When you start a new game, be it in campaigns singleplayer or multiplayer, despite only having a small portion of the map revealed at the start, you immediately know where you are by looking at it, one third to the south for example. This means you already know where the limit of the map is, and you can make an educated guess of where other players are (often forming a circle around the map center).
How about not having this information, by having the minimap zoomed in around the known area, zooming out as you explore and only showing the actual map limits once you can actually see them ? Making it harder to know where other players are at the start of the game.
Of course this should be an optional feature, but it could spice up the start of the game, especially on nomad maps : not knowing in which direction you can expect other players to be.
Seems like a good and fun idea. I don’t like that you pretty much know where enemy is as soon as game starts. Your idea forces at least some exploration to get your bearings, which would be nice. It would make early attacks harder, since you’d have to do a better job at recon before knowing where the enemy likely is. Reward the good and/or lucky player in that respect
Plus, I always liked games that make you explore to orient yourself and get a lay of the land. Makes exploring more rewarding, imo.
Your thread is a good time for me to mention again an idea I posted about long ago:
Let us zoom in and out of the mini-map with the mousewheel:
How? If you hover your mouse over the mini-map, it would auto activate this mousewheel ability. If you then choose to roll the mousewheel, the mini map zooms. It’d be a QoL improvement, since in late games when the map is very cluttered, it’s hard to see stuff on the mini map. If we could zoom in and pan around (push mousewheel down and pan), it would be great. Or sometimes player colors make it hard to know where they are when you want to clean the map up at the end. And so on.
Then, once your mouse arrow leaves the mini-map, the mini-map just resets itself to its current default zoom level we’ve always had (i.e., max zoom out) after 2 or 3 seconds.
I don’t see any conflict issues with this. Even if you have “select idle villager” set to “mouse-wheel down”, I don’t believe there is one single player on earth that would normally otherwise do that while hovering their mouse over the mini-map. Therefore, controlling mini map zoom and pan with mousewheel should be fine
I bring this up in your thread because you’re idea is related to mini-map zoom. Your idea zooms in from the very start and expands out as you explore. If they implement that zoom-ability, then it seems like my idea would be very simple to add at that point. The “max zoom out” that my mousewheel zoom would reset to after player stops engaging with it would be your max zoom level that the player has attained based on their exploration.
No. This removes the ability to click on unexplored areas of the mini-map in order to send your scout. Its annoying and doesn’t really add anything of value to the game.
That’s true, good point. It still does add something, though.
Too bad your con likely outweighs the pros. Darn
How about this, then. The map stays completely zoomed out, and you can still click all around to send your scout, but your TC starts in the exact center of the mini map. As your scout explores, the placement of your TC on the map slowly takes proper form as you find the map edges. To make this work, when you set flags outside the boundaries of the actual map, you don’t know that’s where they are being placed until you explore and your scout hits edges, whereby the map boundaries start to take form
That just sounds massively disorienting and convoluted and still would make it hard to click on the extremeties of the unexplored areas of the map. Also this is something that would only really be relevant in the opening few minutes of the game because as you explore a few rounds around your TC it soon becomes pretty obvious where you are and there is so little you can do with your limited pop and resources at that stage of the game that this has very little practical use. What really are you adding to the game? At the time this even is relevant all you’re doing is gathering your sheep and sending some vils to a woodline. What diffrence does it make to not know which side of the map you are at this point? Its such an odd request and adds so little to the game.