I agree, this map is old. Today there are even more nations. In addition, I play with the Dominions Enhanced mod.
On this map in the Early Age, I once destroyed Ulm and the guys further north, Niefelheim, the destruction of which took a lot of strength, because their God single-handedly resisted entire armies. Arcocephali have the ability to expand early.

Una palabra: "Maravilloso".

Muchas gracias por tu trabajo. :-)

You can go fliers, but icarids aren't great for their cost, wind riders cost a fortune and you'd have to go in with no mage support. Meanwhile the nearby nations without all of these problems have expansion armies taking all the nearby land and your economy/army size is crippled from how many resources and losses it takes to take the mountains. The only reliable solution is going awake combat oriented pretender with mountain traversing capability, but in my opinion the strength of Dominions is in its varied choices.

To give an example of the style of gameplay this map is going for that works well imo is something like the Ulm start of MA Mortal Realms. You have room to expand, but the surrounding mountains add variety to how you and your opponents plan expansions and defenses. I don't think this map should be Mortal Realms size, but if you had this layout with more provinces and no capitals in this crippling of a position it would probably be one of the best maps made for the series.

I doubt this is going to be updated again given how long its been, but I figured I'd throw my two cents in. The map is beautiful, and the idea of mountain chokepoints is excellent, but in execution I think this map needed to be larger in scale to be balanced. I went EA Arcoscephale for a quick test, and boy is it rough.

Surrounded by water and mountains, only a single regular tile out of the 8 adjacent, and Pangaea's capital is one of them. To the north is Ulm with plenty of room to expand straight to one of your chokepoints, Marv slightly west of them sharing that land. Your east chokepoint has another capital with slightly more room to expand and quicker access to the chokepoint, so every nation close by is naturally incentivized to expand towards you while you have to pray that your 1 available province didn't spawn with a stack that will heavily wear down your expansion stack, plus your capital gets almost nothing from adjacent provinces until you can formulate a mountain army.

@Magnnus Well it DID contain all nations on release, but Illwinter games keep adding free nations in their updates and patches, the bastards.

Why is Kailasa spelled as Khailasa in the map?

Where is Ubar? Can't seem to find it!

It would be nice if the description included which nations are supported, since "all" is not entirely accurate.

@Itharus I think it's enabled by default. In 'Divine Rules' after you make your pretender.

Fantastic map, mate! Loving Xibalba's cave islands, Zotz for the win!!

@Veliq Ok, thanks for clearing that up.

@VargHannes This is a bug in the current version of the game and not specific to the map(s).

All good, thank you for the reply :)

It doesn't include any new content since it was released. I'll have to rework and rebalance them into any future updates.

Oh, also does this allow for all factions as of June 2019?

Ok I'm a dumbass. Where's the enable special starts option? A map like this is something I've always wanted to make myself, and so I'm really eager to try this out! :)

@Captain Butthurt when you said "If only mountains would become more passable if you owned adjacent provinces or could build some kind of structure for it." the ability you are looking for are the spells that change a provinces climate to hot or cold. You have to make both sides of a mountain heat scale to cross mountains. You need to make both sides of a river cold scale to cross rivers. You have these tools are your disposal.

I agree with Wolfenix that the montain passes are fun as they are :)

Interestingly, I have the opposite opinion regarding the mountains. When thought of as a map feature, this map really shines.

Are there areas of the map that are difficult to pass or are entirely impassable most of the year? Definitely! This is EARLY ERA, meaning rough and unrefined in society AND landscape. So you have to now watch the seasons and move troops accordingly? Cool! Sounds like a great defense, actually, not to mention the opportunity to develop your spells and artifacts in a way that really plays to those challenges and strengths. Suddenly all the rarely used utility spells/items become paramount to success? Either way I think it's great to have a map that forces me to think outside of my comfort zone. I'm a better gamer for it, so thank you, Potentate, for a great map!

Beautiful map and lots of fun for me to play in SP. Please put less mountains in any future maps as it is very difficult to move around with the mountain passes shut nearly all year round.

I just tried it out, and it's borderline unplayable because of all the mountains.

I'm playing EA Ermor, and after capturing all adjacent provinces and expanding slightly to my south, I'm pretty much stuck - I can't advance north or east through the mountains for like 3\4 of a year, and overexpanding south is not particularly interesting to me and will stretch my supply lines. Securing your northern border is paramount because your capital is very close to your neighbour.

If only mountains would become more passable if you owned adjacent provinces or could build some king of structure for it.

Even if successfully conquer northern provinces and push back my neighbours, reinforcing my main armies with capital-specific holy units is a pain in the butt - I only have a brief window of 1\4 of a year to do so.

make it bigger

I am playing as Berytos and I just realise that the closest wasteland is desert around C'Tis. Is that deliberate ballancing, or an omission?

I'm not sure about the screenshots, I saw them pop up but certainly didn't delete them.

@NinjaX I take that as a huge compliment. I'm sorry the resolution is so poor when zoomed in, but please feel free to add extra details and improvements. Let us know how it goes.

Just want to say thank you for this detailed and lore based map. I am building a Dungeons & Dragons campaign based on Dominions lore and your map is what I will be using for the world map. Much appreciated.

Nah, too small.

Well, posted here three screenshots with issues of this map, why they was deleted?

