I'm afraid of turning on Random New World. Should I be?

[Nassau]

AI seems not to go for the New World that aggressively. Also, I send to explorers to sail around the world, but they got stuck someone. Until the explorer died.

Some new new worlds are a bit boring. And the colonial regions can me a mesh. The current one has a region called Belgium, and two of mine colonial nations are like a jigsaw puzzle.

 

[Torugu]

Here is mine:

Spoiler

Comments:

• I feel like this RNW would have been a lot better if the eastern and western half were switched, as it is the colonial race was mostly over by the time anybody reached the large landmass in the west. On the other hand this would have been an amazing world to play as Japan/Ming.
• There were to few natives for my taste. The only places that spawned with any natives were the somewhat rectangular island near the equator in the east and the larger landmass in the south that has the Portuguese and Aragonese colonies on it.
• You maybe can't tell from the screenshot, but the big continent in the north west is massive. It's the same size as the northern half of Africa, but covered in tiny, HRE sized provinces. Also there are only 4 colonial regions on it, meaning that any fully colonized colonial nation on it will be a nearly unmanageable monster.
• Despite all this it was a really fun world to play in, that could have been even more fun if I had gotten luckier with the world gen. I have already decided that my next game will be random setup with RNW, so I guess that says something.

 

[myrsl0ken]

They are actually separated. The land masses are governed by the tiles files, while the weight of fantasy nations are governed by RNWScenarios.txt file. If you lower the weight of the fantasy tiles to something minuscule (like weight = 1), you'll have fantasy nations show up but none of the fantasy land mass tiles.

But that changes the checksum, right?

 

[Xinkc]

Thankfully, modding the RNW generation is pretty damn easy and surprisingly doesn't actually change checksum at the moment, so it wouldn't affect multiplayers or Ironman Cheevo-hunters. See below.

Really? I thought it was announced that they couldn't get adding tiles to not effect the checksum.

 

[ahhheygao]

But that changes the checksum, right?

No. As I've noted in my previous post, modding the "map\random\tiles\" files and "map\random\RNWScenarios.txt" do not change checksum.

Really? I thought it was announced that they couldn't get adding tiles to not effect the checksum.

Then evidently they managed to overcome that. I haven't attempted to add new tiles, but at the very least editing the weight of existing tiles does not change the checksum.

 

[sr999]

So, I didn't really like that feature before, I think I only activated it once and the unholy mess I discovered when I sailed west made me lose interest in that game pretty quickly. But the changes look good though, so I'm considering giving it another chance, only that this time I don't want to quit the game after a couple of hours of gameplay, the moment I see the first blobby island crowded with disoriented natives and with a big ass desert in the middle.

Just play Portugal and do the odd exploration west. If you like what you see, fine. If you don't, just continue around Africa and get a lock on Indian trade. If you find nothing at all out west, within range, that's perhaps the best outcome of all because all the other colonizers (with their inferior range) will be stuck worse than you and you'll still have your lock on India.

Portugal's also easier because you don't need to use up your small army and manpower to garrison colonies, MP to attack natives, etc. Makes the whole Ivory Coast thing a doddle.

But watch out for Morocco+Tunis, in 1.14 they're opportunistic, aggressive, and might be after you more than the reverse. If they catch the Castile fleet in the Med when they DoW they can probably beat up you and Castile simultaneously in the early game, especially if Granada is still around, so make sure your navy is tooled up.

 

[Tiax]

My results with the new RNW are mixed. On the positive side, the new tiles are generally quite well done. Sometimes they arrange in odd ways, but overall a vast improvement over the previous system.

However, the parts of the system that are left to be generated automatically are still a mess. Trade networks are non-sensical balls of criss-crossing trade flow. Colonial regions often form which are disconnected into two separate components (that is, one part of region A is separated from the other part of region A by either another region cutting through it, or by a large wasteland province).

 

[Hiiri]

RNW has been massively improved, but too often I feel like I'm generating a whole bunch of different shape ocean tiles.

It's fun to just generate new worlds and see what I get, but I wish outcomes like these were more common than the usual archipelagos:

Spoiler: Image

Edit: And another one:

Spoiler

 

[Trin Tragula]

If you lower the weight of the fantasy tiles to something minuscule (like weight = 1)

Better yet set weight to 0 if there is a tile you want to avoid completely.

 

[Tiax]

A question for the devs: If I create additional small tiles, does that affect the frequency with which small tiles will be included in the new world? Or, conversely, could the frequency of archipelago worlds be reduced if a mod created a bunch of additional large, continental tiles?

 

[Steely Dwarf]

However, the parts of the system that are left to be generated automatically are still a mess. Trade networks are non-sensical balls of criss-crossing trade flow. Colonial regions often form which are disconnected into two separate components (that is, one part of region A is separated from the other part of region A by either another region cutting through it, or by a large wasteland province).

This. My first game with the new system was as Hamburg and much to my surprise all the trade zones from the entire new world went directly to Genoa or the English channel, bypassing the North Sea and by extension Lubeck entirely. Because of the way End Nodes work this is a pretty game breaking feature for anyone playing someone further east than Holland.

 

[Pornek]

I got a RNW with a WETN for the entirety of the new world. Hated playing it and dropped the game.

 

[Junuxx]

Here is mine:

Spoiler

So many of the smaller tiles look really square and blocky

 

[ahhheygao]

Better yet set weight to 0 if there is a tile you want to avoid completely.

Nah, it's more exciting this way when there's still a very tiny possibility to get undesirable tiles!

 

[Demetrios]

I do agree that a "Large Continents/Small Continents/Mostly Islands" toggle for RNW would be nice. And having generated a bunch of RNW to see what options there are, it looks like that in most cases they are generating from a predetermined set of tiles that are moved around and rotated to generate random configurations. Not to say that this is bad, but it would be nice to see a few more medium and large continent-sized tile sets to make for a even larger variety of configurations (there seems to be a substantial amount of island-size sets).

Granted, I found a nice medium-sized continent that only had a single High American nation on it, so I replaced it with my custom New Byzantium and am currently making an unpleasant surprise when the Europeans come calling (and probably Japan as well, as they've already unified and are now taking over Manchuria and Korea a few centuries early).

 

[AluminumSoldier]

I think they're a lot of fun, personally, but I generated several and spoiled myself on what they looked like until I found one I wanted. If you want to go in blind, I think your mileage may vary as most of the RNW's I've made trend towards the watery, islandy type and not the continental type.

 

[LikeNothing]

How much do you enjoy playing Civilization series games? Age of Empires?

Lots of people got used to RNG maps from those types of games long ago.

 

[Krajzen]

They are actually separated. The land masses are governed by the tiles files, while the weight of fantasy nations are governed by RNWScenarios.txt file. If you lower the weight of the fantasy tiles to something minuscule (like weight = 1), you'll have fantasy nations show up but none of the fantasy land mass tiles.

In what file can I change fantasy tiles?

 

[ChildeR]

In what file can I change fantasy tiles?

map/random/tiles has a txt for each tile.

 

[ahhheygao]

In what file can I change fantasy tiles?

Like @ChildeR said, you'll have to determine that yourself by examining each tile file in that whole folder.

I suppose someone with a lot of free time who likes to generate RNWs might eventually document everything tile type along with screenshots of what each look likes... but that has not yet happened.