In this kind of game making maps would be just WOW. can't wait to try it out. so... WHAT? wait... NOOOOOOOOO! DOn'T Horrid Tenticle Seaweed Monster is attacking me... arrggggggggg

I'm going to assume that it'll be possible to generate a complete map based on the same parameters that exists in-game, and then edit a map from there on in? I love to remodel some of my immediate to-be surroundings in games, and then play that game.

I always found GalCiv2 sorely lacking in the mapmaking department, unfortunately.

Tractor beams. All you really have to do is adjust the doppler frequency and reset the photons.

Sweetness to the nth degree!!

Shall we assume it will have mini map (dungeons and planes) linking options? 

Wrap it up with a awesome campaign creator & editor and Gods themselves will wail and howl in shock and awe!

Excellent. I eat this stuff up. I made many maps in GalCiv, but they were pretty over the top type things.

This I could work with. I'm already thinking about recreating actual terrain maps. Take a piece of the Rocky Mountains, for example. Abundant mineral resources, food hard to come by, and small mountain passes to fight through. Or the great plains; abundant food, scarcer minerals, and wide open, with little or no natural defenses. I could map the Everglades, or the American southwest, with it's deserts and canyons. Please allow us to use negative altitude. Damn. A blurb and a couple of screenshots and I'm already getting worked up. Now...where exactly to put my ex's house? That's right sweetheart; it's hard to enjoy the bigscreen when you're dragon poop.

of course!    If I were to create a good story-based map (I did in that HoMM all the time) I'd want to create dungeons.  Linking those would be very important.    And since I imagine you have have many dungeons on 1 map and they are not the same as an underground, I'm curious to how thats going to work.   A sub-menu perhaps?

It just hit me that if you made dugeons look like alternate planes, then coded spells that let you pass through dungeons without the use of 'entry' and 'exit' spots (like just have the dungeon be the full size of the main map, and have the plain shift correlate exactly) you could mod in alternate plains if Stardock neglects to add them for some reason.  However the AI would likely not use it effectivly.

I'm just brainstorming since we still have yet to hear about alternate planes and it is getting dangerously close to expected beta release (june-july). 

/whistles

Down boy down. Quit slobbering all over Solam. No, I don't think he wants seaweed slime that far up his pants, or his shirt, or all his helmet, or anywhere else. No I don't think he want to shake you tenticle. God only knows how many people you have groped in akward places with that thing.

Don't look at me like that. You don't exactly have a face, so you attempts at making a puppy face aren't going to work... Oh you poor thing! Ok, you can play with Solam for 5, maybe 10 minutes tops, but then you're comming home with me. Just make sure you don't leave a mess on the carpets this time... its a pain to clean up slime.

/throws a frizbee at Solam

You will want throw that before he catches you.

And change the polarity. Everything is always solved by changing the polarity.

But anyway, I like this map-creation feature. Makes me wonder exactly how many people will race to create these worlds...

1- Faerun

2- Krynn

3- Warhammer World

4- Azeroth

5- Middle-Earth

(fit more here)

--This is a little off topic, but I'm really hoping that the random map genorator will come up with some awesome maps on it's own. One of my biggest problems with Civ3, and Civ4 was that you were lucky to get an intersting map. Except for some of the time you almost always ended up with a western rectangle and a eastern rectangle...with some islands trown in. The land masses hardly ever had intersing shapes or features. I always hoped that the maps would be more "Earth Like" if you will. I'm fairly confident that this game will pull off what I'm looking for, as the map sizes have already been shown to be much larger than in Civ4! I really think that it's especially important for a fantasy game to have interesting maps. What are yall thoughts on this?

Lets hope so. To be frank I assumed an underground would already be part of the map and that the rest would be related maps. I figured that things would be better for the AI but I could be very wrong.

I found certain map types to be interesting, and others to be horrid.   It was very selective based on what kind map generation you picked.  I almost always picked islands, and would make big islands if I wanted them big.   I too must voice my desire for less 'square' maps.   Honestly, the more bizzar and chaotic the boarders of a landscape are, the more realistic.  Perhaps long sections of mostly smooth area where an ocean plate could be concieved to be pressing, but these are almost always partnered by a mountain chain.  some distance inland.

Island chains, lagoons on particularly old islands, canyons with river valley + river, river delta that form near shore islands, river tributaries, and so on...  all these things are often missed in random generation.

I absolutely cannot wait for this game. At first I thought to myself, "Aw come on, where's GalCiv3!?" but scratch that, Elemental looks amazing. This game will show that Stardock is definitely not a one-trick pony, not that they ever were in the first place. I only see success for this game, I don't see how anything could fail in regards to it. I already preordered the game and am trusting in Stardocks ability to deliver a great game backed by great customer service and longetivity. I know that Demigod was not entirely Stardocks fault, as they didn't even develop game, and the whole fiasco surrounding Demigod doesn't faze me because I know how it was GalCiv2. Which was absolutely an amazing experience both in the game and on on the forums.

If at all possible, I'd like the option of exporting any complete maps in a picture format like .jpg or .png. I'm thinking that this would be a very nice way of producing maps for RPGs, you see...

On dungeons/planes/underground/etc, do we have any confirmed information that there will actually be more than one map in a game?  As in MoM's Myrror or HoMM's underground?  Dungeons are confirmed, but do we have any info about how they are actually represented spatially or how a "dungeon crawl" is represented temporally (i.e. one turn or more than that)?

The map editor looks really nice, Brad, thanks for sharing that.  I'll get a good bit of fun out of just making cool maps; my office is notoriously non-decorated execpt for sql db diagrams but these just might make it onto the walls.

Thanks,

Keith

6. gigantic wang

never underestimate the urge of teenage boys for big wang pictures.

If there is a map editor, I am assuming that there is some sort of a dungeon editor as well? Or will we get to pick from a set of pre-created dungeons (hopefully that can be modded in some other way)? What I certainly don't want is for them to be sprinkled arouind the map like GalCiv anomalies!

Also, I want to be able to create some really wacked-out maps, so I don't think it would be wise to have rules like in the GC2 editor where you couldn't put planets outside of three tiles of a star, and so on. Screw you, geology: I want my icey lake in the middle of a burning Mordor plain!