I have a very nice fair site finder script that I posted - it works great on *wraparound* maps.
It works okay on flat maps except that it doesn't know about corners.
The only way to arrange fair start sites on flat map is to put them equally spaced in a ring around the middle. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how you'd do this on an arbitrary graph.
So how's about this for an approximate algorithm:
* Find the shortest route between every province pair.
* Find four provinces which are the "center" of this map: these four provinces will have the lowest sum-distance-to-all-provinces, and will not be within 3 provinces of one another. The remoteness of a potential start location is going to be the sum of the distance of that start to the four centers.
* Potential start locations must be in in the second quintile of remoteness. That is to say: a start location must be less remote than at least 20% of all provinces, and a start location must be more remote than at least 60% of all provinces.
* In addition, the start locations can be as far apart and have as many (non-waste, non-deep-sea, non-swamp) neighbors as you specify.
* Enable as many such start locations as you can using the same algorithm I had before.
This is fairly complicated and I need to go to my own posting and get a copy of my script which I did not otherwise backup for some time
(I have some proof of concept stuff on the machines at work but I lost quite a bit when I dropped my frickin' HD on the floor).
Thoughts? Suggestions? Comments?
Fair start sites on flat maps
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