Topic: What are some good settings to generate a good world for the Legends mode? (Read 1272 times)

Lokamayadon · « **on:** June 18, 2017, 09:32:30 am »

I'm having fun with Legends mode these days and I'm curious if people with experience with this mode have some advices to create a good world for it.

Loam · « **Reply #1 on:** June 18, 2017, 10:57:46 am »

Obviously larger worlds with long histories are best, but the game is extremely slow to generate such worlds. A medium-size world is about as big as you need; I like to aim for 1,000 years of history, but I usually stop well before it gets there because it takes too long. If you have several spare hours and a strong computer you might try it.
Another problem with long histories is that later history gets pretty boring, since by that time several civs have usually been wiped out and many of the beasts are dead, and one race or another (usually humans or goblins) tends to dominate the world. I'd say ~500 years is a good stopping length to have a rich history, but still keep some interest in the game.

I like to reduce the number of civs on medium worlds, from the default 40 (~8 civs of each race) to 20 (~4 of each). This cuts down on the number of historical figures the game tracks, which improves performance, but also makes the legends more navigable. And in medium-size worlds 20 civs will cover enough land to make the world not feel empty, but they'll usually have more space to themselves (instead of crowding other civs), and there will still be some sizeable wilderness.

If your main interest is in reading legends, rather than playing adventure or fort modes, I'd suggest heavily cutting back the number of megabeasts, semi-megas, and titans. These are very powerful creatures who can do a lot of damage to civs and take centuries to kill, but I don't usually find them that exciting to read about: usually they just hang out in their lairs, sometimes attacking and destroying a town; and they kill off a lot of historical figures who might otherwise have done something interesting with their lives. I keep some of them around, of course, but I find the game's default amounts too high.
Forgotten Beasts pose a problem here because you can't adjust their numbers directly, AND they exclusively attack Dwarven sites, usually making dwarves much weaker than other civs. My solution was to decrease the cavern layer number to 1: fewer layers means fewer underground regions, which means fewer FBs. Once again, they're still around, but their not as destructive as they could be.

In truth, though, every world will have something interesting going on if you look long enough. I recommend a tool like Legends Viewer, as it makes navigating the records a lot easier.

NW_Kohaku · « **Reply #2 on:** June 18, 2017, 05:08:03 pm »

You can always try to leave worldgen running while just leaving to do something else... But at the same time, I find that I prefer to just "shotgun approach" and come up with a half-dozen worlds until I find something I like.

So far as settings are concerned, I honestly tend to come up with settings that produce more interesting embarks than worry about legends in particular, but what I tend to do is to crank up the variance and drop the game's rejection of worlds without large tracts of particular terrain types. You can combine this with changing some of the parameters of the entity's raw's SUPPORT_BIOME (or even the settlement) so that they can spread further. Dwarves in particular tend to get closed in on a single mountain range without being able to spread, so breaking up the terrain, and giving them the ability to scamper across longer stretches of valley to settle more lands, and let them interact with a wider range of different cultures.

I also tend to stop at around 500 years, although that's more just because I don't need it any longer since I intend to play, rather than wallow in Legends, alone. (Not that I don't take an interest in Legends, but I intend to do both.)

Also, oceans are boring and don't support much life, so have less of them unless you're going to make a large world. Even using a medium world, if you take out a lot of the oceans, you can cram more civs in there, and even if a few get wiped out, you still have more. (Plus, fallen empires are interesting, anyway.)

Likewise, there's little point in having more than one cavern, so you can probably clip them down to one or two in order to speed worldgen up a bit. (You can also mod the game to make things that only spawn in the second or third cavern appear in the first cavern layer so you don't miss out on anything if you want.)

Spoiler: An example worlgen param set that I like to use (click to show/hide)

This example is skewed to have less oceans (more like seas, really) and large mountain ranges, with more grasslands and forests with occasional spots of mountains.

Spoiler: Example world generated from these params (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Example world's diplomatic map for 500 year worldgen (click to show/hide)

You can see from the example, you can wind up with a fairly well-inhabited world, with only a flukish band of low habitation a little below the middle simply due to the human entity spawning in the southern half of the map getting suppressed by the elves before they could really take up the grasslands. You could easily put more entities in this world and have them fight it out for space and make some extra interesting fallen or conquered entities.

(Also, terrain in general is more broken up because I prefer to embark on "corners" where biomes meet, so more varied and fractured biomes result in more "corners" where those smaller biomes meet.)

(Also, also, warning - that's from 0.42. I don't THINK there are any changes to the worldgen, but you might want to compare to make sure...)

Fleeting Frames · « **Reply #3 on:** June 22, 2017, 07:05:52 am »

vjek has mentioned that he finds night creatures create interesting histories, so might want to up that.

Having plains for humans for the purpose of night creatures/necros could also be neat, though usually necros aren't too interesting. If you want just to look at people moving around without wars, isolated islands with civs on them will result visitors jumping over the areas, but never megabeasts or armies.

@NW_Kohaku: There are. 42.06 gens differ from 43.03 (in history) which differ from 43.05 32 bit which differ from 43.05 64-bit.

NW_Kohaku · « **Reply #4 on:** June 29, 2017, 11:49:10 am »

Quote from: Fleeting Frames on June 22, 2017, 07:05:52 am

@NW_Kohaku: There are. 42.06 gens differ from 43.03 (in history) which differ from 43.05 32 bit which differ from 43.05 64-bit.

I mean, I don't think the actual parameter format differs any. The history stuff should be outside the worldgen parameters, but I haven't tested it.

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Author Topic: What are some good settings to generate a good world for the Legends mode? (Read 1272 times)

Lokamayadon

What are some good settings to generate a good world for the Legends mode?

Loam

Re: What are some good settings to generate a good world for the Legends mode?

NW_Kohaku

Re: What are some good settings to generate a good world for the Legends mode?

Fleeting Frames

Re: What are some good settings to generate a good world for the Legends mode?

NW_Kohaku

Re: What are some good settings to generate a good world for the Legends mode?