MAP: Improved Huge Map of Earth

[Rockatanski]

Hi,

First: Very Nice Map much better than the original. Really great.

But what's up with the starting locations?

I hate when the civs are not in the correct starting position . In my curent game the russians are in america and the americans are in russia and so on... very anoying!

Can anybody tell me how to choose these positions correct or has anyone made already a fixed map. Actually i wasn't able to find a function to bind a starting position to a specific player...

greetz
Rockatanski

[Barnacle Bill]

There is at this time no way to control which civ starts in a particular starting location. We apparently have to wait for the official editor patch. My best guess, based on the way the editor and "scenarios" work now, is that they will have to patch both the editor and the game executable to make that work. The ".bic" files do not seem to support that information, so the game would not look for that information when loading the scenario. Barring a patch, the only workaround I can see is if some bright person makes a third-party "scenario editor" which actually edits saved game files rather than scenario "bic" files - like the Corion2 utility for MOO2. The saved game files DO contain the necessary info. So, to make a scenario on a real-world map where every civ starts at the right location you would need to first create the scenario in the Civ3 editor, then launch the scenario in Civ3 and save the game immediately, then edit the saved game file in "Corion2 for Civ3" to move all the civs to the right places and save it again, then load the edited saved game in Civ3. The fly in the ointment is that no bright person has even announced they are working on "Corion2 for Civ3", much less published it.

[TickeBoy]

I hope people realise that there should be at least one Uranium source in north Scandinavia to simulate real-world conditions. Although you will not find any source of the Scandinavians being mayor exporters of Uranium, this is because the Swedes are not especially fond of mining fuel to powerplants they do not even approve of!

But nevertheless we are still sitting on the world's third largest source of Uranium here in Scandinavia! So it should be an option for the Civ player to exploit...

[PMLF]

Brazil exports a lot of iron (I think that it's the country that most exports it). Also, There are many oil pltaforms in Brazilian sea, as it is impossible to be added, I guess that the best is to add some oil in Brazilian coast.

So, add oil in Brazilian coast and in the north of Brazil and iron in Brazilian north and northeast.

[nicbeam]

While i hate to be the one with negative criticism, here it goes: The maps have been very Euro-centric or more accurately very Western-centric. Europe has an unrealistic abundence of resources. Clearly this is because many people on this thread are European and say "my country has this resource", and so it is added in. While they may have that resource, do they really have enough to supply an entire civilization? Same with oil in Texas. Texas does not have enough oil to supply the entire U.S. and certainly not enough to allow the U.S. to trade oil to other nations. Therefore Texas should not have 2 oil resources.

On a similar note, no one here is from Africa, and so the African continent has been underrepresented. Some things i've noticed: Kalahari Desert should be smaller and more to the west. The massive mountain range in South Africa does not exist. The lower three mountains (Drakenbergs) should stay but the land north of that is high land (between 1,000 and 2,000 m, but not really mountainous. The rain forest is much to large. There is a good 2,000 km between the Kalahari and the forests. Somalia is desert, not fertile grassland. There are two small pockets of mtns in the Sahara, and the Sahara is much too large.

Finally the people of west Africa used iron tools/weapons and had cavalry. Currently they have no access to these resources. In reality, they traded gold and salt to the muslim berbers of north Africa, but the people of the middle east and north Africa don't have 2 iron deposits on this map. Therefore this historically significant trade is impossible. Not knowing a thing about geology, i don't know where iron is, but i do know it got to this areas. Perhaps more deposits in Egypt or the Arabian pennisula.

I can make these changes but will not have time until tuesday, and i imagine the map will look very different by then.

P.S. Docken's last map is the best version so far (in my not so very humble opinion)

P.P.S. The Kongo/Zaire River should be included

[nicbeam]

One More Thing

Kaptnwakky, i like the changes in attempt to make the Western U.S. look more realistic; however, i don't think the Great Salt Lake should be included because it will be used for irrigation, and because it is a great salt lake , it shouldn't be able to be used for irrigation.

[Alexandre Madeira]

Whoa, lots of posts!

