Hidden resources map

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Looks like they took care of it already, Pharnakes. I don't know exactly how different things are now but it should be easy enough to check.

Konny, there are a total of 64 hidden resources (or HRs) allowed by the RTW engine. Doing this allows us to have three major sections of map (3 HRs), five sub-sections of these (5 HRs), and up to 16 regions as part of each sub-section.

Binary numbering lets us represent the numbers 0 through 15 as Pharnakes said. We used four binary digits n1, n2, n4, and n8 (representing binary 0) as well as their opposites, y1, y2, y4, and y8 (representing binary 1) for another 8 HRs. This is a grand total of 16 of the 64 precious HRs used up in order to allow us to have EB work the way EB works.

It is possible to make this more efficient, dropping from 16 to 8. You can do exactly the same thing with the following:

bin1 bin2 bin4 bin8 bin16 bin32 bin64 bin128

Then you can have a series of stuff for each unit recruitment line stating "bin1 and not bin2 and bin4 and not bin8 and bin16 and not bin32 and not bin64 and not bin128" to get region #021. In fact, we had this system in 0.72.

The reason we jettisoned it was because it was freaking impossible for a human being to look at and easily get a sense of where a unit could be recruited. This is why you could get situations where the game allowed hastati in England, gestatae in Carthage, and baktrian horsemen in Crete - because the code was hand-edited and simultaneously unreadable.

We had roughly 30 free HRs at the time so we went with the 16 HR system because we knew if we had to, later, we could convert to something more efficient. However, we wanted something anybody could quickly reference both in the code and on the map. That's why the thing is color coded and the "A/B/C/D/E" groupings match up roughly with modern geographic regions. You can look at a unit that starts off with "requires NW and A" and immediately know it can be recruited somewhere in modern day Iberian peninsula/southern France.

I believe that the only trick to the binary is that because the binary numbers go from 0 to 15 (ie, n8 n4 n2 n1 is the same as 0 + 0 + 0 + 0, or 0) that to make it easier to read we made the "0" equivalent to 16 for purposes of human beings reading the map. That way n8 n4 n2 y1 (or 0 + 0 + 0 + 1) is always region 1 of the subsection and y8 y4 y2 y1 (or 8 + 4 + 2 + 1) is always region 15 of the subsection as well.

Does this make any sense?