Utility: RanDom v2.03 - Map gen & Semirandomizer... Updated

[Ballbarian]

Thanks a ton das123!

I read through your guide and jotted some very rough notes & thoughts which I will share here:


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section: Map details setup
Might be nice to have a few notes on how I come up with appropriate dimensions versus province count. Now what did I do with that formula??? As a general rule, decide on how many provinces you would like and look for an existing map with a similar count and use it's dimensions as a general guide.

Normal Mount check box - when unchecked mountains are impassable and can create choke points within a map. When checked, mountains are provinces themselves (like they were in DomPPP & Dom2).

section: Borders
Map Noise - Adds a speckling effect to the map lands. Increasing this slider increases the speckling. A little can add some texture, too much can get pretty ugly. I usually set this around 15 or less.

section: General Tab
Fiddle Prov% - note that can be set above 100%. The higher the setting, the more time SemiRandom is allowed to try to fill provinces.

Fiddle XP - note: (to clarify) leave unchecked to keep from showing up in the Hall of Fame.

section: Starts Tab
Provinces Per Player - This one is a rather strange and hard to describe critter in how it relates to some of the other settings. Maybe the easiest way to describe it is the following:

DEFAULT_PROVPERPLAYER=20
Priority is:
1. numPlayers
2. provPerPlayer (numPlayers=provCount/provPerPlayer)
3. DEFAULT_PROVPERPLAYER (numPlayers=provCount/20)

So if numPlayers has a value other than -1, then this is the number of player starts that semiRandom will try to place.

If numPlayers is set to -1, and provPerPlayer has a value other than -1, calculate the number of starts to attempt to place by dividing the total province count by the provPerPlayer value. Hmmm. Setting this to zero will surely crash the program. Damn sloppy programmer.

If both numPlayers & provPerPlayer are set to -1, then just use the default value of 20 to calculate numPlayers based on the number of provinces on the map.


Lock Player to Nat Cfg checkbox - When this box is checked, changes to a nations sliders (in the nation configuration screen) will adjust the "Desired Num Players" count. Setting a nation to "HUMAN" or "AI" will increase the number of players and changing a nation to "DISABLED" will reduce this value so you don't have to. If you enable a sea nation (like R'lyeh) it will also increment "Max Sea Starts" for you or decrease it if you disable a sea nation. And finally, it will automatically adjust "AI Land Players" & "AI Sea Players" for you as you make changes to the sliders. I highly recommend leaving this box checked.

section: AI Gods Tab
How can you tell which races have .god files?
Ah, sorry. That is not as easy to check as I made it sound.
Unless I have missed a recent patch added nation, all early & mid era nations should have a god (as long as the user has downloaded all of the available god files from the RanDom forum thread) and I believe that with the addition of Stavis_L's god files we have one for every late era nation as well. If you look in your GOD_BIN, you will see that the god file names contain the nation number and which era they belong to. So nation zero (0) is EA Arcoscephale.

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I hope that helps to fill in some of the gray areas and thanks again for your wonderful contribution.
Two penguins up for you!