Question: Why are the maps not centered?

[arraamis]

The pangea map is one large land mass ... How come it is never centered?

I cannot imagine this being deliberate, since it really serves no real purpose for it to be shifted off to the side every time. And its not like it won't fit because it will.

So, what's the deal?

[jdmillard]

At one point (I can't remember if it was during the beta, or right after release) they changed the way the mini map worked. Before, the mini map was basic and the territory (1,1) was in corner of the minimap. This seems to be the intuitive way to do things, but it meant that your colonizer on the first turn might spawn on the edge of the minimap making it difficult for you to see your whole empire because some of it would be on the far left of the minimap and some of it on the far right (this is a problem in other games too). It was eventually changed so that the minimap would automatically recenter on your starting location on the first turn (so now the territory (1,1) was not guaranteed to be in the corner of the minimap, it could be anywhere). This made it easy to see your whole empire on the minimap with no annoying starts at the edge of the screen. Side note: If you play multiplayer such that you can see both screens, you'll see that all human players have distinct orientations of the minimap. Anyways, this works great on archipelago, random, and continent games but is sure is annoying on pangea games. Other than pangea problem, I absolutely love this feature.

I've never voiced this until now, but I've always thought that the minimap ought to be "re-center-able." So, for example, if it was a pangea game you could adjust the centering of the minimap after you've discovered the edges of the continent. I imagined that it would be a rightclick+drag or something of that nature. This may be too much to ask, so an alternative would be to enable or disable minimap recentering in the advanced pregame options.

[arraamis]

At one point (I can't remember if it was during the beta, or right after release) they changed the way the mini map worked. Before, the mini map was basic and the territory (1,1) was in corner of the minimap. This seems to be the intuitive way to do things, but it meant that your colonizer on the first turn might spawn on the edge of the minimap making it difficult for you to see your whole empire because some of it would be on the far left of the minimap and some of it on the far right (this is a problem in other games too). It was eventually changed so that the minimap would automatically recenter on your starting location on the first turn (so now the territory (1,1) was not guaranteed to be in the corner of the minimap, it could be anywhere). This made it easy to see your whole empire on the minimap with no annoying starts at the edge of the screen. Side note: If you play multiplayer such that you can see both screens, you'll see that all human players have distinct orientations of the minimap. Anyways, this works great on archipelago, random, and continent games but is sure is annoying on pangea games. Other than pangea problem, I absolutely love this feature.

I've never voiced this until now, but I've always thought that the minimap ought to be "re-center-able." So, for example, if it was a pangea game you could adjust the centering of the minimap after you've discovered the edges of the continent. I imagined that it would be a rightclick+drag or something of that nature. This may be too much to ask, so an alternative would be to enable or disable minimap recentering in the advanced pregame options.

Thanks mucho jdmillard, for that bit of infomation.