Gandalf's Crazy Solo Games

[Jack_Trowell]

Gandalf Parker said:
If you generate a map for solo play I recommend turning the mountains to 50 or higher. It creates many "chokepoint" positions on the map which control the access to small areas. Allowing for lots of "cut them off at the pass" tactics. At setting shigher than 50 you can get a maze.

I know : inspired by your horizontal maps that you posted before I got the game (waiting for tuxgame made me live more than 1 month without dom3 after the official release date ! At least it made me subscribre to the forums : I had been lurking since dom2) I used the random map generator to make maps with similar settings, ... but smaller.

I love maps with lots of specials and chokepoints, and I love SP.

I think in fact that our playstyles are very similar, exept that I prefer smaller maps (I like a big game sometimes, but 1500 provinces is really asking for trouble )

Just another thing oh mightly Gandalf, Lord of Eternal Games, Master of Randomness, do you think that extending my perl conversion is useful ?

I have several plans, such making the random commanders depend on the province type(s) (for exemple no random commander and units drowning in a sea province, and thematically appropriate monsters in forests/moutains, maybe an increased chance of lootable treasures in caves (more commanders and monsters with magic items), ...

But for such a project, I would need to parse the complete unit list and choose wich units could go to wich terrain type, and others hings like that.

It's not the programming by itself that worry me, it's the time to process the huge amount of raw data in dom3.

If I think the project can really be useful for the community, I could manage to get the work done. (perl programming is part of my day job, so it's not there that I will have problems)

I can also take sugggestions : I should be able to parse any information from original map files (even starting provinces if there's defined) and from there make any moddable modification wished.

Note : maybe this thread would be more appropriate in the mod/maps subforums ? What do you think ?

If others that Gandalf wish to give their opinion it will be welcome.