Note: This post has been redone (12/7/7) to combine all important information in this top post.
UPDATE: This post has a .RAR attached. The third post in this thread has the same thing as a .ZIP. You can download whichever you prefer, the .RAR is smaller, the .ZIP is more accessible for many.
"The Eight Gates"
STORY
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While the Pantokrator ruled, there was relative peace in the world. Skirmishes would break out from time to time, but not major wars. The people were united under one god. Since his sudden dissappearance, the world has turned to Chaos. The various peoples of the world have each rallied under their local deities and are fighting for primacy. Even the world itself is being torn apart - rifts have opened up in the fabric of the world, swallowing land and lake alike into voids of nothingness. In the wake of this chaos, eight flavors of magical gates, previously only accessible to the Pantokrator and his highest servants, have opened up across the land. Any common man can travel the gates, crossing huge areas of land in a short time - but sometimes there is a horrible price for travelling the Gates.
With the people warring and the world itself in destruction, one supreme god must rise to power, to calm the world and to rule the heavens. Will it be you?
DETAILS
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Roughly 230 provinces, 10 water, rest land. Not wrap-around, but efforts have been made to reduce/eliminate the advantages of edges and corners. Start locations are not set, but are restricted to a set of provinces all of which are roughly balanced. A water player is allowed, but would likely be at a serious disadvantage.
The map has a lot of chokepoints, and a fairly low number of average neighbors. This is countered by The Eight Gates - a means of teleporting across the world. This means that despite the low average connectivity, there is no/little chance of getting boxed in because of myriad options for expansion/attack.
4 VERSIONS
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The download contains four versions of this map (four for the price of one!)
1. Gates provide connections between faraway lands, but nodes are not special. Nodes are weakly guarded.
2. Gates provide connections between faraway lands, and nodes harm those who stay in them for long. Nodes are weakly guarded.
3. Gates provide connections between faraway lands, nodes harm those who stay in them for long, and each flavor of node allows recruitment of spellcasters with that magic path. Nodes are weakly guarded.
4. Gates provide connections between faraway lands, nodes harm those who stay in them for long, and each flavor of node allows recruitment of spellcasters with that magic path. Nodes have stronger thematic guards than versions 1-3.
This map should hoepfully be fun for SP, but is meant for MP. I'd love to see a MP game start on any of these versions. 2 and 4 makes the most sense to me.
SCREENSHOTS
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Here's a preview of the nodes for four of the eight flavors of gates (clockwise from top left, water,fire,air,earth).
Each of the 8 nodes can be reached by 5 gates scattered across the world. I'll show a clip of the overland map and the gates next.
Here's a preview of the overland map (without province borders). It's a swampy area with 4 flavors of gates visible. Clockwise from top left: water, life, blood (the pool of blood at the bottom), astral. The blood gates look different from the other 7 flavors of gate because blood magic is different from the 7 other types of magic in dom3.
(The thing in the middle is just decoration.)
Gameplay-wise, there are five gates of each of the 8 flavors scattered across the overland map. If you step into any of the five pools of blood on the overland map, you are brought to the blood node (which looks like the four nodes in the post above, except blood themed). In the blood node, you can exit through any blood pool. If you stay in the blood node (or any node) too long, you will have bad things happen to you. Depending on which of the .map files you play with you might also be able to recruit blood mages (other mages for other nodes) in the blood node. The other seven flavors of gates all function the same way.
Whole Map (For Scale, note the zoom-in is a small section in the southeast of this map)
Please give feedback at the new map repository
http://dom3maps.wikidot.com