Utility: RanDom v2.03 - Map gen & Semirandomizer... Updated

[Ballbarian]

Technically they were 'your' province files Ballbarian, and those who contributed. I just used your program to put them into the Faerun map.

Ah! Sorry for my confusion. I was running in high gear today and did more skimming than reading and completely misunderstood what you were trying to say. Work was insane today.

I downloaded the Faerunmod.map map that was attached to your post and removed all of the provinces from the map file that had been placed by SemiRandom ver095, then ran it through ver107 a few minutes ago and it modified 349 provinces with 'Fiddle Prov%' set to 100.

It could be that the map file you were using was already modified and SemiRandom just could not find very many new locations to populate.

On the other hand, it may be two problems, nostarts on the the Latus map and some other issue working with the Faerun map.

Very prophetic Panpiper!

The Latus map has 64 #specstart & 25 #land provinces. SemiRandom sees these provinces and all of their neighbors as being off limits for modification. Many of those provinces have 6+ neighbors with 7 and 8 neighbors not being uncommon. This quickly blocks 100's of provinces from modification. But it doesn't stop there. There are many provinces marked with terrain flags like FIRE-SITE, ASTRAL-SITE, EARTH-SITE, etc, and many of these are showing up as having no matching GAN file that is not unique and that has not already been placed. Again, this adds up to many provinces. (You can see when a province is skipped because of no matching GAN file by checking the 'Show Need' box on the 'General' settings tab.

Also note that when I ran a test run on Latus, SemiRandom v107 placed 38 provinces. Since you were only getting 3 or 4, I suspect that you have 'Desired Num Players' value on the 'Starts' tab set to some value other than zero. Every start location that SemiRandom places is going to mark that province and all of it's neighbors as off limits as well, further reducing the available clear locations.

Out of curiosity, I removed all of Latus's #specstart commands and ran it through SemiRandom which yielded 131 provinces modified. There were around 100 provinces with no matching GAN file and around 200 or more that were excluded because of the #land provinces and their neighbors. (Ideally, SemiRandom should only ignore the #land and not it's neighbors, but the initial idea was not to clutter areas around special provinces that were placed by map designers with a theme in mind.)

In summary:
When a map designer has used commands that set start locations and special provinces with custom content, SemiRandom will preserve them and all of their neighboring provinces.

If custom starts already exist in a map, be sure to set 'Desired Num Players' to zero.

If you happen to use the 'Show Need' option, and see an entry in the map file like:
----------------------------------------------------------
-- No match exists for province #71, terrain value:
-- Need: ASTRAL-SITE NORMAL COAST
----------------------------------------------------------

...then design a GAN file for it (the Province Editor tool can help with this) and submit it to this thread or email it to me and we will add it to the library.

Thank you for pointing out the issues you were having as I will bet there were other folks having similar troubles and hopefully some of this might help in understanding how this creature works.