[Music] hey guys Spirit of the law here in this video we're going to be talking about the map Mega
random which by its own in-game description asks if you've ever dreamed of an endlessly
unpredictable map where anything is possible and nothing is guaranteed multiply it by 10
and this is what you get of course it's become a staple in the map Pool and is now one of the
most played maps in aoe2 regularly voted in by The Adventurous when given as an option having
both many fans and tractors the main question I want to talk about here though is how random
is it really the simplest technical answer is not at all the map's seed is generated in some
pseudo-random way and once you have a map seed there's only one way for the map to generate
which is entirely deterministic though admittedly that's an annoying and uninteresting answer to get
more at the heart of the question we're going to look at how a mega random map is generated and not
an overly technical way but enough to pull back the curtain and give a better idea of what sorts
of things it can do and what the limitations are which are unfortunate not as sprawling as that
in-game description makes it sound in fact you may have noticed very similar looking Generations
appear regularly if you played enough times and even after 10 games there's technically about a
two-thirds chance you'll swear you've seen a very similar looking map appear twice over those games
I do want to caution up front initially it's going to sound like it's far more predictable
than advertised and might start off disappointing but I think as we go deeper you'll come out with a
greater appreciation for the map and the hundreds or even thousands of unique gameplay experiences
it can offer now if you're anything like me the first time I encountered the map knowing
nothing about the technicals of map generation and scripting I assumed somewhat naively it would work
like this there would be a percent chance of a river on the map ever sent chance of a lake a
big hill a big pit large or small Islands forests along the edges Etc and would randomly pick some
combination of those features and then through the black box of map scripting would combine them
into one single map with anything you can imagine possible from incredibly boring to overloaded with
features in reality this is about as far away as you can get from how it actually generates
the basic map shape instead Mega random Begins by selecting from one of 45 pre-designed templates
which is still a lot but means you can easily get to the point you start to recognize some of them
with as I said at two-thirds chance you'll get at least one map show up twice over any
10 game span I told you this was going to start off by sounding a little disappointing at first
what's more several of those 45 templates are very similar to existing standard maps map 7
for example is basically Highlands map 9 is an often ice free version of Scandinavia map
23 is Acropolis or something very very similar and map 27 is basically Mediterranean so at the
least several have a very familiar look and feel like other standard maps at a glance now that said
many of the others can be quite novel you have a sort of Crossroads map which I like that is very
distinct for having Force along the edges along with shallows encouraging a very spread out sort
of Base another is like an inverse Acropolis where each player is in a pit with the rest of the map
having tons of elevation change and a special cracked terrain that causes buildings to take
20 percent more damage when attacked then there's the obviously named Pokeball map with a big forest
in the middle surrounded by shallows and in fact mixing water and land in interesting ways is a
common feature in the mega random templates among the most creative has a large starting Plateau
with both players reaching down on steep sides to your only sources of wood the middle area has gold
in it every time but interestingly there's never any stone outside your initial base just as a
quirk of the map you may recognize a few of these templates from your own games and you can see how
it gives a subtle advantage to people who play it often now fixating on that 45 map number though
I think glosses over one big layer of variability which is the map season as it's called internally
in the code or maybe more accurately I would call it the maps climate most maps have a chance chance
of being any of the major climates whether it be desert Alpine Frozen tropical Etc which can
have more than just aesthetic implications a Central Lake for example could be deep water
allowing for fishing in one generation or in a different generation be ice having a big impact
on how things play out in this map generation for example outside of each player's starting
Square you have tiny islands of trees with scraps of gold and stone on them the rest of the map is
quicksand which is completely unbuildable so how would you ever get a good farming economy going
here well it would probably take a lot of chopping the same map template but with a Southeast Asian
climate has plenty of area for Farms as well as the potential for fishing and demo rafts
as all of that unbuildable quicksand area is now instead multifunctional is it really fair to call
these the same map even if technically they're both map template number 44. not so sure about
that in addition the majority of maps have a 10 chance of a nomad start and at least one
has two starting Town centers again giving a bit different experience and pushing players outside
their regular build orders so to recap so far when you start and make a random map the game picks
a seed number uses that to randomly pick one of 45 templates picks a random climate for that map
which may or may not radically change something about how the map is played and then sometimes
rolls for a nomad start but it's not done yet once it has the lathe land figured out it then adds in
trees and resources now if you've played Mega random before you know it loves to mess around
