Spotlight - Custom Worlds
Tue, 28 July 2020
Discover the joy of playing on a map tailored to your preferences and share it with others.We are proud of our campaign map of ancient Greece. Many hours went into the research and creation of the map with all of its details and aspects. Although you can play as almost 30 factions that ensure a different player experience with every new game, we know the deep rooted desire that sleeps in all of us to explore and colonize new worlds, to face the unknown.
The Map Generator that comes with the base game allows you to generate new worlds tailored to your preferences. For your new world, the settings allow you to select the size of the map and the prevalent climate (which also affects the terrain). To populate the world the number and density of the individual civilizations can be set, as well as their level of development.
The level of development setting allows you a number of starting choices. At the two extremes of the scale, you have, either a start as a basic nomadic society, roaming the wilderness, exploring and building your first villages, or if slow starts are not for you, ready established, developed civilizations, with urban infrastructure, economic and cultural buildings already in place. So the start point for your journey towards your new kingdom is completely up to you.
You can also tweak two aspects of how fair the game will be. You can make the world relatively level, so everyone has more or less the same starting conditions or you can create significant differences between the nations right from the start. In addition you can also choose where on that scale you want your own nation to be. Do you want to have an advantage or the most challenging conditions? You can choose how you want to play, take it easy using a world with many differences, with your nation at the top of the pile, or play as the nation with the least advantageous starting conditions, to see if you can make it to the top, beat fate and prove your worth however you please.
You can set the abundance or scarcity of the resource mines on the map. This greatly affects all player’s abilities to develop their nations and sets the tone for the frequency and brutality of the conflicts over resources. Winning the struggle for survival is dependent on key resources and you can decide in advance how tough this challenge will be.
Alongside these settings come the diplomatic relationships. You can set how friendly or aggressive the neighbours will be.
The presence of neutral cities on the map is also optional. These are not simply idle settlements waiting for you to take over. They spawn settlers to colonize the lands around and military units to defend themselves. They build and improve their city-states as any other nation would do and they will not give up their independence without a proper fight!
Few available resources, crowded map, aggressive neighbours, you will be plunged into a merciless battle for survival from turn one. But of course, this is the only way for masochistic hardcore gamers. For the rest of us you can tune the game in all of the aspects mentioned above and still enjoy the game at the pace you like. This doesn’t mean that there will be no challenges, but you will have time to adjust to the changing conditions.
You can also use these custom generated maps in multiplayer or use them to build your own scenarios and mods. Speaking about moddability, the game has an open architecture which allows for easy modding.
The game comes with a Map Builder which allows you to use an image of a standard map (e.g. one downloaded from the internet), and turn it into a game map. The tool allows you to cut out parts of the map, adjust the size of the final map and define terrains and contours.
If you want to create a world, tile by tile, yourself, you can do this as well. There is an in-built Game Editor that helps you change the map and its settings and values directly. Change the landscape and shape the coast, place new cities, mines and buildings on the map, add rivers and roads, add factions and define their mutual relations, economic and military power, and much more. You are designer and creator, only your desires set the limit.
The dedicated Steam Workshop and forum are there for you to share your creations and inspire others to build wonderful new scenarios for all to enjoy! Did you play an interesting game that you want to share? Upload the save to the Steam Workshop directly from the game. Have you created a nice new scenario or are you working on a mod that you want feedback on? Give access to your creations to others through the workshop.
As well as the many hours of fun you will get from Imperiums’ Greek campaign map, you will be surprised how many worlds can be created, endless re-playability! The custom Map Generator, Map Builder and Game Editor with the integrated Steam Workshop make sure that you will not leave the Imperiums realm unsatisfied.