Civ 5 Will Let You Import and Convert Civ 4 Maps

bbretterson writes "From an interview Bitmob conducted with Civilization 5 Lead Designer Jon Shafer: 'You can import Civ 4 maps into the world builder and convert them into Civ 5 maps, including all the units and cities and stuff on it — the conversion process will just do that for you automatically. We're hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already.'"

Comments

Square to hexagon conversion

[Maian]

Civ 4 map plots are squares. Civ 5 are hexagons. I don't see an easy conversion process that won't produce real not-just-semantic map differences (e.g. how to convert diagonal waterways where in a 4x4, one diagonal is water and the other diagonal is land, and ships can travel through the water diagonal?)

Re:Square to hexagon conversion

[Shrike82]

Yeah this was my first question too. Nothing in the article about it, but it hesitantly alludes to the fact that the only things confirmed to "carry over" will be cities and units. So this could very well be an approximation rather than a conversion. Cities roughly in the same place, land masses roughly the same size and shape, rivers running the same general course and touching the same cities etc.

Units will be interesting though. If you import a map with huge unit stacks they'll have to be spread out to conform to the new one-unit-per-hex requirement. Suddenly a stack of doom will become a huge traffic jam across your civilisation!