Heya, some additional observations on Xibalnba (again across eras): Oh lord is there a wide gap between playing EA to MA.
EA: 2 provinces then stuck until you can dislodge a throne (might be that the settings I play at here make a difference, but if it's a level 2-3 throne you're on 2 provs for a while and neither are good blood hunting).
And then conversely, MA Xibalba has all the ocean in the world and no one nearby that can really contest. Very easy to expand to UW chokepoints and fort up, ignoring most nearby land neighbors (who are tiny compared to you for being stuck on 3-4 province islands) until you want their stuff.
IMO there is perhaps too much water in the South and some (like Marignon, Bandar Log, and EA Xibalba) have only a small "guaranteed" plot of land, all of which is easy to harrass from sea. I'd suggest biggening their islands a little.

No probs, thanks for using my map and let me know if you have any other suggestions to improve future versions.

Oh I agree with the placement of Phlegra in terms of who their neighbors are. Reading back I was unclear in what I was referring to, which is their proximity to so many other capitals.

As for West/East mythologies and their prevalences: I was suggesting more along the lines of "compressing" Caelum's available territory, perhaps by moving some Western nations a notch East from where they currently are in order to offer competition for that land. The amount of mountains still would favor the flyers though, hence my mention of slimming down that range.

Just to clarify what I meant, thanks again for the great work!

As for Phlegra - I placed it where Mekone was, which in turn was placed based on their Spartan background as a sort of "gate to the west" based on the battle of Thermopylae. I think their proximity to Uruk and Hinnom makes sense since the Spartans famously fought the Persians (which I know aren't quite what Hinnom and Uruk are based off). I may be wrong in this interpretation and am open to having my mind changed.

Thanks for playing my map, I really appreciate the feedback. Your point about Niefelheim was brought up by someone else and I agree they are fenced in. Same for Bandar Log. In terms of Caelum the problem is that most of the nations are based on western mythologies, so you get a crowded Mediterranean and empty east if you try and place nations in lore friendly spots - which then makes the game unbalanced. I will try and work on this in my larger version, I've seen people try and shrink a world map down to give everything approximate representation, but I'm working on something a little more abstract.

Hey I think these maps are great! I've started a game or 2 on both and I'll give my feedback here for both maps:

EA Version:
- Niefelheim has a hell of a time expanding without a mountain survival bless. A lot of places around them realistically never become accessible due to frozen mountain passes.

MA Version:
- Phlegra's placement feels off to me. Immediately next to Uruk and 2 jumps away from Pythium.

- That swamp North of Bandar Log really sucks to have to move through. It'd be fine if all nations had a similar impediment but a lot of nations don't. I guess this is true of both maps.

- Again probably true for both: IMO Caelum has way too much free room to expand. They've gotten massive in every attempt I made on this map (save for one where I didn't really have scouts there so can't confirm). Maybe slim down the mountain ranges and move over some West-side nations?

Thank you.

The map is cool but it has far too many mountain passes, to a point they harass the capitals directly.

beautiful

amazing map...this should be a vanilla map with the game.

@Mr B
I agree! This map is a lovely addition to Dominions 5.

It does need a number of fine tuning to work, but it can clearly be one of the top single player maps out there.

@Potentate
I notice a slight mismatch in the map's sides for the E-W wraparound. Its possible to correct it with some light photoshopping.

I think I will wait for this map. I love the design and idea. Can't wait for all the finetuning. Excited for this great addition to Dominions.

NICE! awsome art!

nice drawing

You raise an important point, and by starting games with most nations I've found you get hemmed in almost immediately. The only real remedy for this is to make the map bigger, which is what I ideally plan to do. Both so there is more resources available as a well as redundant choke points for nations to capitalise on.

I'd also add a concern that northern nations will enjoy far more chokepoints than southern ones, simply due to temperature distribution and terrain. The map relies primarily on mountain pass borders to create chokepoints, but in the south these will be open most of the time while in the north they will be closed. This could be changed by nation selection, but that's less likely to mitigate things given that the south is full of heat-loving nations, and vice-versa. If there is to be any semblance of balance between regions, either the north or the south (but not both) needs to use river borders to create chokepoints.

I love the look of the map, but I have two areas of concern.

With 8 connections per province, its connection density is insane. It really reduces the effective carrying capacity of the map because of how short distances between any two points become - and in the case of an all-nation map, it effectively rules out some nation combinations because they start with overlapping cap circles - or even adjacent capitals (!!).

The terrain distribution also leads to some issues - the nations with mostly low-pop terrains around them could probably use more provinces tagged as large to balance against those less hanicapped.

Thanks for changing the area around neifelheim. But I believe there was a mixup. You changed the hills into forest, instead of changing the mountains into forest :D

So Neifelheim is still boxed in with mountains :P

I remember reading that one of Agartha heroes (in MA I believe) is from Ulm. It could be said then that Agartha is not super far from Ulm (though in what direction?), either that or the old guy had a really long walk. I would say that making the caves around Agartha would be a good choice though. Especially since this is EA. Really good map!

cool map!

Thanks for the feedback. I can address both problems with Neifelheim and Agartha

Neifelheim - For some reason I thought they got mountain survival, but the inspector says otherwise. I'll open up some of those mountains to the west and add some forest. That will also give Fomoria more room as well.

Agartha - I placed Agartha where it is because the north was sparse and there is more room for it to expand. The band of cold affects the northernmost 3 rows of provinces, so it is escapable. As a compromise for its cold blooded trait I can make the caves around the capital neutral?warm?

What do you guys think?

Started out with Neifelheim and noticed I couldn't capture most of the neighbouring provinces, because there mountains. Now I could wait for the snow to melt so I can cross mountains, but I believe that would take a very long time since it's a cold 3 nation. Also you don't start with flying units so thats also not really a option.

Just found that part a bit silly, so thought I would point it out. The map itself looks great!

Kinda funny that Agartha is in the north since the Pale Ones are all cold blooded. Though they are underground so I guess it works out.