Multiple Sea Regions

[DimeBagHo]

A post in another thread reminded me of this earlier bit of info from Jerome:

Jerome Grasdyke posted this info about map-making ages ago:

A few other caveats about regions:
- they should be 'convex' (one landmass, no inaccessible areas)*- they should have only one settlement and only one port
- all land tiles should be part of a known region
- each non-sea region should contain at least some fertile tiles
- continuous sea surfaces should form one region
- the maximum number of regions supported is 200
- the distance between the centres of any two adjacent regions should not exceed 50 tiles*

*: not doing these things shouldn't cause a crash, but it may cause the AI to mess up.
Which got me to wondering whether multiple sea regions could fix a problem with the AIs use of naval units on the Mundus Magnus map (ships in the Indian Ocean and Caspian Sea bunch up on the coast facing the Med). Has anyone managed to add multiple sea regions in RTW?

I tried the obvious method of giving the Indian Ocean a different colour in map_regions.tga, but this produced a ctd.

(BTW, I removed another region, without problems, so the total number of regions still come in under the limit).

[Arbaces]

If it's how I'm understanding it, using Ocean (and perhaps Deep) sea on map_ground_types on the Caspian and on the lakes should avoid your pirate ships from showing in unwanted places. AFAIK pirates get spawned on shallow sea, not sure about deep, and again AFAIK not on the ocean. Hope it helps a bit, or even further if you play in ground_types properly (you might try even tweaking the AI a little with these... ).

Arbaces

[Makanyane]

Vanilla RTW map_regions actually has slightly different sea colours for caspain and red seas. Difference is very marginal 41 140 233, 41 140 235 and 41 140 236 but that obviously loads. I did try playing about with colour variations on other maps to see if that did anything to help land-mass CTD problems (which it doesn't) but don't know if it does anything to help ship movement problems.

Fact that its in vanilla could mean something - or it might just be another thing from CA that was meant to do something at one stage and got forgotten about.

Btw the hypothesis about having to remove a region to get different sea colour in is probably right, M2TW has different coloured seas in map_regions as well and they have to be made same colour to get max number of land regions in.

[DimeBagHo]

*edit* scratched because I screwed up the test

[DimeBagHo]

Thanks for the help. I tried using the sea region colours from the vanilla map, and cutting down the number of land regions (so the total of sea + land = 200 regions). The campaign started fine, and the different sea areas showed different region ids. The AI behavior also appears to be much improved, as I had hoped, but I'll have to run some longer tests to confirm this.

[nikolai1962]

I'd be very interested in your results. Only occurred to me yesterday that the red sea etc seemed to break the caveats. If it's right you might even see more naval landings a la MTW2as i *think* they've split the seas up in that.

[DimeBagHo]

Longer tests confirm that the "bunching" problem is definitely fixed by having multiple sea regions. Pirates now roam around in the other two sea regions and occasionally blockade ports. The other AI factions also seem more active. I haven't seen much sign of naval invasions, but then all the factions with ports on those seas had available land targets, so that's no surprise.

[nikolai1962]

Sounds very interesting.

Wouldn't expect many more naval invasions at the beginning of the game unless the pirates were massively nerfed. Only later on when the AI factions had built bigger fleets and cut the pirates down a bit. Would prob also need the "prefers naval invasions" set to true.

If this is related to the convex region thing then i'd be surprised if there weren't more naval landings.

But i'm often wrong :)