Semi-Random maps

There is a concept which mixes my randomly generated games with the idea of a well-thought manually created game. My games tend to involve random commanders all over the map that have random equipment, random bodyguards, and random troops. Also random scattering of castles, labs, temples. And some use randomly assigned alliances between the AI's. Pros and Cons are that its a very different game. Fun to play. But its hard to make the randoms fall into logical patterns (not put land castles and land troops in water, not have an archer for a commander with gods as bodyguards). Of course another advantage is that I can daily generate a new game when the things in that one get too known. If you want to try one you can pick up my Poke in the Eye game.

An excellent example of a well thought out and designed game is the work of Peter Ebbesen called "Orania the Nasty Edition". Each race has specific starting locations with multiple starting provinces. There are additional castles, commanders assigned, equipment given, troops, and magic sites. All making logical sense within the theme of that nation. If you want to try that game it can be gotten from HERE. The Pros and Cons is while it is a great game to play, it might have a limited replayability factor.

Anyway, I had a thought about a project which might be able to blend the best of both methods. Variations would be created in pieces of .map code, then randomly selected to paste together into the downloadable file. There could be a Dragons Den province, Wooing Woods, or the Fast Food Forest. The population, structures, units, magic sites can all be designed around a name. It could be ever growing as small 1-province files were added around single themes. Werewolves, or vampires, or trolls, or dryads... well you get the picture.

With enough province files a randomly generated map could be unique each time but still be abit more logical about what you run into. In the following of my usual stuff a map image selected from my daily randomly-generated ones could be used over and over. Or maybe a GOOD map done by someone with a paint program. But possibly some intelligent coding could be done to read a .map file and do the bit-math of the terrain commands to match a province description to proper locations. Such as, the Dragon Den might have a group of dragons in a mountain castle with mountain-type independent population and mountain-type magic sites. The program could search for a mountain terrain province to put that into.

Secondary Thought: If someone could develop a spreadsheet of units, with flags, then this could be greatly improved. I would like for the code to be able to build groups based on leaders w/ troops, land water or amphib, all dragon types, or all undead types, or all animals.

UPDATE: The new DomMap utility (thanks to Bryon Daly "lintman") now includes new info in the .map file which can make this concept work even better. Each #terrain line includes a comment saying land or water, and how many neighbors are land and water. That means that L-S4L0 means an island and S-S0L5 means a lake.