Map: The Eight Gates

[Humakty]

I bet this map will be more pleasant to me than the previous one, as I only play SP (one day, I'll have a connection on my PC, and I'll be able to go and get crushed...).to increase connectivity you could also put some ports, as there is water on your map. Hard to be more precise without a preview.(I,too, want a poney)

[Zylithan]

EDIT - THIS POST HAS THE FILE AS A .ZIP INSTEAD OF A .RAR!


Yes. The AI should do much better on this map. It'll use the gates better than it uses the desert.

Yeah, I thought some about the ports idea, or having a a river map where the river provinces are long and thin.. because (maybe?) you can travel quickly on water in real life compared to land (well.. if you go the right way.. but ignore this).so river provinces would be important.

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I'm interested in how different connectivity maps play out. Like, two maps could have an average of 4 neighbors per province, right. But if one has all provinces with 4 neighbors exactly, it would play very differently from one that had half 2 neighbors, and half with 6. You think think about how many nearest neighor,s 2nd nearest neighbors, etc. each province has.

One thing I realized, is in most maps, if you have a province W, with neighbors X, Y, and Z, X, Y and Z are usually close. For example, if W,X,Y,Z each had 3 neighbors, you could have something like

NOTE - Somehow my "ASCII" is all messed up... putting periods as placeholders helps? ignore them please

..........X......
........./.|.\....
A--Z--W--Y--B

So, from W, in two moves or less, you can get to any of 5 provinces.

But if you have some provinces that connect provinces that do not connect to eachother and have 3 neighbors.


.....A--X--B....
...........|.......
C--Z--W--Y--D.
......|.........|....
......E.......F....

In this scenario, with all provinces having 3 neighbors, just as before, in two moves or less, you can now get to
9 provinces (almost twice as many).

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I think when I return to map making I'll use an easier/simpler system for making the graphical parts of maps, and play around more with this aspect perhaps. These maps take too long, and I'm not even sure if I like their look. They seem not grand enough a scope (like, seeing individual mountains instead of a huge mountain range.)

[Zylithan]

Here's a preview of the nodes for four of the eight flavors of gates (clockwise from top left, water,fire,air,earth).

Each of the 8 nodes can be reached by 5 gates scattered across the world. I'll show a clip of the overland map and the gates next.

[Zylithan]

Here's a preview of the overland map (without province borders). It's a swampy area with 4 flavors of gates visible. Clockwise from top left: water, life, blood (the pool of blood at the bottom), astral. The blood gates look different from the other 7 flavors of gate because blood magic is different from the 7 other types of magic in dom3.

(The thing in the middle is just decoration.)

Gameplay-wise, there are five gates of each of the 8 flavors scattered across the overland map. If you step into any of the five pools of blood on the overland map, you are brought to the blood node (which looks like the four nodes in the post above, except blood themed). In the blood node, you can exit through any blood pool. If you stay in the blood node (or any node) too long, you will have bad things happen to you. Depending on which of the .map files you play with (I'll provide 3?) you might also be able to recruit blood mages (other mages for other nodes) in the blood node. The other seven flavors of gates all function the same way.

[Burnsaber]

Sounds very, very cool.

I'm looking forward to it.

[zepath]

Awesome stuff Zylithan! Something about your artwork reminds me of the old Lords of Magic. What are you drawing with, by the way?

[Sombre]

Was that made using age of wonders tools?