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

[Chazar]

Here is the corrected file. It's called 3.5 now.

PS: The two underwater locations do not have victory points assigned. This might annoy an underwater player, though the map hardly puts any underwater nation at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, it is easy to add the victory points if desired.

[NTJedi]

Looks nice... any chance we'll see a map with over 200 provinces?

[Chazar]

...and again a new version of the map file available for download.

Changes:

• Simply 2 item-wielders per province, because just one per province did not make much of a difference (considering the difficulty of finding the low-level items after a battle).
• Missing victory-points for the two underwater starting locations added.
• The two provinces which are each single-adjacents to possible starting locations received a lowered preset independent force.
• A few more idependents for many-site provinces. Their leaders have #randomeqip 3, so there should be something to loot

Always remember to have fun!

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@NTJedi: No, for I especially made this map to address the lack of small and wrap-around maps...

[Chazar]

Note that the attachment for V3.6 only includes the .map file! The tga file has not changed since V3.3, so please download V3.3 from e.g. Arryn's nice & useful site: http://www.dominions-2.org

Arryn also provides V3.6 in addition to V3.3, which is good, since it the difference are rather a matter of taste...

The reason for not providing the file here is that the forum does not allow to attach files of that size Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

[Chazar]

New map available: Drea V4.3, a 49 province wrap-around map, suited for Blitzgames, Duels or a bloody 9 Player Deathmatch.

The map is essentially the lower half of my previous Chandrea map (94 provinces), which is now also available in version 4.3!!!

Both maps can be downloaded from Arryn's www.dominions-2.org. Many thanks to Arryn for her nice website! Others are welcome to make the maps available on their own Dom2-related websites, too. Each map brings its own new tga-file as well as a mapinfo-generated txt-file containing the map details in a human-readable format. If you play my map, please report whether you like or dislike it here. Thanks!

The following changes apply to both Drea V4.3 and Chandrea V4.3:

• Shipping lines have been removed! This makes travelling much more interesting and puts strategical flyers back to where they belong. Connection is still ensured, because:
• There are three Pocket Ships items located in each city. Therefore each land nation starts with three PocketShips already when using the special starting locations (i.e. in Cities) and can acquire more pocket ships by conquering further cities, provided you catch the pocket-ship item holders.
• Each city is preoccupied by three sage-priests and some ordinary crossbows. So all nation starts with three sage-priest. The idea is that they help somewhat against an early temple/lab loss (for there is someone there to rebuild) and against late library findings (especially on a small map) by providing a good initial research base.
• Each province now contains three commanders with #randomequip 2 and only 2-5 bodyguards (in addition to whatever idependent strength you choose). All many-site provinces have at least one commander with #randomequip 4. It is still pretty difficult to find items... :/
• Cities are now large mountain provinces plus extra population, which yields an even ratio between forests and mountains on both maps. (Recall: Farmlands have few resources, therefore mountains plus extra population are better here, as cities should be focal points of my map, being both rich in gold and resources.)
• Minor neighborship changes (Mount Nimrod became inland, Giant's Causeway lost a remote neighbour, etc.)
• Minor terrain corrections, especially removal of some freshwater tags and adjustment of small/large as well as more nonstart provinces tags, e.g. "Mount Nimrod" is now a 'large many-site non-start mountain waste' instead of a mere 'many-site mountain'.
• Bug fix: Province Otzburg Pass (40) had erroneously an odd mixture of independent defenders in V3.6.

Apart from two connected main continents, there is a single province island and a 5 province island. It is possible for a player to start on the 5-province island, but it contains 2 cities and a nice many site province (Mount Nimrod) already, so it allows a nice start. Leaving the island can then be done via the Pocket Ships. I think the necessity for sailing adds much more fun to the map! - I even think about removing the province "Stepping Stones" entirely from both maps...

[PashaDawg]

Thanks for making a small province!! I play a lot of 1x1 games and this will come in handy!

Pasha

[Chazar]

@all: Have fun and please tell me what you think about the map.

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I do not have any demand myself currently, but in case that there is some demand for another small wrap-around map:
I can easily turn the upper half of Chandrea into a proper seperate wrap-around map. It would probably be more suitable for 1:1 games, for the upper half will wrap into a single continent with no islands and less water provinces, thus removing the need for the Pocket Ships entirely (but personally speaking I like the Pocket Ships).

However, there is one thing preventing me to do so: After splitting the map, one has to delete all the lower-number provinces from the mapfile and renumber the remaining ones. This is straightforward to do, but pretty tedious and quite error-prune for a human, since one has to take great care which numbers refer to a province and which do not (e.g. for just one example, if province 32 shall become province 4, then "#terrain 32 32" should be changed into "#terrain 4 32" and not into "#terrain 32 4" nor "#terrain 4 4". Similar for distinguishing "#setland 32" (number changes) from "#units 20 32" (numbers remains unchanged, 32=archers)). I have described the arising problems somewhat more detailed in this Post#396275.

However, it should be straightforward to let the computer do this job, but I am not eager enough to code it myself (since I consider Chandrea & Drea to be finished now, except for yet unknown bugs). If someone knows python, then CJN's mapinfo tool (I already linked to its thread here in previous posts in this thread below) might even be a good base to start from, since it already encodes the complete mapfile parsing (but I do not know python myself).

I am also sure that other mapmakers will welcome such a tool for altering mapfiles as well, to there is some praise to earn there!