Random Map Generating

[Centurion]

Hi, my anme is Thomas. My first question can be summarized as this: How sophisticated is the Random Map Generation in 0 A.D., and does the terrain create interesting situations?

I think of such as when the Persians invaded Greece and daelt with those spartans, like that movie 300, or Hannibal going around the entire Mediterranean to get to Rome.

My next question is how resources placement effects the game, and wether you will be using a give everyone 8 berries and deer and gold in the name of fairness, or will you place them sporadically.

Excuse me, but I really don't understand idea of Random Map scripting. I think of it like there being land with the mountais and gulches already, a thin layer of water over the land, and then it coming together to form seas.

[historic_bruno]

I don't know if you've read the documentation on Trac? That's a good starting point for understanding random maps. You can think of the random map generator as a black box: the input is map settings, scripts, player assignments, and the output is a terrain and list of entities (roughly same data as a hand-made scenario). It doesn't matter how the scripts work as long as they output something reasonable, so really any technique could be used to generate a random map and there's already a variety in the game.

As for sophistication, I would say most maps currently use a combination of low level techniques to make something that looks vaguely like a particular region, rather than designing from a global gameplay perspective, mostly because it's a lot easier that way (It's much harder IMO to randomly generate a map with "interesting situations", when both the size of the map and the number of players can vary, and there are time constraints to the process...)