I tried the game for the first time yesterday, and as a old SMAC(X) fanatic, I quite like the first impression. What's with the world sizes though? I tried the largest option, but didn't find it large enough. Contact with other factions came too early to my liking, etc.
So eh, I started messing around, and apparently the number of size options is hardcoded or something? Oh well, I just overwrote the old options. Way larger worlds seem to generate ok, at least 124x124. 160x160 crashed during generation. Exception c0000005 at 0x7da19b11, so did the process run out of memory, or would that be something else?
And err, the landscape generator doesn't really generate "shapes"? The archipelago option seems to create 5-10 landmasses which just change in size according to landTerritories and world size. So in reality, with a larger map, you get 5-10 continents, not an archipelago. As a side note, you also get a ridiculous amount of wildlife. So things don't scale too well, eh? Those generator options could use conditions for fine-tuning, like formers' harvest option, which has lots of different landscapePriority values. Doing the math and tuning the numbers for a specific type of game before you even start the application seems bit silly.
And the aforementioned ridiculous amount of wildlife seemed fairly heavy. Or maybe it was just the fact I used /reveal map and moved a trooper, which seemed to trigger a moving action in all of them. Dunno, might be I'll want to cut down their initial numbers and keep only the hives, if in any case they spawn more bugs when they aggro?
So err, so far my only problem is with the scalability (or rather, lack thereof), but let's see what happens once I get a proper run going. I just hope the exception doesn't mean campaigns in large worlds will crash when they require too much memory.
