Request

[Tiltowait]

Originally posted by Targa:
Hey, we're talking about a game map, not a Picasso or Rembrandt. If there's a demand for it, and people will play it, then I vote for randomization.

And I! How many dominions players would turn up their noses at more options?


Gandalf, did you ever make a randomizer that would spread around specific special sites?

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Targa:

quote:

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Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
The game I just played on it, I started in the province with the skull mountain. There was one land province and one water province as neighbors.

Gah! Shows what happens when you spend too many hours of non-stop working on a map. That province shoulda been #nostart (which I did do to some of the interior provinces that would have been poor starting positions, like that one). Oh well...

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From what I can tell, nostart doesn't work. I flagged provinces as nostart in the editor on the World map, because they're just really awful places to start, and whenever an AI race starts on them, they tend to become stranded and never are able to leave.

Nonetheless, I start up a new game, and end up on that crappy island anyway. Doublechecking, I find I did, in fact, flag it nostart. Must not be working right.

[Targa]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
From what I can tell, nostart doesn't work.

Add 512 to the 2nd number found after #terrain in the .map file. Should work as nostart.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Targa:
Add 512 to the 2nd number found after #terrain in the .map file. Should work as nostart.

Well, I was under the impression that the map editor built into Dominions II was able to set this correctly. If the Dom2 Map Editor isn't setting the nostart bit, which bit *IS* it setting....and what does THAT one do?

[Targa]

My mistake. I misread and thought you were using #nostart (and meant that that wasn't working). Bleah.

Anyways....as I re-read (correctly this time) your post, it should have worked. When I made Clash of the Titans map, I used the Dom2 map editor and flagged all provinces as nostart except the two starting spots. I've played numerous times on that map and always start in one of those two provinces, so it appears to be working.

Are you perhaps playing the scenario, and it has commands that override the nostart indicated in the .map file?

(512 is the value that the map editor adds to a province for it to be designated as nostart)

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Targa:
Are you perhaps playing the scenario, and it has commands that override the nostart indicated in the .map file?

No, it's not the scenario. I regularly play on the World map, being that it's my natural favorite, and every so often, a player would wind up starting on an isolated island province like New Zealand or Hawaii. For a non-seafaring nation, that's pretty much a mulligan right there. When it happens to the AI, you can more or less write that AI out of the game.

So to avoid this, I flagged all of the offending "really godawful" start provinces nostart in the map editor....but upon starting the game, I found that every so often, I'd spawn on one of those invalid locations anyway.

[The_Maxx]

I can almost feel the power of randomization coming soon to a dominions map near you.

Im not giving up until someone tells me to shut it (it must be rude and blunt as well).

The_Maxx (you guessed it, still addicted to randomized.map)