Sod V5 New Map

UPDATED: April 02, 2009


Hi guy's.

I'm making the new map for SoD V5
The Map is still WIP, but this is what's done so far.

This thread is for you guys to brainstorm to. I also want you to wright the first thing that comes to your mind when you see it, ya know!

Change that, keep that, remove that completly, add this and so on. And to ease my work... please specify!

If you can, please specify pic too.


The New Continent (We'll call it that for now) might look a little barren, but keep in mind
that there are NO (parties)/ Towns/Castles/Villages/Bridges on the new continent what so ever.
(Except for Radoghir Castle and 2 sea-raider spawn points, but its only temporarily there for testing)


Questions NOT regarding the map does not belong in this thread.
I dont know more than you guys about the mod, and I haven't asked, and I won't.


_____________________________________________________________________

Below you will find the New map of Old Calradia. I have not made any major changes to it.

The pictures in this spoiler are from the map editor.



_____________________________________________________________________


Below you will find the New Continent.

The pictures in this spoiler are from the map editor.


______________________________________________________________________

Below you will find an Overview. The Overview is unfortunately very small.

The pictures in this spoiler are from the map editor.



______________________________________________________________________

Below you will find the New map of Old Calradia.

The pictures in this spoiler are from In-Game.


______________________________________________________________________


Below you will find the New Continent.

The pictures in this spoiler are from In-Game.




_______________________________________________________________________

UPDATE
UPDATED: April 02, 2009

Some new pictures of the map. These pictures are from the remake based on the suggestions You guys gave me.




Below you will find Choke Points of the New Continent.

The pictures in this spoiler are from Map Editor.


You asked for Chokepoints and recived...




Below you will find the mountains of the New Continent.

The pictures in this spoiler are from Map Editor.


You asked for Irregular Mountains and recived...





Below you will find the lakes over all.

The pictures in this spoiler are from Map Editor.


You asked for Irregular Lakes and recived...





Below you will find the Peninsula.

The pictures in this spoiler are from Map Editor.


You asked for Peninsula and modifications of the shore and recived...



_______________________________________________________________________

I would also like to thank the guys that helped me with all the mapmaking questions:

[list type=decimal]
[*]Vonmistont
[*]Saxondragon
[*]Keedo420
[*]GetAssista
[/list]


And regarding the map,

Thanks In Advance!

Nagl

Thanks NaglFaar!

I wonder how would it look with Punkt's textures

I know it's only first version but I would love to see less regular shapes, even more choak points and for gameplay pursposes (unfortunately) less trees. They look good but unfortunately they are killing the fps of even best machines in battles. Forests should be placed in strategic positions and be less scattered I suppose (i know it will look worse because that ).

Easy to say huh?

Thanks once again.

Yeah, the forests. I'll decimate them.
For the "regular shapes" i'm not shure if i follow. Elaborate please.

Anywho, I'll get to it in the morning.

For now... Too many nights, too little sleep.

NaglFaar said:

For the "regular shapes" I'm not sure if i follow. Elaborate please.

Click to expand...

The lakes, islands, coastlines and mountains could be more irregular in shape, more rugged, less "geometrical" or straight (less regular shapes, circles, straight lines). Maybe not as extreme as the Norwegian coast line but  more bays, peninsulas, maybe whole coastline rather than going straight W->E more waved. Lakes and islands less round.

Just some rugging.

Nice work on the map!

vonmistont said:

NaglFaar said:

For the "regular shapes" I'm not sure if i follow. Elaborate please.

Click to expand...

The lakes, islands, coastlines and mountains could be more irregular in shape, more rugged, less "geometrical" or straight (less regular shapes, circles, straight lines). Maybe not as extreme as the Norwegian coast line but  more bays, peninsulas, maybe whole coastline rather than going straight W->E more waved. Lakes and islands less round.

Just some rugging.

Click to expand...

Textbook explenation.

The mountains will invoke fear into peoples heart by not being so inviting.

The lakes and islands will NOT be completly round.

And the shore shall have bays and penisulas.


-EDIT-

BTW, I take it as this goes for old calradia too, and not just The New Continent?

