Topic: Planetary Dawn Project: Construction of Worlds

[Inkling]

Yeah, otherwise all we're doing is wandering around and throwing rocks at animals.

[PatMan33]

Yeah, otherwise all we're doing is wandering around and throwing rocks at animals.

[Oviraptor]

Also creating races!

[Krakow Sam]

Lets keep things simple

White people/Brown/Black/Irish/Other

[PatMan33]

Alright so let's start this rule set, then.

I don't think we need a point system, necessarily; but we do need turns. Maybe segments? For the sake of the example, I'm simplifying things.

What if... we have a goal to reach. The first turn of the game would be from a period of Year 0 to Year 10,000. Year 17,000 would be the earliest possible date to begin permanent settlement. Within our first turn can be any number of "segments", I was thinking five segments. And each of us can use those segments to create stuff within the time period of the first turn. This allows us each to have our own chance to lay down five bits of detail (or more if we want) to that span of time. We all have the same start date and end date to allow us to synchronize and move onto the next turn.

Thoughts?

[Krakow Sam]

Ok, here's a crazy idea.

Rather than things turning totally eterministic because we already know how **** is going to turn out and just spreading people around the globe mechanically how about this:

Divide land sections into semi-arbitrary zones. Each turn we can move our dudes into a new zone and a dice is rolled, modified by the biome in that zone, to determine the "habitability" of that region. Our tribes could have some light "stats" which determine how adaptable they are to survival in various areas. Pat's segments or "clicks" or whatever can be spent either spreading dudes out from where they're already living or increase the population in an existing region. The higher the population the faster the people living in that region would git gud at technology, until eventually they git gud enough to develop pastoralism and agriculture and finally found the first city.

This is my general idea of how it could work. Obviously it would need nailing down into proper rules but I think it would simulate discovery and exploration and humans expanding to fill various niches pretty nicely.

[PatMan33]

Let's do that. It'll be like Sengoku Rance!

[Flisch]

So, Ovi asked me to do some ecozone mapping onto the continents.

Here's three versions:

http://imgur.com/a/Od76U

Disclaimer: The regions simply represent the fauna and flora. A region called "East Coast" simply implies that it's the biota found on the east coast on real earth, even if it is located on the western end of the continent in PCP.

Some quick thoughts on the variations:

Alpha is relatively simple. I didn't try to map the zones too closely to the biomes, rather to the continents and how they connect. As you can see South America has a lot of Taiga and Africa has plenty of temperate woodlands. This is a simple setup, but can create bizarre situations going forward.

Bravo is a little bit more out there in terms of connectivity. Eurasia is split into three disconnected landmasses and Africa has a direct connection with North America, which is a tad strange, but shouldn't create too many issues. (Africa and North America share quite some fauna due to Asia).

Charlie is similar to Bravo in terms of me trying to focus on biome mapping rather than geographical mapping. For example, South America is bordering both Europe and Africa, a circumstance that is possibly the strangest of all the variations so far. Still I like it, because many biomes neatly map onto the ecozones. PCP has two large Taiga areas, which unfortunately are north and south, so I made the two real-life Taiga continents, Eurasia and North America, on opposing hemispheres. Mesoamerica stretches across the subtropical rim on the norther part of North America. One could imagine that a recently broken up landbridge formed between Amazonia and North America and allowed faunal interchange. Africa is really huge, but that's no problem as Africa is really big on real earth as well (it just looks small due to distortion). Also this setup allows me to have a neat transition between Arabia and India. This is by far my favourite, but you can decide which one you like best.

Also suggestions for improvements or alterations are welcome.

Also apologies for naming the British Isles 'England'. I hope there are no irish here.

[Oviraptor]

You put a lot of thought into this! First impressions (before reading descriptions) was for Alpha, but after reading the descriptions, Charlie has grown on me a lot.

[PatMan33]

Neat, I didn't even know Flisch was playing. Cool maps.

[Oviraptor]

I brought it to his attention yesterday and he seemed interested in working on the biosphere equivalency zones, so I told him to go for it!

[Flisch]

I was blackmailed into it, really.

[PatMan33]

I like the first or third because North America is still the new world and it even has a cool Caribbean area! As well, the third also encapsulates a lot of what I was envisioning when I drew some of the biomes.

Also, the starting area will be like Southeast Asia, which I think is pretty cool and will let us explore a flora/fauna that most of us are not familiar with or native to.

Map three!

[Oviraptor]

I was blackmailed into it, really.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG6vgzAswgE" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG6vgzAswgE</a>

The more I think about it, the more I like the third map, as well. Go ahead and put my vote down for map three.

[PatMan33]

Right then, to elaborate on Sam's idea.

I'm thinking something along the lines of Europa Universalis in terms of how many territories there will be. We're talking upwards of 100 or more? Maybe 200 or more? Are you guys cool with that? Or do you want a smaller/larger scope?