Would you look at this!

[mxb2001]

I don't recall that the old buggy 1.31 ever generated lairs like this. Maybe I don't remember... : ) But new Com. Pat. feature or not this is pretty amazingly crowded. Well it is a small land choice, that probably helped. Heh. Haven't tried Tiny, I imagine it's even crazier. No room to settle until you clear some perhaps!

[Gaznak]

And what good is in all of this? Where is at least the smallest shade of balance?

[mxb2001]

I just tried out my parallel 1.31 MOM on small and I noticed a difference. No adjacent lairs and it seems like less lairs period. I am starting to suspect that the Community Patch may have some sort of bug wrt Map Generation. I know it fixes a lot of problems with the 1.31 Map Gen. but it may have introduced one. Either that or it was a neccesary compromise to fix the old bugs.

Still it feels weird.

[drake178]

Either that or it was a neccesary compromise to fix the old bugs.

It was a sort of necessary compromise, but strictly speaking, it was a corner cut. Allowing adjacent lairs is the fastest and easiest way to mostly prevent the map generator from locking up in an infinite loop on land sizes smaller than the vanilla minimum of 360 tiles per plane. Such as, for instance, the "Small" setting of the published CP, which is actually only 250 tiles per plane (Tiny is 150).

The original lair placement design was: roll coordinates, then check for validity - including a minimum distance of 2 from all already-created lairs. While this is simple and efficient with the vanilla map parameters, it lacks any way of evaluating the strictness of the placement criteria, and so can't be made to allow adjacency only when it's actually necessary. It could have been modified such that allowing it is triggered by land size, but it wasn't - the minimum distance requirement was instead removed altogether.

I replaced this generator (as well as most others) in v1.52.03a with ones that can check for viability. That is, they evaluate all valid tiles and pick only from those. This results in more or less the same placements as vanilla - with original criteria being retained wherever possible -, while also being able to lower requirements if necessary. I think that's a much better solution, but it also took a lot more time and work to create.

[mxb2001]

Hey thanks for directing me back to that post. I'd only skimmed it earlier and didn't realize that it's basically the latest patch. I've tried it out and it looks great! It even has an option to go back to the easier island tower/node maps but for now I'm gonna try and beat the much more active computer players. I do remember the sad way that in 1.31 you'd see stacks of 9 computer units on a island tower linked to a continent on the other plane where they came from...
Some other interesting optional patches I saw were the High Elf one and the less restricted high diff AI races. Surprised to learn that these were things in 1.31.

Oh found a typo in the help pop up for the restricted ai races it says restiricted. LOL not an easy word to type, I just typoed it in this sentence.

Anyways thanks a lot for making the new map gen patch. Much appreciated.