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[Acymetric]

I'm trying to figure out which levers to pull to manage population growth/save size during large world gens with long histories.  The Wiki is helpful for understanding the basic impact of the settings, but doesn't really get into the gameplay implications of raising or lowering values (nor does it talk about what "normal" ranges might be so for all I know I'm way off track already).  I am tweaking vanilla entities a little, if this should have gone in the modding subforum my apologies but it seemed like this is more related to world gen than modding.

My goal is basically to have a large world with a large number of civs and sites.  I also want a lot of megabeasts/semimegabeasts/titans (currently 400/400/200), with a goal of making it to the Age of Legends during world gen.  I had a world make it to year 2000 and remain in the age of legends, but that was with the site cap at 1000 instead of 6000.  I assume having more sites increases the likelihood of encountering/killing beasts/titans...or is it just a function of population, or historical population, or something else?  Kind of a tangent, but I've also noticed elf settlements reliably die off around year 500 leaving only the capitol surrounded by abandoned sites, not sure if that is a common thing or not.

In terms of increasing sites, are there any gameplay downsides to reducing the MAX_SITE_POP_NUMBER?  More susceptible to beast attacks/invasions?  Or could I halve the max site population to get twice as many sites with half the total population?

As far as historical figure count, right now I have considerably less than one historical figure per site.  I have no idea if that is the right way to think about it, nor do I know if that is way too low or perfectly reasonable.  Any thoughts are welcome.  For making it to the Age of Legends, do I want more sites, more historical figures, more population, or are none of them relevant?

Here's a sample of the relevant population settings to get a sense of what I'm doing (some slight variation across entities but all are along these lines). I don't really care if any particular civ sprawls as long as the other civs are still around.

Entities:

Code: [Select]

[MAX_POP_NUMBER:12000]
[MAX_SITE_POP_NUMBER:100]

World Gen:

Code: [Select]

[TOTAL_CIV_NUMBER:180]
[TOTAL_CIV_POPULATION:1000]
[SITE_CAP:6000]
[MEGABEAST_CAP:400]
[SEMIMEGABEAST_CAP:400]
[TITAN_NUMBER:200]
[MOUNTAIN_CAVE_MIN:250]
[NON_MOUNTAIN_CAVE_MIN:400]

[Salmeuk]

humm. my only advice is, to not worry too much about 'The Age of Legends' designation since it merely indicates a percentage loss of megabeasts since beginning of worldgen. its purely aesthetic designation

I assume having more sites increases the likelihood of encountering/killing beasts/titans...or is it just a function of population, or historical population, or something else?  Kind of a tangent, but I've also noticed elf settlements reliably die off around year 500 leaving only the capitol surrounded by abandoned sites, not sure if that is a common thing or not.

yeahh if you are adjusting default titan numbers, you can easily kill all viable civs . every titan or megabeast seems to attempt attacks yearly, so the more you add the higher chances you have of the early game settlements being completely destroyed.

I have a settings file that generates medium worlds with 1000 titans, and that is kinda fun, but I have to stop generation before year 200 or all the civs are destroyed.

pop growth and save size will ultimately come down to number of civs that survive the first 100 years and the size of the map.

histfig counts per site are generally not that high, so 1 or 2 is to be expected? I think

elves are weak and tend to fall off once the goblins get their populations going which might explain the die offs around 500.

my sweet spot settings tend towards medium / small worlds with boosted civ counts, however I only run the worlds for 250 or so years.

If you are shooting for 500+ year histories I highly recommend small or smaller worlds. Medium is simply too big, and too much irrelevant data.

if you are having trouble with certain civs staying alive, you might try duplicating their raw files into a 'new civ' with the same properties as the old one. this (iirc) causes more of that civ / race to generate during worldgen.

site caps, I know very little about, and am curious if anyone else knows how or what they affect in terms of lag generation and save size. I imagine you lower the site caps to prevent over-population, but.. unintended consequences perhaps.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

TBH once mythgen is better fleshed out I'm willing to bet the age designations will be more meaningful, but yeah they're basically placeholders as is.

[Acymetric]

humm. my only advice is, to not worry too much about 'The Age of Legends' designation since it merely indicates a percentage loss of megabeasts since beginning of worldgen. its purely aesthetic designation

I assume having more sites increases the likelihood of encountering/killing beasts/titans...or is it just a function of population, or historical population, or something else?  Kind of a tangent, but I've also noticed elf settlements reliably die off around year 500 leaving only the capitol surrounded by abandoned sites, not sure if that is a common thing or not.

yeahh if you are adjusting default titan numbers, you can easily kill all viable civs . every titan or megabeast seems to attempt attacks yearly, so the more you add the higher chances you have of the early game settlements being completely destroyed.

I have a settings file that generates medium worlds with 1000 titans, and that is kinda fun, but I have to stop generation before year 200 or all the civs are destroyed.

pop growth and save size will ultimately come down to number of civs that survive the first 100 years and the size of the map.

histfig counts per site are generally not that high, so 1 or 2 is to be expected? I think

elves are weak and tend to fall off once the goblins get their populations going which might explain the die offs around 500.

my sweet spot settings tend towards medium / small worlds with boosted civ counts, however I only run the worlds for 250 or so years.

If you are shooting for 500+ year histories I highly recommend small or smaller worlds. Medium is simply too big, and too much irrelevant data.

if you are having trouble with certain civs staying alive, you might try duplicating their raw files into a 'new civ' with the same properties as the old one. this (iirc) causes more of that civ / race to generate during worldgen.

site caps, I know very little about, and am curious if anyone else knows how or what they affect in terms of lag generation and save size. I imagine you lower the site caps to prevent over-population, but.. unintended consequences perhaps.

So, I did accept that you are right and I needed to downsize my world gen size. It is admittedly kind of nice being able to regenerate worlds quickly while testing things!  I also decided to make it a "widescreen" world so I could see more of it during world gen, which actually resulted in some cool worlds (I use poles, so the compressed temperate area gave interesting results).

That said, changing [MAX_POP_NUMBER] in entities_default.txt appears to do...nothing.  As best I can tell, the only thing that will reliably limit site count is the global [SITE_CAP] (Site Cap After Civ Creation) setting in advanced world gen.  I don't like the global setting though, because it prevents weaker civs from making a comeback once the cap is reached.  I also feel like it is blocking necromancer towers, although my understanding is that it isn't supposed to and there may be some other issue causing them not to show up (I am getting necromancers reliably, they just won't build towers).  Thanks for the feedback, if I come up with anything useful I will report back!

[Acymetric]

Weirdly, even though  the entity tag[MAX_POP_NUMBER] doesn't seam to work, [MAX_STARTING_CIV_NUMBER] and [MAX_SITE_POP_NUMBER] DO work.  Unfortunately, without [MAX_POP_NUMBER] those two tags don't really prevent site explosion (although at least I can balance the number of each civ even if I can't limit their size).