Bay 12 Games Forum

I've been messing around under advanced world generation more than I have actually been playing. Whilst trying to create unique worlds I'd actually like to play on I've learned quite a bit trying to make world gen ideas come into a playable form. Today I made an interesting discovery I thought would be worth sharing.

I started trying to make large worlds with minimal ocean and lake areas to maximize playable area. I also was cranking up dragons frequencies, pop ratios, cluster size, etc. and reducing the age for dragons to reach full size to 400 years. This way reducing the age they reach full size isn't so cheaty, but, allows for reasonable world gen times since most dragons spawned at world gen are any where from 150-300 years old. This is all to make Dragons the more dominant and prevalent mega beast life form. I found it difficult to find a good civ count, in combination with site and pop. caps, that wouldn't give me civs that sprawled the whole map or were so few in number and sites the map was unusable. I was using a high degree of variability in terrain to create numerous amounts of individual sub regions. Again running into issues with where civs were being placed and how their pops were generated.

So, I instead began making Large Islands instead to push civs closer, but, not to close, not to large in population and, had more sites with smaller pop. numbers instead of one or two sites with 10,000 plus pop. (creates huge lag in adventure mode). I took what I learned from trying to create vast almost water less worlds to maximize playable area, terrain variability, civ placements, beast counts, etc. and applied it.

Starting with typical island formation parameters and ending with a high variability for randomly generated in game things like curse and what not. I defined a large mountain cave number to allow for the amount of beast I was looking for and removed non mountain caves entirely. I also defined less terrain variability to give me mountains which are usually centrally generated in the middle of the islands. This combination in particular, places the deadlier cave dwelling beast around and in mountainous regions only, along with a large semi megabeast number, to allow for less deadly creatures to inhabit the rest of the world, is what allows for this tiered difficulty to happen.