Desirability III

I am working on making the desirability index more parameterized. With this, I can create sets of parameters for each race, because humans, elves, etc will not desire the same climates, terrain, or biomes for their habitations.

I'll probably be tweaking those recipes for a long time. I haven't looked into details on the races (5e is, of course, deeply unsatisfying). But I'm not worried about that for now.

Most races avoid the rainforest - the soil is often poor for many types of crops. Dwarves like mountains and avoid the coast - but they're not total loners so they'll utilize rivers for travel. Stuff like that.

This is a hard map to read - essentially I've layered five races on top of one another; humans: green, elves: red, dwarfs: blue, halflings: orange, and orcs: purple. Why those five? No idea. I wanted the three classics, plus a feature race for ice and desert climates that would be inhospitable for the others. The orcs end up with a lot of territory, but they are not as gregarious (modeled with an infrastructure penalty), so the size of their empires should theoretically be limited. The elves also have a wide distribution thanks to the large amount of rainforest (unless I penalize them for it also).

All of this is, of course, very modular. It's easy to change the climate models and then propagate those changes to the desirability. This is a far cry from where I was earlier this year, where a map like this would require tons of manual rework.

Creating this Step 0 desirability map is more or less straightforward (tweaking is, as always, necessary). However, existing infrastructure will also affect the terrain...but I haven't built any of that code, so that will need to be next.