Map: PlanetRorschach v4b - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 375 provinces! Updated 3/21!

[cleveland]

Howdy,

There's a lot of great maps out there, but only a precious few are wrap-around. Of course, you could always just click "wraparound" on the map editor and have an ugly, yet functional fair map. Here is my attempt to add to the shortlist of aesthetically pleasing wrap-around maps:

PlanetRorschach - The colored dots represent start locations; the yellow dots represent coastal starts that are restricted to sailing nations in the "sailing starts" revision of this map.

This map is actually a 3D sphere: it wraps east-west, and has "polar" connectivity in the north & south. Think of a 2D map of Earth: distances at the 2 poles get stretched out. Same here. [For you non-math-nerds, the classic wrap-around map makes a Torus - not a Sphere - in 3D.]

It has 375 provinces, so plenty of room for those All-Nation games, even EA. 40 of those are sea provinces.

The best part is that it's not ugly: I made it using Ballbarian's RanDom, so it has plenty of pretty colors. I started with a narrow map, then mirror imaged it so that all the boarders lineup. I then fiddled with all the little white pixels in GIMP. I then assigned all neighbors & terrainmasks from scratch. Took about 800% longer than I thought.

So, spherical like a Planet, left-right symmetry like a Rorschach test. And fair as hell. For even more fairness, I've restricted the start locations such that no nation will start with fewer than 6 neighbors, though the great majority will have 7. A 2-indy-province buffer exists between all starting locations. There are 24 starts, which is sufficient to support an All-Nations game in any age (see image above). I've prepared 2 revisions of this map: the "with sailing starts" revision restricts coastal starts to sailing nations, the other does not.

This is Version 4b. It corrects a major bug from Version 4, which itself corrected an insidious oversight that could have potentially given sailing nations a significant advantage. A number of connections have been corrected, as were a number of terrainmasks.

Since Version 4b includes an additional province, you must re-download the image file, even if you have a previous Version. This file contains the image and both map revisions mentioned above:

PlanetRorschach_V4b.zip

Feedback, as always, is appreciated.