Someone's an old school Civ gamer

It's even a bit worse than that.

The probability of not getting 10 unique maps is around 40% (37.2%).

This includes the chance of getting a map thrice, getting two maps twice each, and so on, and so on.

hmm, the game technically hasn't BEEN released yet.  this is a pre release version, after the 24th then start the griping.

So um...what the hell does that mean?  That you will pirate it? 

Yeah but let's face it, there isn't a problem where someone can't find a suitable place to set up a city for 20-30 turns as someone suggests could happen with an imbalanced map from Elemental. That sort of imbalance is way out there. I've been playing TBS games since the first Civ game and never experienced anything like that. Sure in pretty much the entire Civ series you are spreading territory pretty quickly to cover the most land to get those unresearched resources later, but the use our static non-random map, and I am not about to have an argument on the definition of what a random map is here, or get some crazily drawn map where you spend an hour looking for a place to park your city is... unacceptable. That's the best word I can find to describe that.

I've played other TBS games too of course, AOW included as well so I am not just comparing Elemnetal, as the players are reporting it now, to only Civ.

I noticed that there are only one tactical battle map for each terrain type (I mean one for forrest-grassland and one for hills-grassland, too, and so on). I had 3-4 battles one after the other on the same map, although on very different tiles.

Yes it should. Its missing features but its still a playable game (for most) and the game hasnt even been officially released yet. So unless you have something new to say shush.

Someone ban this idiot

Do you realise how difficult or what is involved to program a random map generator that produce maps that are realistic and playable?

Just try it with only 2 terrain types - water and land. Say you want a map with one third water and two thirds land. You can not just look at each square and random generator because you will end up with chess board type maps. So you need to be random in a specific areas to create islands and bodies of water. That is just 2 terrain types.

Stardock already have a map generator but its not perfect (as people have said whe they remove the seeded maps) so they have a choice; either allow dodgy map creations or use seeded maps that produce proper maps. I think they made the right choice. They now have time to produce a random map generator that rivals Civ4

YOU BET!

I think everyone agrees that it's almost impossible nowadays to release a product that isn't suffering from bugs or imbalances out of the box. Especially if it's designed to provide fun and gameplay for -as Froggy stated- ages. So a lot of things that pop up here already and will pop up later when people are playing for a while might be quite understandable and pose minor problems if fixed in the next patch(es) or even user mods.

But THIS is rediculous! "Oops! We realize that one of the most important features of such a game is difficult to implement and we don't have the time to create more pre-made maps coz we don't want to delay the release, so let's suggest  to have players generate them for us..."

Guess that just post-poned my purchase by yet another month or two.

Disclaimer for all the fanbois who are ready to jumpstart:

I love SD for all they have achieved in the past, and I'm sure they'll come up with a solution to this and most of the probs that have surfaced and will surface later. But this is some behaviour/mind-set I find hard to tolerate.

LDiCesare is the author of what is still my favorite map script for Civ 4.  If anyone gets it, I think he does.

He wrote the "Tectonics" script.  It's actually included with the game at this point (since BTS or one of the Warlords patches - forget which).

My map generator for Civ IV has been included by Firaxis in the latest patches. Cephalo, who also got the game, has made map scripts for Civ IV too, in particular his 'Erebus' map script which is used by FfH2 is absolutely perfect for fantasy worlds like that of Elemental. And I bet he'd provide map scripts for Elemental too if he could (like me, he asked for map script modding).

Seeded maps can't fit the bill because there won't be enough seeds for replayability.

An alternative to an in-game map script would be an external generator, but the map format is a bit obnoxious: They basically put lines of similar terrain in a single tag with a number attribute, which probably makes reading faster and the files terser, but is more of a pain for generation. I think they gain about half the size of the map on a regular map with lots of water. A lot of data seems redundant too, so I don't feel like creating an external program without an explanation of the format, or I could generate maps that won't even load.