Worls Maps suck!

[genghisvick]

Bought Civ III this morning from babbages and its a great game! My only complaint is the world maps that ship with the game...they suck! They are not remotely realistic can't wait for someone to make a better one.

[Andrew_Jay]

you mean both of them? I gather from screenshots that the smaller of the two is obscenley bad. It looked like Britain was a pathetic 9 or 10 square blob of land, while the Italian peninsula was 3 squares long.

[genghisvick]

The world maps are pretty bad, I cant figure out how to use the ditor yet either. I will give it another shot later on.

[Knight]

Originally posted by Andrew_Jay
you mean both of them? I gather from screenshots that the smaller of the two is obscenley bad. It looked like Britain was a pathetic 9 or 10 square blob of land, while the Italian peninsula was 3 squares long.

I hate to tell you this, but that map was the bigger of the two. The world maps are very poor, but I'm sure some new ones will be out soon enough.

[Boliao]

can u post a screenshot of the huge world map? Thanks...I'll be eternally grateful

[Earthling7]

I would create a good map... if I had the game

[Stuie]

Re: Worls Maps suck!

Originally posted by genghisvick
Bought Civ III this morning from babbages and its a great game! My only complaint is the world maps that ship with the game...they suck! They are not remotely realistic can't wait for someone to make a better one.

Guess I'm not sure what the big deal is, but then again I used the world map in Civ2 only once or twice. I guess Firaxis shouldn't have bothered if the maps are that bad; the random ones are more fun anyway.

[wotan321]

what's the point anyway?

Why in the world even bother including ANY "Real world" maps if you cannot place civs where the "Real Civs" actually occurred?

If you want to play to recreate history..... put the Egyptians in Egypt. Perhaps it'd be fun to ask "Hey, what would have happened if the Babylonians had started.... in Brazil...?" Hmmm...

I get the strange feeling that the poor souls at Firaxis were sitting in a group meeting pondering how to handle the fact that Infogames needed the thing Gold, boxed and on store shelves before Christmas regardless of how much more needed to be done.

"Hey, I read on one of the Civ fansites that the Civvers REALLY want an Earth map! Maybe if we put that in the box, it will help them forget that there are no scenarios, no scenario creation tools, and no MP! I can have an earth map finished before lunch!"

"Whoooohooo" goes the crowd.

Okay, enough sarcasm. I am sure Firaxis is sad that the thing wasn't 100% for them. For the fans, it can NEVER be 100%, we always want more. And yes, they will fix it. But I sure was looking forward to creating some scenarios right out of the box.

[Che Palle]

Re: what's the point anyway?

Originally posted by wotan321
Why in the world even bother including ANY "Real world" maps if you cannot place civs where the "Real Civs" actually occurred?

I'm not ready to bet the farm on that just yet.

I loaded the Huge map into the editor (and yeah like someone else said, the one without greece and with Italy being a whopping 3 tiles, is the huge map... and I saw that you can place these placeholders that say something like "Player Starting Position" or something like that.

Apparently I could place more than one of those (I placed 2)

Now I dunno if there ISN'T a way to specify which Civ will start in which starting spot... I would hope there would be (I didn't look into it, after seeing I could put the markers I closed the editor and started playing Duh!).

Incidentally if there isn't that would make the editor essentially useless for creating scenarios.

Maybe when I go home I'll spend another 5 minutes trying to figure out if I can either specify the starting positions (best) or at least found the first city for every civ and specify which civ that is.... that should be good enough.

However, like has been mentioned, the map is essentially worthless for placing some civs where they should be... for instance if you put the Romans where they belong, the French where they belong and the Germans where they belong, you might end up with Paris and Berlin sharing a square.

My personal impression is that the world maps were included to appease our requests... I can't really see a realistic game being playable on such a huge scale given the limited space.

Think about it... even on a 256x256 map (which I think someone said is available).... the diameter of the earth at the equator is I believe about 41,000 km (I hope I'm not grossly wrong here)... divide 41,000 by 256 and you get 160km per tile.

Using such a scale italy would be at most 2 tiles wide (but realistically it should be more like 1.5) and about 6-7 tiles tall.

Basically Rome itself would be the only city that you could build there. And you better build a harbor!

Alessandro

P.S. Maps of specific areas... Europe, just Mediterraneum, North America, Asia etc. will be much more useful when the artists start making them :-)

[wotan321]

I have read that you can place starting cities on the map, but you cannot specify which civ gets the city. So you can put a city on the European Continent, but there is no way to force France or Germany or whichever European civ to start there.

[wotan321]

P.S. Maps of specific areas... Europe, just Mediterraneum, North America, Asia etc. will be much more useful when the artists start making them :-)

except there doesn't seem to be the ability to use flat maps, just wrap around maps.... though this could come in darn handy for Germany in a WWII scenario.... since they can simply blitzkrieg into France, head for Spain, and continue on into Russia! No more fighting on two fronts!

[Skeeve]

I'm wondering how the random map generator is.
Surely it's better than Civ2?

[Earthling7]

Originally posted by wotan321
I have read that you can place starting cities on the map, but you cannot specify which civ gets the city. So you can put a city on the European Continent, but there is no way to force France or Germany or whichever European civ to start there.

That's just plain silly! They can't do this to us! Dan, help us!

[Faboba]

Did you say what I think you said.

Did you say there was no flatworld option????????

Firaxis - If you've given me a doughnut world but not a flat one like Activision did I may scream.......

[El hidalgo]

No specified starting positions, no flat world... great, wake me up when Firaxis releases a real editor that is at least as useful as Civ 2's (which was very frustrating and annoying, but at least it was possible to specify starting positions and flat world).