Chandrea V4.3 (94prov) _AND_ Drea V4.3 (49 prov)

[Chazar]

I have finished a revised version of my map: V1.03

Unfortunately, a new .tga file was necessary, since boundaries changed and even another province was added. I cannot host the files myself, but look out for the updated files at the places where you can get the old map files right now. The new files are all named chandrea2.map, chandrea2.tga, etc. in order to avoid name clashes and confusion.

There are three variants of the map files now:

• Standard
• Cities contain two wizards and a priest (see notes below)
• Bridge provinces removed (also see a paragraph below)

Changes are:

• the big water province with the logo inside has been split into two, limiting water movement and sailing a bit (i.e. there are 103 provinces now instead of 102).
• some coastlines have been disconnected to limit water movement and sailing: (34/44), (41/32), (56/43), (64/47), (80,95), (75,64), (33,40), (12,26), (7,12).
• fixed and altered some neighborships
• bridges are kept as small provinces, but their neighborship is limited to land provinces now
• terrain changes: one more swamp and waste each instead of plains
• defaultmapzoom added
• proper linefeeds added to map description, making it readable
• filenames end in a "2" now to avoid name clashes and to allow ongoing games to continue (i.e. "chandrea2.tga",...)
• every city now has a feudal population (does not work as intended, since independent defense forces seems to ignore the poptype... )
• every city now has an Iron Mine, Otzburg has a mine of Superior Iron (due to its poor neighbors).
• starting positions are restricted to the cities for land dwellers now

The last two address the often criticised lack of resources. Since every starting position resets the resources to 81, this should be less of an issue now! Furthermore an Iron Mine has been added to each city, which also helps the situation. From my test, I think it is fine now. Nevertheless productivity is recommend for nations that need to built high-resource units!

Initial Wizards: I also wanted to fortify and defend the precious and important cities, but since they are also starting positions, predefined castles would change the balance to much. I tried to add some independent defense, but the drawback is that these units become owned if that city is choosen as some nations starting province. However, I found a variant with two wizards per city quite amusing, since the wizards may add interesting random paths to a nation. However, you cannot built wizards, so guard them well! I recommend difficult research for this variant though, since wizards are also great researchers.

About sailing: It has also been criticised that sailing/sea access is to easy. I hope that I have changed the situation a little bit now. I am open to further suggestions on altering sea access and shipping lines!!!

About bridges: I really like the bridge provinces. They are small, but their their possesion is of help when moving walking armies around terrain that would stop them. However, I included an alternate mapfile that has the bridges removed, due to popular demand... Unfortunately, one cannot disable provinces in the mapfile and removing them properly would require an altered tga and a lot of renaming within the mapfile. Therefore I just adjusted the neighborship relation to disconnect all bridges from the rest of world. This means that they will still show up with province flag and that forced might teleport into those provinces (for whatever reason), which some people might find pretty annoying too.

[Arryn]

Chazar said:
I have finished a revised version of my map: V1.03

I cannot host the files myself, but look out for the updated files at the places where you can get the old map files right now.

The updated archive, repackaged with RAR to save almost 30% space and download time, is available on my site. The original version has been one of the most popular maps on my site since it was released.

[Chazar]

As always, you're pretty quick, Arryn! Thank you! And thanks for your great site! Nice to hear about that download ratio, too! Although searching the MP Forum occasionally for "Chandrea" does not reveal too much...ahh, I've been told that I am always too pessimistic...

[The_Tauren13]

Province 65 has a Great Iron Mine instead of just an Iron Mine. This gives a player starting there a sizeable advantage. I would mark it nostart.

[Chazar]

This is an updated list of known errors contained in the current V4.3 !!! Feel free adjust the files for yourself, I might post the corrected .map files here as well. Furthermore, thanks for reporting any encountered map errors or problems here in this thread! Please report anything that is not already in contained in my following todo-list:

• Great Iron Mine near Otzburg: This is not a bug! The Great Iron Mine mas intentionally placed at the mountain pass nearby.
• NO KNOWN BUGS.

[Saber Cherry]

I like the map!

But I have to add a vote to the "Bridges shouldn't be provinces" camp, and a vote to the "It's hard to tell where provinces are" camp. The map is very pretty and making the province borders thicker or brighter may make it less pretty, but it would also make it more clear. For example, it's not at all obvious (unless you have adjacency arrows turned on) that provinces 31, 40, and 41 are separate... from the pink lines, they could all be the same province. Same with 41, 48, and 50. Of course, rather than uglifying the map with lines, you culd make an obvious "Province Center Marker," like a little town or cabin icon, and a little coral reef icon for underwater province centers. Then it would be obvious where provinces are even without borders...

Anyway, thanks for your good work!

[Chazar]

Saber Cherry said:
For example, it's not at all obvious (unless you have adjacency arrows turned on) that provinces 31, 40, and 41 are separate... from the pink lines, they could all be the same province. Same with 41, 48, and 50.

Thanks for your input, but I have trouble understanding you:

I assume you refer to V1.01 rather than V1.03, right? I see your problem: I think of rivers and coastlines as natural borders, however this concept is clearly broken at some places, like "Drüh Rogg" (38 or 39 depending on version), "Stepping Stones" (37 in V1.03), or "Shallow Waters" (85)...

Admittingly, I never tried my own map with the province adjacency arrows turned off. However I fail to see the benefit of explicit province center markers, like the little cabins you proposed: How would they function differently from the province flags placed by dom2, which already mark province centers? Or are you refering to the city provinces, which are marked at the city instead of the province's center?

So there is still the problem with those provinces cited above where the natural borders are different from the actual province borders...