with resources the size and number of smaller wood clamps scattered on the map seems predetermined on
the ones I looked at the code for so that part is pretty consistent I assume for balanced reasons on
the other hand you're starting gold and stone are very much random within reason in fact generally
there's only a 10 chance of having the standard seven plus four plus four gold piles that you
get on Arabia with various other distributions possible being either more or less the extra gold
in stone piles on the map and how large those clumps are are then completely independent of
what's in your starting base this is true for each resource giving you almost any combination you can
think of between high and low gold stone and food distribution though with food specifically having
a fairly generous minimum to make the early game playable and especially with Nomad starts
I've seen it roll some very large amounts of food with the map set up then Mega random adds another
independent layer of Randomness with starting buildings and Scouts the likelihood of buildings
to appear seems to be dependent on the map itself and if the map is considered to have limited or
lots of available space around the town center but especially in an open map you have a decent
chance for a free starting building this could include any type of tower including up to three
watch Towers you can also start with a wall around your base every once in a while get a free Castle
up to three houses a combination of a faderia with four houses to help your housing cap a free
market Siege Workshop or other military building a monastery three extra villagers 10 of the time
a fishing or transport ship and up to five farms in fact on average you have not too far off a 50
50 chance of something extra being given to you I also saw an interesting note in the script as
well about a chance to start with a lumber Camp VLDL man which I assumes a typo for VMDL or a town
center surrounded by berries though I haven't seen those before in mega random and they don't appear
to have been actually implemented personally I'd love to see them lean more into this and a VMDL
man as a scout would be pretty fun given it's the fastest unit in the game what do you think
of this VMDL now that's a good idea I would really like to see that but speaking of which of course
in addition to random buildings you can also get unusual Scouts you have a roughly 10 of getting
two scouts at the start and a 20 chance to start with a horse or camel usually just one but it can
be up to four there's also a three percent chance you don't get a scout at all and have to rough
it Age of Empires one style in very rare cases as well you have a small chance of a militia Spearman
or skirmisher as your scout with no other units unfortunately being possible though personally I'd
love to see The Siege Tower added to this roster all this together means while it's not truly
as random as at least I naively thought years ago with combining random features and making
anything possible to say it's just 45 Maps I think it's underselling the variability to illustrate
again let's focus on one map number 42 which we can nickname the Taurus or donut 76 of the time
it's a ring of land surrounded by mangrove forest it's an interesting hybrid map with an inner and
outer Lake to contest with a safe land bridge in between theoretically you could focus just
on land or contest either or both of the separate water regions so there's a lot of ways this could
play out even before considering how much gold and stone there is on the map the other 24 of the time
though it's generated as a desert map where the usual outline is replaced with quicksand and the
middle and outside are solid Forest suddenly it looks more like Oasis though the looped quicksand
tracks that replace the usual generation Shoreline means it's actually impossible to wall either side
now it's a permanently open land map and in this particular generation only gives two relics with
very little gold and stone outside your starting town this particular generation though then feels
enough pity to give you six starting villagers and two camels to just call this the same map
as the prior one I think undersells how much variation in gameplay you can have again despite
both being technically map number 42. of course having no idea what kind of map you're getting
into naturally Mongols are by far the most popular choice given their better scouting
and with players no doubt hoping capitalize on a very hunt heavy generation a couple of other
popular picks are Franks and britons as always as well as lithuanians for that reliable food
at the start now I'd be remiss here if I didn't at least quickly mention Zetnus before we finish
he's a legendary martyr in the community in his own right and not only does he have a 50 minute
long video re-rolling variations of each of the 45 template Maps but he's created his very own
hyper random map on The Mod Workshop this is what the more adventurous secretly wish Mega random was
giving even more variety in maps and Scouts there is a light version that tones things back but the
traditional version gives you not just things like a battering ram to scout but even sometimes
gives each player a wonder they have to defend or they lose the game while even changing how many
resources there are in animals mines and trees to be more or less than usual definitely takes
the whole premise of Mega random to a new level and if this is up your alley I check that out on
the workshop so to wrap up and answer the question of how random is Mega random I have to admit after
looking at it it's a combination of more and less than I thought with a huge number of potential
combinations possible but all built off a limited number of templates if you're curious I touched a
link below showing a representative example of all 45 map Generations that someone put together which
might be helpful if you want to leg up in the ladder and see if you can commit a few to memory
that'll do it for this one though thanks for watching guys and I'll see you next time foreign