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[Gezol]

The new maps- very nice. It looks a lot better now that there's other snowy terrains.
I really like this idea of all kinds of different color possibilities... I'm picturing red as being a blasted, hellish landscape, and purple as being more like the swamps in Mordor where there were the ghostly dead faces in the water. Cyan, meanwhile, is like Lothlorien or something like that.

One problem with cyan for good is that it's the color of tundra and glaciers. Those do look distinctly different from the good landscapes, but it might be a little confusing for some people... still, I'm not sure what other color would work... maybe if you made the tundra and glaciers white?

[Toady One]

White looked too much like clouds for the glaciers, and mixing the colors looked to strange.  Also, cyan just... looks colder.  What I've done in this one is change the symbol for the tundra, so at least there's no confusing it with good plains.  Just like the low mountains are dark gray but not necessarily evil, I think people can deal with some particular cyan examples that aren't necessarily good.  A person is bound to run out of colors and symbols doing ascii.  This is probably okay.

map

[Gezol]

The new tundra looks good. It's less confusing that way, and actually the new symbols look colder somehow.

Is it possible for events in the game to increase or decrease the level of evil on the map? And also, how much space does the dwarf fortress itself take up on the map? In other words, about how many map squares are we seeing in the movies?

[Toady One]

Yeah, the new symbols look a little like space or something, and space is cold.

Yeah, unlike Armok, where everything is recreated with seeds, the maps here are always fleshed out and stored.  The downside is that the maps can't be as large as Armok's, but the upside is that they can be destroyed with impunity (something that would be possible in Armok but take more time to implement).  The altitude, evil, rainfall, region type, whatever can be changed to whatever by whatever.  The dwarf fortress itself occupies one square on the map, and in fact, so that you can play as many games as you want, you can have multiple fortresses per square (and they don't see each other).  Once you start getting your nobles, you'll be able to interact with more and more world map squares, and you'll eventually be able to influence everything there.  Then your next fortress can deal with the consequences of all the horrible wars you started.

[Joe Sixpack]

How might one destroy huge swatches of land?

[Toady One]

Here's some civilizations on top of it:

civs

I dunno.  Leave it to the evil people.  Or if your cave is big enough, maybe you can have lumber imported from villages around your cave entrance, and it will slowly affect the map.

[Toady One]

Latest

I've balanced things out a bit more and made fewer large cities.  This one has 139 dwarf sites (7 capitals), 26 evil fortresses (3 capitals), 31 elf sites (2 capitals), 2104 human towns (15 capitals) and 462 nomadic kobold bands (not displayed).  The evil (goblin) fortresses are all in the mountains -- the other evil places have roaming kobolds for now, with much more to come of course.

The dwarf cities are all placed in evil<33>=66 zones.  I think the player games will all be placed in between, in the 33<=evil<66 zones.  In this way you have a fair shot of trading (almost certainly with humans, and possibly elves), with some danger of attack from gobs, though not too much.

[Gezol]

It's looking good. So is all this map stuff one of the core things, or just part of one?

I'm assuming the omega symbols are dwarf fortresses, but I notice they come in different colors. Does that indicate size?

I also notice there's a lot of them in the tundra. Seems like there shouldn't be quite so many- that would be a pretty hard life, and made harder if there was a large population all competing for the same scant resources...

"Much more to come"-  Will there be lots of different races? In the movies, I remember there being a screen listing all the different kingdoms the dwarves had contacted. Will the map eventually show borders and things like that?

[Toady One]

Map stuff is sort of a bit of a lot of the core things -- core things like wars and trade and so on.  I've just been playing around with it recently.

Those are the dwarf fortresses, and yeah color is size.

The reason they can survive in the tundra right now is because they can dig inward -- dwarf city sizes are supported by mountain squares, where this isn't true for the others (well, gobs are supported by evil, which can be in the mountains).  At the same time, maybe the mountain squares in the cold shouldn't provide as much -- temperatures tend to normalize underground, so there might still be running water and cave critters though...  hard to say in these fantasy settings.

There will be more races than the 5 it currently places anyway, although these might end up being the main ones.  The borders all follow the natural terrain right now, but after I have wars and so on I might have to indicate where things are.

[Aquillion]

Probably the most definitive trait assigned to dwarves in generic fantasy settings is "hardy", so it makes a bit of sense that they'd be able to eke out a life in the cold if anyone could...  but it seems to me that they should still be less likely to build there than in warmer climates, if that's possible.

[Toady One]

They've since moved out of the glaciers.  Evil will still occasionally hang out there.  What else goes on there will depend on how much time there is to do it.

[Demon]

Elves in Tolk are completely unbothered by the cold.  They could settle there if not for possible food issues.

[flap]

For info : I have created a link to your maps and to this thread to an other thread, in an other forum :
http://z3.invisionfree.com/UrW_forum/index.php?showtopic=552

I appreaciate your maps, and thought that it could be source of inspiration for an other game (Unreal World. A kind of roguelike which takes place in Finland. The aim is simply to survive in the wilderness. No big monsters. The system aims at being rather realistic)

So thanks Toady for showing us what you are doing !

[Toady One]

I played unreal world a long long time ago, back when the english translation for being hurt was "many little damages", whenever that was (late 90s maybe?)  I think I tried it again and there were vga images of people or something.  That was a few years ago maybe.  It's a neat project, but I never had time to give it a real whirl.

I've since loop-erased my rivers -- I posted that pictures on another thread...  if it was the big thread then good look finding it...  I guess we'll have enough images soon enough.  The alpha thingy release is only like 68 days away now.  My life is slipping through my fingers.  Like the sands of the hourglass.  From Krull.

[Aristharus]

So, now you UnReal World forumites are also spying on me, eh?