Advanced Map Settings

This page will detail what the different advanced map settings do. There are three categories:

Page 1 has a variety of rules that primarily effect what state the game begins in, and how the map generates

Page 2 changes the way the map is generated, and allows the player to change how skill trees work

Page 3 has unit generation options, and miscellaneous other options

All map settings apply to just the map that's created, or when loading into that map later on. Advanced settings remain the same until the player closes the game. If the player generates a world with some advanced settings modified and then decides they want to generate a world with the default settings, they will have to manually change the settings back.

### Page 1 - Starting Rules and Map Generation

Hamlet / Township / City / Capital - determines the degree to which the starting city is developed at the start of the game.

* Hamlet has no buildings
* Township (default) has 1 income building and 1 dwelling
* City has 2 income buildings, 2 dwellings and a tavern
* Capital has 3 income buildings, 3 dwellings (2 of them upgraded), champion status, marketplace, fort and guild of mages

Faction Biomes - determines whether starting terrain fits with the terrain of the faction in the area. This is mostly aesthetic, altering the appearance of the world, but it also affects the creatures summoned by Elementalism and Call Beasts

Monster strength - the strength of neutral monsters on the overworld map

Faction vaults - whether vaults in the starting area fits with the faction in the area or not. Vaults are overworld dwellings protected by units, which give some resources when defeated and spawns reinforcements each week once captured

Starting resources - determines the amount of resources that the player and the AI start with

* Low: 5000 5 5 0 0 0
* Normal: 12000 15 15 8 8 8
* High: 20000 30 30 15 15 15

Hero movement points - determines how far heroes can move per turn on the overworld map - basically like giving all heroes logistics

* Low: 12 starting movement
* Normal: 17 starting movement
* High: 22 starting movement

Building requirements - determines the likelihood of town structures having requirements for other structures to be built before they can be built

Guardposts - determines whether map areas are separated by Guardposts or just normal neutral monsters. Guardposts are automatically given guards once captured

Randomised Map - determines whether or not many features of the map, such as location of mines and obelisks, are randomized. If turned off, maps will be mostly the same. Enemies will be different, and some buildings will have changed, but the difficulty of fights, type of building, and location of each, will remain the same.

Randomised Town - determines whether the building tree for a town is randomized or not. If off, buildings will have the exact same requirements every game (assuming the requirements setting remains the same), and will be located in the exact same spots on the building planner.

Mixed-faction Town Units - determines the likelihood that dwellings in cities will give units from a different faction than the city

Weekly Bonuses - determines whether or not Weekly Bonus effects can occur at the start of the week

### Page 2 - Map Generation

Roaming hero number - the number of neutral roaming heroes generated in each area. While the actual number depends on the size of area, this setting adjusts the multiplier

Scattered resources - this modifier determines how many undefended resources are scattered around each zone of the map

Frequency - the following options all modify the frequency of various things being generated on the map. Beware - setting all of them to High or to Low doesn't change anything - but setting just a couple to High will greatly change the distribution of map structures

* Artifacts - the frequency of artifacts either undefended or defended by a neutral monster
* Extra mines - frequency of duplicate mines (e.g. 2 sawmills) or gold mines
* Altered mines - frequency of non-standard mines - e.g. potential mines, derelict mines, overgrown mines
* Vaults - frequency of vaults. Vaults are overworld dwellings protected by units, which give some resources when defeated and spawns reinforcements each week once captured
* Monuments - frequency of monuments. Monuments are overworld dwellings which, once captured, can create units each week by paying gold or other resources. They can be upgraded to expand their weekly unit growth, and be used even without a hero nearby
* Palaces - frequency of palaces. Palaces are buildings which increase daily gold income and boost unit growth in a nearby town. They also give defensive bonuses
* Adventure Buildings - frequency of adventure map buildings, which is a large diverse group of random building with various effects. Examples are the Brewery, Sphinx, Chapel, Training Grounds, Crystalarium, Black market, etc

Obelisks on/off - toggles on or off the existence of obelisks on the map, and therefore the existence of buried treasures

Guard difficulty - changes the strength of guardposts or neutral monsters defending the path between different areas

Force Symmetry - determines whether the map will be generated with Strict Symmetry (on) or Loose Symmetry (off). With Strict Symmetry, all players on the map will get exactly the same neutral monsters and structures in their starting areas. With Loose Symmetry, players will get neutral monsters of approximately the same difficulty, and structures of the same type, but not necessarily the exact same type. For instance, with Loose Symmetry, one player might find a Cartographer and the other a Forge (two different adventure buildings), while both will have a Potential Gold Mine.

Skill Trees - this setting has three options:

* Randomised - shuffles skill trees of all heroes of the same class together into new skill trees. Starting skills remain the same
* Normal
* Off - instead of picking skills freely, when hero levels up, they can choose between up to three randomly selected skills from their tree

### Page 3 - Units & Misc. Options

Unit creation cost - a modifier determining the base gold cost of hiring units in towns

Unit growth modifier - a modifier determining the weekly growth of units in towns

Force neutral unit group - forces all neutral monsters on the map to be of the chosen unit grouping.

Allow Debug Mode - enables cheats and disables achievements

Sudden Death (hotseat) - enables a special sudden death mode for hotseat games. Once a time limit is reached, players are forced into one final confrontations with their full armies and best hero, but no town bonuses, and the winner wins the match. The time limit starts at 2½ hours, but the two first times a major battle occurs between players, an extra half hour is added to the time limit