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

[Arralen]

Possible Map Errors:

???

edited:
Upon reloading the game today, the provinces #68 & #76 do not show up as direct neighbours.

Strange, really. Haven't seen something like that before - but I'm 100% shure that they where shown as neighbours yesterday. I checked at least twice while playing and writing the bug report.

[Chazar]

Arralen said:
Possible Map Errors:
#68 & #76 are direct neighbours

Are you sure you got that numbers right? According to the map file that I did not alter so far, they are not neighbours. However, they have #64 as their common neighbour..

[Chazar]

I've been told that Neighborship (4-19), (102-13) and (13-25) are wrong and need to be removed. I am currently deciding on adding known Resource-Sites and preset Fortresses to Cities. Any suggestion which Cities need boosting as compared to others?

I've also been told that bloodnations might have an advantage due to cities, but I do not think so, as smaller maps are disadvantageous to blood nations anyway and because blood hunting does not profit from highly populated areas (>5000) except for the duration of the hunt - while game duration should be shorter due to the small-size map. Comments?

[Arralen]

No, blood hunters won't have an advantage, unless you count crippling your gold income by decimation the pop through extensive blood hunting an advantage. An experienced blood player would go hunting in the numerous 5-6k provinces and leave the others alone, to get more gold to buy more mages.

Did 2 test games against AI on the map, and here's what I had to find out:

The map size is far from ideal - it's simply to "stretched" in the vertical direction for a wraparound-map. Together with the (therefore) NW-SO "wrapped" land masses this makes for a very strange game. And it becomes complex fast - but in such a sense, that you have lots of interlocked fronts within short time, and have to check neighbours etc. constantly.

The Bridges as provinces is something I can't get used to. They end up with about 4500 pop. and 14 ress., despite being small plains (have to be plains, otherwise terrain movement restrictions would apply) - so they are more worth than some full-sized mountain/swamp provinces.
Even worse - they don't work as intended. A bottleneck is something you have to pass through. But they only make distances longer by 1, and you actually move into them and sit there. Unless you're caelum, in which case you're happy about another way to use you province hopping ability. Furthermore, they're cluttering the map horribly with all those additional prov flags which, if you zoom out, seemingly are placed right on the borders between "real" provinces.

The oceans/seas are too small/too few - seafarers, esp. Vanheim gets an unfair advantage this way. The vans could simply move everywhere as if the seas wheren't there. Heck, if even the AI could use this to it's advantage ..

Adding pre-placed sites to the cities will not be sufficient Even if you add the "best" ressource-giving site, it's only a meager 50 ress. Which are not doubled by building a castle on top of them, IIRC. Better make those prov. "plain" plains and add additional pop via map command. (basically, that's what the "grassland" flag does: 150% pop, 50% ress. IIRC, and lesser chance to find magic sites)

My suggestion: Drop the bridges. There are bridges on other maps (e.g. Cradle) which work quite well as a hint for prov. neighbouring. Add cities as "standalone" prov. - they are much more easily discernable.


But don't get me wrong - it's a great map, nicely done and absolutely playable. Actually, I'm being trashed by my own modded Ulm in the 2nd game, and it's the DOM2 game I have the most fun playing ever ! But the map shows so much potential to be even better ...

[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!