can be versions after that and long discussions on what exactly to focus on.

That way everybody gets what they want.

The difficult part is to actually create the map.

I am going to use mostly Giant map from Yoda Power for rivers and resource placement. I will also consider the two maps you posted for final touches.

I agree on the cities placement. Probably I will implement these type of helpers to design mountains and rivers.

I posted an update with fixed starting locations and initial work on more bonus resources distribution.
 
Does anybody know how a civilization destruct themselves?

When I beta test the map using some custom settings, I get a message: "The ramping XXX civilization (for example Romans) get destroyed by XXX (same civilization, for example Romans)".

Also when I play using the debugging mode, I see, for example the Chinese or the Arabs cities got disbanded for no apparent reason.

More specifically, the Chinese had 2 cities and they disbanded their capital and the Arabs disbanded the only city they had!

The above events happen at the start of the game.

Another issue: How Chinese teleported and conquered Zulu?

They disbanded every city they had on China and now I see Zulu are destroyed and China took over their place.

Another question: Why Russians get a free scout at the beggining of the game?


The above error of teleporting was an error of editor. After checking again the starting locations, I saw the error and fix it.

Any thoughts for the first question?
 
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Is it possible to change the level of barbarian aggression to the maximum possible?
I could only find this setting in the new map generation window in the map editor.
I would like to play on this big map with a constant threat at the beginning from hordes of barbarians.
 
Is it possible to change the level of barbarian aggression to the maximum possible?
I could only find this setting in the new map generation window in the map editor.
I would like to play on this big map with a constant threat at the beginning from hordes of barbarians.
When I created the map I set the level of aggression for barbarians to maximum.
Practically its not the barbarians the major thread here.
I currently play test this map and I see that the constant thread is all other nations.
If you want epic battles, set the aggression AI to max setting.
This setting is located when you select civilizations, at the bottom right corner.
I will update the map in a few weeks with much needed corrections that have to be made, mainly to resource placement.
 
Does anybody know how a civilization destruct themselves?
When I beta test the map using some custom settings, I get a message: "The ramping XXX civilization (for example Romans) get destroyed by XXX (same civilization, for example Romans)".

This strange bug was seen several times. Until now nobody found a proper explanation. In the case with the RARR worldmap it happened with a civ (the Celts) that was deleted in that biq. That civ appeared 4 times (!) in the game. The links in the following spoilered box show the wrong texts due to problems in the CFC software, but lead to the proper posts:
Spoiler :


I will update the map in a few weeks with much needed corrections that have to be made, mainly to resource placement.

It is great that you continue your work with this promising map. :thumbsup:
 
Since the map is very large, then I have doubled the number of moves for all types of units (in my test game-party) - this has increased the dynamism of all processes, especially when waging war.
I also increased the cost of all scientific discoveries and canceled the possibility of their exchange between civilizations. I hope that this will avoid the appearance of rocket technology in the Middle Ages :)
 
This strange bug was seen several times. Until now nobody found a proper explanation. In the case with the RARR worldmap it happened with a civ (the Celts) that was deleted in that biq. That civ appeared 4 times (!) in the game. The links in the following spoilered box show the wrong texts due to problems in the CFC software, but lead to the proper posts:
Spoiler :




It is great that you continue your work with this promising map. :thumbsup:
I thought I did something wrong when I placed civilization starting locations.
There are many small corrections I have to make.
Since I have no experience modding a world map, I started playing based of another mod I am going to publish (it's based on this world map).
Its very slow paced, that's why I have not made big changes yet.
When I am saying slow, I mean more than 100 hours gameplay.
I have not forgotten your suggestions (I have already increased the territory for Dutch).
Through playtesting I understood where to place the resources and make small adjustments in landscape.
I am currently at 70% completing the game, I have to playtest for another 20-30 hours.
I will post more info when I am ready (in 2-3 weeks).

Since the map is very large, then I have doubled the number of moves for all types of units (in my test game-party) - this has increased the dynamism of all processes, especially when waging war.
I also increased the cost of all scientific discoveries and canceled the possibility of their exchange between civilizations. I hope that this will avoid the appearance of rocket technology in the Middle Ages :)

If you play vanilla civ, try not to give units more moves.
Based on the spirit you just described, you can try to double the cost of everything and give to AI 130% production bonus. Also increase the artillery's range by 50%.
Its the only way to appreciate the modern units and also the huge role of air superiority.
 
@Quintillus I benchmarked the map and when the city limit reached, it took 20 seconds each turn to play.

I own a 9900K @ 5 GHz.

Since the limit reached after about 150 turns, I presume after 300 turns where civs will have a lot more units the time for each turn will be 40 sec max.

Anyhow, you need a very fast cpu with top of the line single thread performance.
That pretty much rules me out for playing the map except for a small number of civilizations, with maybe restricting the number of settlers by having the Palace auto-produce every few turns. Given my enhanced Barbarians, that should serve to keep the number of cities down. i have had some of the scenarios take over 5 minutes for a turn, at which point I stop playing them and delete the save.

When you make a monster map, have some consideration for those of us who do not have the latest and greatest computers to play on. I will try to see how it works with a few civilizations. like maybe 6 or so. I have already been changing the starting locations into something more reasonable and accurate.
 
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