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

[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!

[Chazar]

Saber Cherry said:
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.

Thanks for your input, but I have trouble understanding you:

I assume you refer to V1.01 rather than V1.03, right? I see your problem: I think of rivers and coastlines as natural borders, however this concept is clearly broken at some places, like "Drüh Rogg" (38 or 39 depending on version), "Stepping Stones" (37 in V1.03), or "Shallow Waters" (85)...

Admittingly, I never tried my own map with the province adjacency arrows turned off. However I fail to see the benefit of explicit province center markers, like the little cabins you proposed: How would they function differently from the province flags placed by dom2, which already mark province centers? Or are you refering to the city provinces, which are marked at the city instead of the province's center?

So there is still the problem with those provinces cited above where the natural borders are different from the actual province borders...

[Saber Cherry]

Chazar said:
I assume you refer to V1.01 rather than V1.03, right?

Hmmm... I downloaded it today from Illwinter's site. The version is not listed in the map file, but it says #domversion 175. I assumed it was 1.03.

I see your problem: I think of rivers and coastlines as natural borders, however this concept is clearly broken at some places, like "Drüh Rogg" (38 or 39 depending on version), "Stepping Stones" (37 in V1.03), or "Shallow Waters" (85)...

Admittingly, I never tried my own map with the province adjacency arrows turned off. However I fail to see the benefit of explicit province center markers, like the little cabins you proposed: How would they function differently from the province flags placed by dom2, which already mark province centers? Or are you refering to the city provinces, which are marked at the city instead of the province's center?

The main difference is that you only see flags in provinces adjacent to your empire, and for distant areas, it is really hard to tell what a province is or isn't.

Rivers make nice borders, but they are not used as borders in most Dominions II maps, and the roads look like borders too, and somtimes coastlines are borders and sometimes not, and the shipping lines sort of look like borders as well, and...

Places with victory points and cities are obvious, but otherwise, a "province center" designation in non-obvious provinces (bigger than 1 pixel) would be helpful to me, if not to other people.

[Chazar]

[*]Actually it should read "(V1.03)" within the title. V1.03 should have 103 provinces, while the old version has only 102. Furthermore all filenames contain a 2, i.e. chandrea2.tga. I thought that #domversion is not about the map itself, but about the minimal version of dom2 required to play, isnt it?

---
[*]Oh, I see, I forgot about that problem that flags cannot be seen from afar. I agree, there ought to be a more clear designation for the provinces -- added to my ToDo's now!

[Saber Cherry]

Oh, it was called Chandrea.map, no 2. #domversion is the Dominions 2 version, but... there is no version 175, which is why I mentioned it