Unity Survey

[Verrucosus]

I've been playing around with the various custom rules recently. With regard to the Unity Survey, I am not really sure if it makes the game easier, more difficult or just different.

If the Unity Survey is "on", you can see the exact shape of the continents and the exact locations of rivers, but you cannot identify any elevations. If it is turned "off" (which is the default), the unexplored parts of the map are black, but you can make out elevations by looking at the map grid (which is still visible) and get an idea of what the continents look like. In particular, landmarks like Garland Crater, Pholus Ridge or Mount Planet can easily be identified.

Which do you think is more helpful?

Verrucosus

[CEO Aaron]

Having the Unity Survey on is definitely more helpful to me. I would much rather have a detailed coastline, giving me more useful feedback on where I need to be sending my early scouts than a positive fix on the Garland crater half a world away. If you start out near enough to a landmark to make it worth settling on, you're GOING to find it, unless you're horribly remiss on your scouting. I play Morgan most of the time, so I don't usually build a ton of scouting units, but even then I don't have any problems scouting out neighboring terrain in advance of former and colony pod deployment.

Since Unity survey doesn't have an effect on your score and benefits all factions equally, I usually play with it on. The computer, of course, has complete map information at its disposal, which is why factions on the sam continent as the Monsoon Jungle will lunge so awkwardly to build on it, not that it does them much good.

[BustaMike]

I play with it off. This decision has nothing to do with gameplay advantages. I just don't like seeing all the greyed out map. I much prefer just the black for unknown areas.

[MariOne]

Ditto as BM here

[MariOne]

PS:
best "map survey" mode I saw in any game (imho), is in "Machiavelli the Prince" (Microprose's Trading-Politics game in pre-1492 world & Venetian Republic).
Despite the old graphics, there you had an APPROXIMATE map of the known world, with the background storyline excuse that it was what longdistance explorers and travelers had reported, often exaggerating, or being too vague due to the rudimentary tools of that epoch.
Thus, in the survey, a coastline can be *several* tiles off the actual one. You only get the gross shape and dimension of the continents, and generic placement of rumoured/famed cities and rivers, but *can't* rely on that info without actually senting out scouts.

[Verrucosus]

Thanks for commenting on this. I was probably so used to knowing where these landmarks are that I overestimated this information a bit. In the end, Unity Survey "on" is really the bonus for exploration that it's supposed to be. In a game I started last night, knowing the river locations, my Peacekeepers were able to explore their starting continent much more quickly than usually. From a purely aesthetic point of view, I'm not really comfortable with the greyed out map either - in fact, I don't even like the "fog of war", so I turn it off during peacetime. Still, I want to experiment a little bit more with this setting, so maybe I'll get used to it.