Ok, I took Kaptnwakky's version and did a few changes:

PMLF: Replaced the Coal in Brazil and added a bunch of Iron. If Brazil also has good ammounts of coal, let me know so I or someone else can add it back.

Docken: your changes in 2.08 look good, but Kaptnwakky's 3.0 made different changes to Australia, perhaps you could check it out and comment or do further changes to Australia in the version I'll post here.

Evgeny: My knowledge of Russia is not that great , I just fixed the older version a bit, the Ural mountains were way off. Kaptnwakky's version has lots of changes to Russia, how is it now? (Oh, I forgot to add the russian starting location in 2.07)

nicbeam: That post was mean, think the cold war ended some years ago

Kaptnwakky: Ok, you did lots of changes, most of it looks good to me. I removed some oils, I think we should not represent offshore oil in nearby land because we would end up adding a bunch of them all over the world.
Minor modifications to Italy, and, the Iberic Peninsula... God! It now looks just like the real thing (coast wise)! I had to keep some of the plains in northern iberic pen. because the coast looks better with them, but as far as Portugal goes, only southern portugal is arid, the rest is green Hmm, fixed the Istambul area so you can cross it without needing a boat Eastern Asia looks good, I think, so does Africa.

SPWhite, added some more Iron to India. I disagree with having more than one oil field in a specific location, unless its a hot spot like the middle east. Remember, one oil field is enough to build as many oil requiring units as you want, extra are for trade. Added one in central russia.

Docken: Sure, I'll try

Barnacle Bill: Yea, we could use a hacking program to move units

TickeBoy: Added some uraniun to scandinavia

Nicbeam: No time right now to check out Africa, not gona be home this weekend, maybe someone can do it during the weekend, or I may try when I get back.
Huh, can we irrigate from sea? I think in civ3 we can only irrigate when next to a river or other irrigated square.

Well, here's 3.1, I havent had that much time to work on it, so I may have missed some stuff that needs changing.

[Pyrodrew]

Regarding oil I agree 1 is fine unless it's a hot spot. I believe I read 70% of the world's oil comes from the middle east. Although I've heard Russia does have a good amount of untapped oil resources buried in tundra.

From reviewing all the changes since last time...

The tundra islands north of Scandavia & Russia were removed. I would try to add them back in, but there's a problem with doing so now...

ALL of Scandavia is now MUCH TOO far north. Someone put it almost in the North Pole now! Looking at any map will show it is not as far north as Greenland... if it was it would be all tundra.

I would also recommend Docken adjusting Australia again. It seems the gems & Great Barrier Reef you put in were removed also.

Nicbeam - The reason Europe was given a heavy amount of resources is because many of the civilizations will be starting in Europe. If these civilizations are not given balanced resources 1 of them will quickly wipe out the others in the beginning. Particulary the Roman starting position should get considerable more help since they have France directly northwest, Germans to the north, Greece to the west, & the Egyptians to the south. Yikes!

I'll work on it to balance things a bit. I'll post an update soon.

[Draconus]

Docken: Ok I made the changes to Greenland. To represent the glacier in greenland I used snow capped mountains mainly to keep the computer AI from just throwing cities down anywhere kind of attitude. Also along the coast line I changed all the tundra squares into mountains and hills.(very few hills) There is now only room for 6 cities along the coast. Since the coast line of Greenland is normally barren and rocky with few Boreal forests. I was going to add game for the seals and furs for the polar bears but decided it would make that area to good.

Also changed Iceland a bit to, added a desert square to represent the lava bed that covers 11 % of the island.

Hope these changes are ok with everyone tried using the maps I found to better represent those two islands but didnt want to change too much.

