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.