Cradle map bug?

[Vynd]

I started a game on the Cradle map for the first time Last night. And now I have noticed that the lake with a large island in it towards the center-right of the map (Province 120) is, despite all appearances, a Plains. It's labeled as such in the province info, and my land units can walk right into it no problem.

Did I download the wrong Version of the map, or is this a bug? On Illwinter's site they had links to: "Download map with fixed map file:" and also "Download fixed map file:" Which is kind of confusing, if you ask me. I went with the first link, assuming that the second was a "map only" download for people who had already downloaded once and didn't want to re-download the scenario file. Did I goof?

[BugRoger]

Try downloading the fixed map-file as well. You have an old map file if the map shows up as "A map with 220 provinces" or something like that. The title of the map is fixed in the newer map file.

[J. Lutes]

Hi Vynd,

Sorry about that error. It turns out that I was not nearly thorough enough in my early playtesting, and several annoying bugs got through. When did you download the map originally? If you download the "cradle_fixmap.zip" file and unzip it into your Dominions 2/maps folder, the bugs should clear up. Let me know if they don't!

[Vynd]

The fixmap.zip is what I needed. I was just thrown off by the fact that both of the downloads available at Illwinter say "fix" in their description. Thanks for your help, Jason and Bug. And thanks very much for an awesome map, Jason!

[Cainehill]

I thought the Cradle map used "#nostart" entries to create the "rule" that all starting provinces would have at least 4 neighbors?

Is there some other mechanism that does this, because right now neither of the "fixed" .map files on Illwinter's site have any #nostart provinces.

Just noticed this because I had a start in province 150, with a grand total of 1 neighbor, and started checking the files.

Looks like maybe the #nostart's (if I'm correct in recalling that they were what was used) got removed while bugs with the neighbors were fixed.

[Edi]

The #nostart command is not necessary in the map file if the appropriate provinces have been specified as nostart ones in the map editor. The map editor adds that info into the #terrain command.

IIRC, the terrain types were as follows:
0 Plains
1 Small province
2 Large Province
4 Sea
8 Fresh Water
16 Mountain
32 Waste
64 Swamp
128 Forest
256 Farm
512 Nostart
1024 Many Sites

You just add together what you need, and that's the terrain in the province. E.g. a province with both forest, mountain and fresh water (lake or river) and that had many sites and was nostart would be 8 + 16 + 128 + 512 + 1024 = 1688, so the terrain command would look like #terrain 1688.

It annoys me that the Last two of those options were left out of the mapedit.pdf, because they would come in real handy when manually editing map files later when you can't use the map editor anymore (because it wipes out everything else).

For the Cradle of Dominion map, the correct map file that you want is Cradle2.map, it has all the terrain bugs fixed, the cradle_fixedmap.zip was useless. Even the Cradle2.map has one bug, there are two forest provinces that should be neighbors but aren't at the eastern edge of the map just north of the bridge leading to the wastes that taper down to the southeast corner. It's easy to find with a test game with the neighbors filter in use and then add the appropriate #neighbour X Y line into the map file. I just don't remember the province numbers out of hand, though.

Edi

[Cainehill]

Ah, thanks - I knew about 1024, but not 512, so have always been putting in #nostart entries - which in one sense is friendlier, because you can grep for them.

I'd also thought that the Illwinter site had the fixed ".map" files in the main zip files, and was just offering the secondary ones so that people didn't have to download the background image again; then when I tried to verify the two fixed Versions, there weren't any #nostarts, so...

Again - thanks.

[Cainehill]

And, as I was thinking, even with Cradle 2 there's provinces that aren't non-startable even though they should be, because they don't have 3 land neighbors.

106 for instance - land provinces, 4 neighbors, but 2 are water, easily shafting a nation. Terrain is 256, farmland, but (according to the designer) it should be 768.

Personally, I'd really encourage map makers to use #nostart, because that way it's easier to step through the map, jot down the # of provinces that shouldn't be startable, and then grep / awk / perl / etc all provinces that are currently excluded from starting provinces.

[ June 01, 2004, 04:18: Message edited by: Cainehill ]