The Drunken Lizard Pub

Hey folks,

Love the game. It's great and I have wasted FAR too many hours playing it.

One minor gripe: I souped up my Cartography skills so that I could look at a nice, pretty, detailed map as I trudged across 5 minutes of scrolling maps to the Goblin HQ.

When I removed my amulet of mapping the auto map I so diligently created "reverted" to giant, non-descript green swaths of land...erasing all the cool trees and roads I had mapped.

My point is...in real life if I draw a highly accurate map today and tomorrow I travel down the same road I am not going to erase what I have already mapped and replace it with a crappier map. I'd just leave it be.

Is there a possibility in Book 2 you could have the map stay at it highest "state" of resolution? Does this ability exist in Book 1?

Thanks for your ear.

But Buckeye43026, how often in real life do you use a magic amulet to increase your skill? If you take off the amulet you remove the magic, hence you lose the ability to read your detailed map and it becomes a blur of green swaths. But if someone with a natural or magically enhanced high cartography skill comes across your map he/she will be able to see all the detail which was written by your once magically enhanced hand.

You have a good point...

hmmm....

This would be a good point, but, should buckey re-equip the amulet, he would need to remap the area he blurred out.

Laudimir wrote:This would be a good point, but, should buckey re-equip the amulet, he would need to remap the area he blurred out.

That doesn't seem right... I wonder if it's a bug?

Jude

It's not a bug, it just wasn't thought out very carefully on our part.

This is being asked in another thread, as well. Thought I would post my experience here, too. On the Mac version, maps are not overwritten when my cartography skill reverts to 1 (when the spell wears off).

Hmm, I using a Power Mac G4 running OS X 10.3.9, and the maps are overwritten when I walk through the area again with a lower (or higher) level of Cartography, showing the amount of detail corresponding to my current level in the skill. I think it happens with Reveal Map, too, although I have been playing a Divination skilled character lately, and I can't remember for sure.

Jude

The maps are only written, and re-written, when the area is 'in range' of where you are. However as BW said, this was not well thought out .. maybe there needs to be another 'memory' skill - if you have good memory you don't lose what you previously knew. Right now everyone has really really bad memory..

In the Mac demo, which I downloaded today, I am not seeing this behavior with the Reveal Map spell. The areas I have mapped with Reveal Map active to not revert when I return to them without it.

Is there a maximum level at which increasing cartography further does not yield a better map?

Karl wrote:Is there a maximum level at which increasing cartography further does not yield a better map?

I've heard tell that after skill 17 there is little or no benefit.

Maelstrom wrote: I've heard tell that after skill 17 there is little or no benefit.

is that for any other skills aswell?

minim8mike wrote:

Maelstrom wrote: I've heard tell that after skill 17 there is little or no benefit.

is that for any other skills aswell?

no

This was my issue with the cartography skill as well... although in my case I "intuitively understood" the process to be more like an obsessive compulsive need to constantly draw in everything my character passed by, only sometimes he would have access to grey, brown, blue, and red crayons, and sometimes he wouldn't. Gotta draw something in, no matter how many times he's drawn it in before, but if the red crayon broke, he'll use green instead.

But aside from attaching a map state variable to each and every pixel on that map, and checking those states each time the character takes a step -- to see whether the current cartography skill is greater than the one at which the current map was drawn -- I'll be buggered if I know how to fix this sort of issue. And that would introduce a fair bit of overhead into the game.

Functionally speaking, I find it better to simply not use the compass at all; there are too many useful amulets out there, and inevitably I'm going to swap it out for something else. If I've taken any points in cartography at all, I find it better to just accept the lowest value and use that. Oddly, I find I'm in a better position if I haven't taken points in Cartography, because at least then whatever map I have made (via Reveal Maps, for instance) isn't going to get overwritten when my spell runs out and my skill drops back to 0. The whole map just vanishes in that case, and comes back in its entirety when I next cast Reveal Maps. All I've got to do is make sure I keep casting RV at a spell level equal to or higher than the one I was using before.