Civs-per-Continent : seeking balance

[Cort Haus]

As far as civs-per-continent go, the map generator seems to roll a lot of 6:1 or 5:2 standard continent maps and very few 3:4 or 3:2:2 spreads.

This seems a bit imbalanced, and a lot of continent games turn out as either isolated starts or near-pangeas.

Is this moddable?

[Adagio]

Whenever I play continent games, it always ends up with equal number of Civs per continent, which I find boring, so I don't play continent games anymore...

[Cort Haus]

We should swap maps, Adagio! Do you play standard maps?

[Adagio]

I don't remember the exact map settings I played with, it's been a while since last time I played a continents game

[Adagio]

I'll do some tests when I get home, to see how the maps change at the different settings

[Adagio]

After a few tests I believe I have the answer to the problem:

I have by accident every time I've chosen a continents map chosen 'custom continents' (but with everything random... believe it would create the same result as just 'continents'). I did 5-6 tests with these settings, and everytime there was a max of 1 in difference between the number of civs on each continent

I also did one test with the 'continents' (also everything random), and that test created 3 continents: a huge one with 5 civs, a smaller one with 2 (or was it 3?) civs, and an empty continent (the smallest)

I assume you've only tried 'continents' and not 'custom continenst', so by chosing the 'custom' version you'll get what you want (I guess) and by removing the 'custom' I get a bit like what I want



Though something puzzles me. In each of the 5-6 tries of 'custom' I did, all the maps looked soo much more interesting than the 'custom continents' maps I've been playing. The continents in the maps I've played all looked the same, while 4 of the 5-6 tests I did all showed islands with huge differences... the map-maker is working against me

[Willem]

Re: Civs-per-Continent : seeking balance

Originally posted by Cort Haus
As far as civs-per-continent go, the map generator seems to roll a lot of 6:1 or 5:2 standard continent maps and very few 3:4 or 3:2:2 spreads.

This seems a bit imbalanced, and a lot of continent games turn out as either isolated starts or near-pangeas.

Is this moddable?

I know exactly what you mean, in fact I've been griping to Sirian about it in another thread. Last night I started a game where all 7 civs started on the same continent. Very rarely do I get a balanced split.

[Willem]

I've been doing som experimenting and it seems to me that part of the problem is that the continents being generated are quite often to small to hold more than a couple of civs. A way around that is to lower the sea level considerably. If you select Low, the current default is -8. I've set it at -20 and I'm seeing much bigger continents overall, plus a more equal split after checking things out in World Builder. I've even been able to squeeze an extra civ in there and doubled the spacing variables, so every civ has a good distance between each other.

[Willem]

An update on those experiments. I was originally using a custom size somewhere between Standard and Large. With default Standard, lowering all sea levels by -10, not only am I seeing better distribution due to larger continents, but I can get in another civ and increase the distance percentage from 12-15 and the minimum distance from 10-12. Only with high sea levels do I see any jamming as the last civ gets placed, and that was only by 3 squares.