Continents

Future Game
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Eventually, continents will be implemented, I assume, as the current patch system, although functional, is pretty weird. I would imagine that continents would show up in a world map, but still have patches appear instead of some sort of coordinate-based system - although coordinates would also work, and be more true to reality (although more complicated to simulate).

When this occurs, there’s something pretty important to think about - names. Current continent/sea names are… boring. Like the species names, they’re randomly generated to such an extreme degree that very few of them are memorable or concise. I think concise is the word, here.

On Earth, the continents are America (N/S doesn’t count for this), Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania/Australia, and Antarctica. Except for Asia and Europe, all of these continents have exactly 3 syllables - and if you combine Europe and Asia into Eurasia, all of them have these syllables.

But wait! That’s another thing to think about! Europe and Asia are artificially defined as being separate due specifically to Europe? How will you simulate this??

Short answer: don’t. That’s really not important when none of the organisms are sentient. And even when a species does become sentient, I’d imagine that the Thrive coders don’t want to design an entire system for randomly generating alien languages which cannot be spoken or read just to make more accurate continent names. Simulating artificial changes in continent definitions due to dominance of certain culture groups is dumb. Thrive’s development is slow enough as it is and if you focus on stuff like that it’ll never get out of the ‘technically impressive game that’s too complicated for mass appeal’ niche, which it’s already sat in pretty firmly.

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dude you are posting so much!
anyway, I don’t think alien continent naming simulation would be that hard to implement, you would literally just need to have some simple algorithms define how separated a land mass needs to be before being considered a continent and then throw it into a random name generator. This would be a system that would really only be apparent when your species starts naming things, before then the continents would probably be best left unnamed, since it wouldn’t affect gameplay, and the player could navigate landmasses just fine without it.
something more in-depth could probably be an emergent property of other systems, or at least something that could be more easily implemented after scaffolding for language is introduced, I imagined something like a language tab could appear in aware stage which could be built off of in future stages.

Not to mention at the end of the day the only names your species cares about is their own, so dominate culture groups don’t really matter as much as your species saying, “this is the first name I came across, so this is the name now”, or them simply dictating their own name.

I do agree that these little details don’t need to be focused on, but they shouldn’t be ignored either, what separates a good game from a great game is often the little things. so, these types of features should be put off until the important parts are finished or if it’s a logical/easy extension of the main mechanics. It’s also good to not try to implement small details before knowing what the base looks like since that could lead to mechanics that simply don’t fit with the currant theme or vibe of the game.

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Perhaps the issue of Europe-esque “continents” could be solved by having the names of landmasses generated on basis of geography AND cultural regions after some point, most likely in the society stage. There could be also the distinction of “subcontinents” as smaller regions of that kind.

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Subcontinent naming would work for things like Europe and Central America. Europe isn’t seen as a subcontinent on Earth, but it’s also of similar size to the United States and to India, so that’s just a cultural thing. Perhaps there could be some method wherein dominant subcontinents can be ‘promoted’ to continental status?

Really, you could just have a hierarchy of terms for differently-sized landmasses, like so:

  • Supercontinents at the top, possibly divided into smaller continents (this may or may not be something to do with cultures).
  • Regular continents.
  • Subcontinents.
  • Regions and large islands.
  • Small islands/archipelagoes.

There’d still be a number of edge cases, like Australia, which is subcontinent-sized but not connected to a larger continent. All of Earth’s edge cases, at the very least, need to be covered, since games of this level of simulation depth are generally intended to have the possibility of simulating Earth.

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I don’t see why Europe-style continents have to be continents. Why difference does it make? It’s just a semantics thing. Culturally, only culture matters. Geographically, only geography matters. Why should they have to share the same definition?

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Maybe instead of continents we should use “regions” to name such areas?

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Yeah, for the cultural counterparts, right?

(Like India [plus pakistan and sri lanka and bangladesh] could be in it’s own region, and they could change over time with invasions and cultural drift.)

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Yeaa.

Any regions system would need to be integrated with culture. They’d shift slowly over time, probably gradually tending towards the borders of a single large polity or many smaller polities with common cultures.

I’m looking for something better than CK3, at least.

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We’d also need a good name generation system for these continents a regions, probably requiring a long list of names or some sort of a generator.

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Nobody’s very interested in the name generator, understandably, but right now it’s complete trash. That’s something to work on (I say as if I can program, which I cannot, or contribute, which I don’t), probably later on in development. Not sure how much later, but it should probably be done by the end of Aware, I guess.

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I agree, we should have enough people on the project by that point to have atleast one person tackling down things like this.

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