Very nice WIP

My suggestion would be similar to that of von, variety and variation:

Cosatlines
Currently the sea separating the old and new is divided into a large rectangular strip with couple of islands
Suggestion: once side would be close from each other but with heavily fortified position-> quick to cross but deadly risk. and the another side where the sea separating distance is even greater, with couple of islands (pirate bases) in between, so longer travel through sea->high probability of sea battles
So a peninsular idea could well fit in the design

river
On the new map, there is one major stream, quite straight forward
Suggestion: as river is a natural frontier between possible factions placing, perhaps add one of more stream, and put the stream into S U C letter shape, and crossing bridge would be very vital and high strategical value as explained by von about choke points. Different factions can be virtually neighboring each other only to be separated by river and can only warring each other through a single bridge crossing or go all way round to achieve same thing (this intervene where would you hit head on with a heavy but slow army, or light and fast one to take your enemy at the back lands)

mountain pass
Same thought, same logic, choke points, whether to charge direct head on fortified pass positions or go all way round, then army size, troops types intervene, requires more strategical thinking for the players

I truly understand how time consuming is it into the map making, thanks again to dedicate to this assignment

Nice map 
But becareful with rivers and crossing, it might creat "stuck point". I encountered it in few maps of other mods already

Thanks guys, for the replies. I've made some changes and I will post them soon. Just some minor tweaks left.

Btw, does anyone know if it's possible to ADD a vertex? It could be very useful some times... most of the times.

Or are you stuck with the (vertexes?) that are already there?

Stuck I believe New ones are created on the New map creation based on config file entry. A shame we can not copy part of the land and paste it elsewhere.

Shjn said:

Very nice WIP

My suggestion would be similar to that of von, variety and variation:

Cosatlines
Currently the sea separating the old and new is divided into a large rectangular strip with couple of islands
Suggestion: once side would be close from each other but with heavily fortified position-> quick to cross but deadly risk. and the another side where the sea separating distance is even greater, with couple of islands (pirate bases) in between, so longer travel through sea->high probability of sea battles
So a peninsular idea could well fit in the design

Click to expand...

I have some questions and comments but before I can do this, I need to know what you mean by a sea battles.  I have seen a mod that creates bridge battles (which would be cool to add if possible) but has the work been done to have a battle on a boat in the sea?  If so, then there are definitely some cool possibilities.  If not, then crossing the sea should at least take one day.  It is not something you should plan to do frequently and needs to be large enough to be a pain in the butt to cross and why these civilizations do not trade. 

There will be some technical issues regardless of the time to cross.  Such as:
How is it possible to collect fiefs from both sides of the map?
Why does one side of the map require special structures to train units while the other does not, etc.?
How will caravans spawned in one city to travel across the ocean function (in the same respect, how will the city quest to escort the caravan work if the city is on other side of sea)? 

Will there be naval caravans (trade ships)? 

Sorry, I'm getting off topic.  Back to the maps:

Why is Nord territory so horse friendly (i.e. flat) yet they do not use horses?  Swadia territory has many hills, but they are definitely a cavalry civilization.  Is it far fetch to put mountains on the coast to make the Nords more adept to infantry battles and flatten out Swadia territory? 

Also,
Is it possible to make a dessert with dessert battles?  The Zaks (sorry forget the spelling) seem to come off as a desert / horse civilization and having dessert battles would be fun (dunes, cactus, etc.).  Of course this would have to be located very far from the ocean / snow areas. 

Beach battles is something else that would be sweet. 

Cyclohexane said:

Shjn said:

....longer travel through sea->high probability of sea battles
So a peninsular idea could well fit in the design

Click to expand...

I have some questions and comments but before I can do this, I need to know what you mean by a sea battles.  ....

Click to expand...

V5 SoD Developement Brainstorming Thread
New strategic experience:
- Caladria will be expanded. New oversea continent will appear.
- On this continent there will be Your Motherland conquered by The Legion.
- The basic idea is that Player comes from his Motherland with a task from his King to gather forces abroad (in Caladria) and come back some day to strike back.
- Meanwhile Motherland is Occupied. Still some of the loyal Lords are hiding in mountains and forests and fighting with The Legion.
- Legate Gaius Marius sees the threat and decides to build a fleet to invade Caladria.
- Sea battles will be added on very large scale.
- First Invasion wave will be huge but the Centurions will NOT respawn. Instead of that Legate will launch more and more Invasion waves (significantly smaller).
- The player will have a task not only to repel an invasion but also to build a fleet, and capture ports in Motherland to stop new invasion waves to come.
- Then The player will have to fight not only with the strong Legion forces that occupy Motherland but also with treacherous Lords from his own Motherland.

Click to expand...

I believe this is the origin creation Pirates of Calradia of all those sea battle derivation

@NaglFaar, Sorry for an off-topic reply

Vonmistont:

What a shame. However, I'll be thinking of that nex time I make a new map.




Cyclohexane:


Regarding the technical questions I actually have no clue. I'm the kind of guy that's having trouble removing the (e,q,1,0) from the game_menus.py, adding the ships to be able to test out the map fully, without srewing it up totaly. (Had to do it 6 times before succeding).

So this I'm afraid i'm not very much help.
Sea battles has been made, and they will be implemented to the mod. This much I now.


