Map development thread

[Solo]

Probably would have to start from scratch to do so. Anyway alpaca didnt want to work with anything larger than vanilla scale (& I think he's got a very good point about game speed) so we kinda have the best compromise possible here. That doesnt mean we wont have open field battles just because there are a few clusters like Venise-Treviso, Amalfi-Salerno or Vienne-Lyon. Plus larger scale maps also have their own problems.

[alpaca]

Yes I am pretty much against these huge maps. They slow down the game speed a lot because of a much more complex pathfinding, and they create other problems like if you scale movement with them you can't have properly immobile characters.
In addition, if we had a larger map people would ask for more regions so the effect would be annihilated again.

The most important point is however that the "siegefest"-effect doesn't only (not even primarily) depend on the distance between two settlements, but on the questions whether you can attack them in the same turn and whether there's a defensive army inside the settlement.
If you can't just assault them because you don't have spies/cats and/or the garrison is too large for that, you will have to actually siege them which is in fact the wanted behaviour because it leaves you open to counter-attacks and allows your opponent to send relief forces. The question is how good the AI copes with that, but right now there are good reasons to assume a smaller map works as well or better than a larger map in that regard.

[bovi]

From what I've seen in The Long Road, the AI does not seem to react very well to sieges, it will attack the besieger with an inferior army, then follow up with another inferior army when that fails, repeating until it's out of troops. With Kingdoms it seems to be a bit better, as it will mass its forces before attacking. Both observations are with not very much playtime though, I've been doing EB (RTW) mostly.

I agree that cities should not be moved from their historical positions, of course. This map is probably the best compromise between the issues of small/big.

[SigniferOne]

I have to say, the first in-game screenshot looks just amazing. Very good job Solo, looks like the map progress for your guys mod is proceeding very well.