Cheater Hater Wrote:Looking at the latest picture, do deer appear on plains hills naturally? I don't remember ever seeing it, but I haven't played as many maps as you guys (especially if it's a modified donut, like SevenSpirits was suggesting).
I don't think that's unnatural - seems normal to me. Could be wrong of course.
As for the map, it's definitely a Donut base script as Seven suggested. It just has to be - or I'd bet pretty heavily on it anyways. The shoreline is a hint, but the bigger hint is the abundance of grassland and rivers, and just the general resource layout. Take a look at early screenshots of the land surrounding Spullla in PB2 and look at this land. It's really, really similar. No other script that I've seen generates grass river tiles that frequently. Note other things like the lack of floodplains, the lack of deserts, the lack of tundra, etc. The little bay south of our capital would be man-made in that case, but that's certainly plausible. So yes, I'd bet pretty confidently that this is a customized Donut.
One other distinguishing feature (that gives things away a bit) about Donut is that Jungles are the main oddity with that map script. This was one of the (few) mistakes the PB2 map team made on what was otherwise a very good map. Jungles only appear at the Equator in Donut as you might expect, but this leads to much more different land quality around the donut than you'd expect - the equator teams in PB2 got robbed a little bit because of having to deal with those. I think of Inca, Dantski, and Nakor in particular who got quite a bit. The alternative though is to play with the "No Jungle" preset, but this often ends up completely removing a bunch of calendar sources like Dyes, Rice, and Bananas. I'd expect in this case that the map team would have turned Jungle off, but it's quite possible they may not have noticed the lack of jungle-centric calendar sources. So it's quite possible we may be looking at a map with a few luxuries missing. It's not particularly meaningful to us just yet, but it's something to keep in mind as we continue to hypothesize.
Do we know what map size this is set at? We can roll some Donut maps with our guessed settings to see how close that gets us to the land tiles, and we can then formulate a guess on how much hand-drawn land there is out there and prioritize or deprioritize water exploration accordingly.