A map made by Reveilled delivers a faithful recreation of the Americas map from the original Colonization.
Missing your glory days? Like the Western Hemisphere map, but it's "just not the same"? Annoyed how only Brazil is colonizable because of how remote the high seas are?
Well, friend, I have the cure for all your troubles.
Attached is a faithful recreation of the Americas map from the original Colonization.
What's different from the Western Hemisphere map?
The main difference is that in the original game, High Seas spaces on the Atlantic coast were determined by their distance from the coast. This is reproduced, so while in the Western Hemisphere map you have to sail halfway across the map each time you sail to North America, in this map the High seas are never more than a few spaces away if your colonies look onto the Atlantic
Terrain is very different. South America (especially Brazil) has lots of marsh, and there's loads more plains north of Virginia, and terrain north of Upper Canada is almost entirely Tundra. The Rockies and the Andies are now serious ridges of mountain, as opposed to hills spotted with the occasional peak. The thickness of Isthmus prevents you creating the Panama canal hundreds of years early.
Perhaps most importantly, the East coast of the Americas is almost entirely covered in forest, and the Amazon is a proper jungle, not a couple of tiles of jungle snaking their way through the Brazilian interior. There's a lot of woodland on this map.
What's the Same?
As far as I can tell, you still start next to South America. I don't know why, but it seems that no matter what, human players always start in roughly the same spots near the bottom of the map, regardless of whether it's a premade map or a random one. If anyone doesn't experience this, please let us know.
There are no new terrains or resources, so things that were taken out for this game don't return.
What's Different from the actual original map?
Because Savannah, Prairie, Swamp and their respective forests were removed from the game, I've had to merge these into other terrains. Swamp in the old game was just a marshier marsh, so I made that a marsh, while Savannah was the original game's Sugar terrain, so that's marsh now too. That means that Brazil, which was about 50/50 Savannah/Rain Forest is now pretty much entirely Marsh with half of it covered in Jungle. Tropical Forest, which was Savannah's forest, is now Marsh with thick forest, while Marsh's Forest, Wetland, is light forest.
Plains now produce Cotton, so Prairie was merged into that. Prairie's forest didn't produce the huge amount of Lumber that Mixed Forest did, though, so I've made that Light forest.
Prime Timber is gone, so I've used my own judgement on that front, to compensate for other shortages on the map, and some Deer on Prairie Forest has been replaced with Prime Cotton.
Oases are gone, and Bananas have the closest effect, and look a bit like Palm trees too, so that's what's replaced them.
Natives are not placed. I'm not sure at this point what would be balanced amounts of braves for them, or even whether it's possible to keep them in fixed places without fixing the positions of the Europeans' starts, or even whether placement is possible at all without a mod.
Anything Else?
I'm not great at supporting things I develop, or keeping tabs on threads, so this map is released entirely into the public domain. There's no need to ask my permission if you want to use this for anything, or modify it. If you can make the map better, I want to play it.
Unzip the map into the \PublicMaps folder and you should be ready to go.
Screenshots?
Soon.
Update 1.01
-Fixed a couple of terrain errors, esp in mountains. Silver tiles are no longer hills when they should be mountains.
-Identified a possible AI issue, that the AI doesn't consider large amounts marsh or forest a viable colony site, and so moves to the extremities of the map for sites.
