Displaying Custom Maps in-game: Tutorial and Japan/Korea Screenshot

[JC_Denton]

I was thinking today about when I might like to update my Europe custom map to incorporate the new ability to separate industry and infrastructure growth, and which map I want to play my first "real" (not just seeing the mechanics) game of 2nd Gear.  But there aren't a whole lot of options for maps to choose from yet.  So having more of them would be a good thing!

This will eventually very interesting to play with, the map I am currently working on is for original version (which I suppose is 1st gear) as it seems to be more stable at the moment and I am still trying to figure out how to implement things.

I'll also be curious what your experience is with adding cities.  I've tried a few different approaches over the years, starting with the built-in tools, then moving to the XML files, then writing some tools of my own that better matched how I had my data organized.  And that itself has evolved over time.  But I'm also looking at it from a historical data standpoint, so I don't know what would work best on a fantasy map.

So far when adding cities I have mainly used the built in tools and modified xml files as needed. On the front of keeping my information organized I made a spreadsheet with the data in it as I find it easier to keep track of in this way. Eventually I might have to follow your lead on making a tool, as I would really love to make it so data could be input via something like a CSV file. 

I am curious how you come up with values for variables without a straight forward real world value such as resource rate or manufacturing skill.

Hey, sorry I missed your post, I'm used to different forum software and hadn't seen the alert.

I'm also still targeting 1st Gear for now, as I figure out what all has changed.

For figuring out values... it's a lot of research, and some approximations. Which are complicated when multiple countries are involved because they measure things differently and inconsistently, especially the farther back in time you go. Add in changing borders, and it becomes worse.

But for population, it's kind of gone like this:

- Find stats for a regional population. Idaho. France. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
- Determine which localities I want to have in-game. Boise. Bordeaux. Sault Saint Marie. Find stats for their populations.
- Divide regional population proportionally.

This isn't perfect as in most countries, multiple municipalities represent an urbanized area. That definition of "urbanized area" differs by country, and I've found several false positives. "Metropolitan Statistical Areas" in the U.S. are not great because they are county-based and include significant non-urban areas. "Functional Urban Areas" in the EU are worse, because they represent the areas that _could_ commute to a city, which tends to be quite wide.

For resource rate/manufacturing, etc., in 1st Gear I've used "urbanization" as a proxy. So let's say I have Boise, Pocatello, and Couer d'Alene as my cities in Idaho, and they represent 20% of the population in 1900 (not necessarily accurate numbers). In Massachusetts, Boston, Springfield, and Worcester are my three cities and they make up 60% of the population. Massachusetts is more urbanized.

I'd like to include more variables such as availability of key materials such as steel; finding data on it and then incorporating it is what takes time, especially if I want the data to be accurate, not just, "Pittsburgh has a lot of steel".

In 2nd Gear, one of my main goals is to incorporate historical info on road build-out for infrastructure. I've found this at a per-country level for autobahns in the EU, and expect I should be able to find it on the Interstate system in the U.S.

---

GNP is the other big one I focused on initially. Finding country-level information is not too difficult, although in earlier years it's often in the local currency, so I had to find historical currency conversion rates and build some currency-conversion tables (sometimes it required more than one hop to convert). Finding regional info can vary by country. Last year I found an academic publication where researchers from a lot of countries had put together their work to come up with approximate GDPs for all regions in Europe for every decade in the 1900s (think of Brittany or Normandy as the size of the region). That's fantastic for the scale of Gear City, so I'd like to improve my GDP info with their research. IIRC they also did some currency normalization, so if I'd found it earlier it would have saved some work.

I should probably compile all my notes and put them in one place; I mentioned some of this in my EEII thread but quite a bit of the nitty-gritty remains in local text files and archived PDFs.