Redefining Regions

This weekend I spent some time working on how to approach the development of tribal migrations. The current idea is to make migration patterns goal oriented. So, for example, a tribe that prefers living in the forest should migrate to forested lands, a tribe that primarily practices agriculture should instead try to settle grasslands or floodplains, and so on. To help this happen, tribes should be able to recognize which territories best serve their intentions. So for that I decided to improve upon the region generation algorithm which was left in a deficient state after the introduction of rivers in 0.3.3.

Right now, regions are mostly defined to encompass unique biomes within a particular altitude range. This works well for very uniform areas. But those are now somewhat rare. The algorithm breaks down in areas where biomes vary wildly. Which happens very frequently in areas with high drainage, like forests and jungles. This results in many small, very jagged regions peppered with holes. My intention is to fix this by adding hole-detection mechanics and border softening. Once this is done, I hope I'll be able to better direct the behavior of migrating tribes so that they can try settle the entirety of these regions and, in future versions, make land claims over them.

There's lots of work to do here, but I hope I'll be able to show progress over the next few weeks with actual screenshots. Which I expect will make these updates more interesting to look at.