Regarding the map thou...

The main objective with this map was to add a new continent to the native map. Also adding some more strategical points
As for the nords, their land is pretty flat in the native map and will probably stay that way. The Swadians are a faction with well mixed troops thus the land shaping.

About the sea travel time, its probably to little ocean. This is because of concern for older comps and also gamecraches.
The time it takes to travel (as for now) in a complete straight line across the ocean is 2 time spans. I.E early morning till noon.
Also put in mind that you then travel in the speed of 15 and don't have to think about dodging/ avoiding any enemies.
Perhaps the speed will be lowerd later, I can't answer that cus I don't know.

Regarding the dessert battles, they work fine even in native. All that happens when you enter it is an message saying: Unable_to_load_random_scn_object.
And thats it. This I bet will be fixed, but as said before, I can't answer that.

Shjn:

It's cool.


Hope this clears up some questions regarding the map-making part.

FYI - from what I've read, its possible to control the speed of any boats.  So travel by sea could be slowed down.

Also - although its sort of cool to have a boat on the strategic map that you move around... mildly cool... we could emulate sea travel entirely using menus & presentations.  Think Indiana Jones style icon moving across a 2D map.  And we could emulate encounters along the way, leading to battles, storms, etc.  So sea crossing can be controlled, or abstracted as we see fit.

Mordachai said:

FYI - from what I've read, its possible to control the speed of any boats.  So travel by sea could be slowed down.

Also - although its sort of cool to have a boat on the strategic map that you move around... mildly cool... we could emulate sea travel entirely using menus & presentations.  Think Indiana Jones style icon moving across a 2D map.  And we could emulate encounters along the way, leading to battles, storms, etc.  So sea crossing can be controlled, or abstracted as we see fit.

Click to expand...

Sounds interesting, could work very well. Would be like playing text based RPG games. Some people may not like it though, and it could stop people from being able to travel across the countries without fighting bandits.

Cyclohexane said:

Why is Nord territory so horse friendly (i.e. flat) yet they do not use horses?  Swadia territory has many hills, but they are definitely a cavalry civilization.  Is it far fetch to put mountains on the coast to make the Nords more adept to infantry battles and flatten out Swadia territory? 

Also,
Is it possible to make a dessert with dessert battles?  The Zaks (sorry forget the spelling) seem to come off as a desert / horse civilization and having dessert battles would be fun (dunes, cactus, etc.).  Of course this would have to be located very far from the ocean / snow areas. 

Beach battles is something else that would be sweet.

Click to expand...

Just make me think about my system calculating terrain bonus for autoresolve.

As mountains aren't a terrain type you can fight in (the only mountain terrain is unpassable), the only way I've found to determine if a battle terrain is mountaineous was based on the altitude (if z position value of party is > to a set value, terrain is mountain). I don't know if it's also how the engine decide to use flat or rough 3d map, but there are chances it's that too.

So on a map with big flat plateau very large area of land will be considered mountains and advantage infantry, when hills that look like mountains but are in fact low in altitude (ie a 50 meters high hill in a middle of an altitude 0 plain) will be considered plains. For the terrain bonus system to work, it's needed to have all lands that should be considered mountains higher than all lands that should be considered plains (this or using a different terrain for all really mountaineous lands, ie cover all terrains that should be considered mountain with snow).

The first post is now updated with some new pics from the modification of the map.


The mountains surrounding the map will still be an open rektangel.
This is to prevent the player to move out of camera view (and lack of imagination of what to put there instead).

As for the ocean. Yes it's a bit small, but that is so that older comps won't go:
****, my god, I can't handle this. Lag, Motherlagger.1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1. And then crash.

If the SoD developers feel that it should be increased,
I will smash my head againt the wall,
and have to start all over again with a new map. So be it.


Trees, my beautiful trees, has been DRASTICLY decreased. This was also to improve the FPS and not make comps go as I described above.

It's nice that you think about the people with older comps, until recently I was the guy with 256 MBs of RAM
I also love that the New Continent is WIP, finally. Oh how I've been waiting to duke it out with every bastard oversea...

vadermath said:

It's nice that you think about the people with older comps, until recently I was the guy with 256 MBs of RAM
I also love that the New Continent is WIP, finally. Oh how I've been waiting to duke it out with every bastard oversea...

Click to expand...

Glad you like it.

NaglFaar said:

As for the ocean. Yes it's a bit small, but that is so that older comps won't go:
****, my god, I can't handle this. Lag, Motherlagger.1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1. And then crash.

Click to expand...

I don't think it needs to be larger.  As I posted, we can do things in the code to make it feel bigger.  So we can keep it relatively small, as you have it, and still get whatever effect we want from it.