I used Alexandre Madeira latest version to make the changes

[Pyrodrew]

Update

1.Placed forests in the Northeastern US. Much of these forests were cut down for timber during the expansion of America.
2.Made Scandavia better alligned with Greenland. Re-added the small tundra islands north of Scandavia & Russia. I made these islands smaller than they should be.
3.Realistically, Iceland is actually very green & beautiful with nice hills. I don't think they even have a "snow-capped mountain", but I left 1 in there anyways.
4.Slightly adjusted some start positions by 1 tile for game balance so all the Civs are not crammed together in small area.
5.India is the 4th largest producer of coal & thus received a coal.
6.Replaced a lot of unnecessary 'sea' & 'coast' in the North Pole area with ocean. This will help the AI not waste as much time in that area early on & settle in better areas.
7.Some Barbarian Villages were far too close to starting positions, these were moved a few squares further away.
8.I started to modify some of nicbeam's suggestions (desert Somalia, change east african mountains to hills, etc.)... then I stopped once I read he when he said he would do it on Tuesday. He can improve upon what I did.

GameBalance Adjustments for the Greeks & Romans:
1.The Roman starting position has the French to the northwest, the Germans to the north, and the Greeks to the east. To the south is sea also limiting their expansion, by the time they get ships Egypt will have colonized much of Northern Africa. Rome is by far the hardest starting position.
2.The Greek starting position is also surrounded by other civilizations, but atleast they have a somewhat larger area they can colonize.

So for better game balance:
1.Gave Roman start position spices since cooking is a strong part of the Italian culture.
2.Gave Roman start position 1 goody hut.
3.Placed additional fish for Roman & Greek start positions, and gave each a cow.

Future Projects:
1. Australia could be refixed (Missing GreatBarrier Reef, Gems, etc.).

2.Someone could work on the tundra islands north of Canada. The ones there don't look exactly right.

[docken]

Wow this map development has certainly picked up some steam!!!!!

I will get onto editing Australia back again tonight, and I will use the latest version to do it too.

Hopefully we can make a great map if it keeps up like this!

[Kaptnwakky]

I'm glad my changes were well recieved - I added a couple of things that Pyrodrew suggested

-- I tried to add the Islands north of canada but it still looks all distored due to the stretched nature of the map - I don't know how this can be fixed without dropping the americas a couple of squares entirely although this would screw up Japans location also

-- I made the congo region in Subsaharan africa smaller thus increasing the Kalahari Desert

-- I tried to incorporate Dockens Australia from his 2.04 upgrade although I left the Great Dividing range somewhat large to prevent abuse of Australia

-- I added an Oil in the Caucus Region as gaining the Caucus Oil Fields was one of the major driving forces in Hitlers strategy in WWII and it seemed appropriate.

--I changed southern Italy back to plains, Hope no one is offended - Historically (At least in ancient and in Medieval times) Southern Italy has allways been rather poor and agriculturally backward compared to the north - plus geopgraphically its southern mediterranean location places it at the same altitude as the Iberian peninsula and Anatolia. I also placed the cattle right next to Rome to make sure of quick growth in the first few turns before cultural borders expand. Also, the plains just seem to look smoother. Why not add a wheat or two to make it better if plains are too poor strategically?

Whoever fixed greenland and scandinavia did a great job btw.

I keep getting this nagging feeling however that there are still too many resources on the map. It seems every country has more than its share - especially India - there is one location you can place a city that will be insane!! It gets coal, iron, spices and incense I think.

Anyways, hope you like the fixes - any word on cracking a save game to fix start locations?

[jimmyh]

HACKED

Ok, I've found out where unit positions are stored in the SAV file, I'm sure there is also some thing that tells what Civ they belong to, I've got to go out right now, but if you want I can write a program to change unit positions.

Let me know what you think.

James.

[PMLF]

Yes, Brazil produces coal too, in Santa Catarina (Southern Brazil). Also, we "produce" horses in the center and in the south of the country.

[Chillion]

hey im just a quiet observer... but damn guys, wow.

my future includes much lost sleep if theres this many dedicated people working on good maps for this awesome game. I would like to personally thank you all, and my hard drive thanks you as well for the 50 million versions of satyas map =D

I'm sure theres alot of folks just watchin on the sidelines and enjoying the great gameplay you guys are all working to get us. I would just like to say thank you.

And just to make note of the too many resources comment - that is good. It makes the map more about your strategy than your starting loc, which is something at least I prefer.

Anyway enough out of me. Thanks again!

Chillion