Cartography Annoyance

[silverkitty]

I brought this up for Book I and thought you were gonna patch it for Book II, but it's still happening:

if I map an area with a boosted cartography from a ring or something, I'd expect my character wouldn't be stupid enough to erase useful information when my boost (in this case, an amulet) is removed. But, yes, as I wander about, I busily unmark doors and roads from my map.

[Palog]

Lol, good point! But... your character is perhaps a stupid warrior?

[Slarty]

The Book II manual actually mentions that that can happen. Stupid, I agree, but it seems to be a feature now and not a bug.

[silverkitty]

Oh, I didn't bring it up in Book I, Azzy did, I just figured out that if only have level 1 cartography, you can minimize the damage from it: viewtopic.php?p=9652#p9652

Note also BW's reply to the original thread:
viewtopic.php?p=9332#p9332

Which brings up the question: is "Reveal Map" still a useless spell unless you take scrupulous care to NOT lean any cartography skill and ONLY use the spell?

[Randomizer]

Reveal map is cheap so you can keep recasting it. The chief benefit is that you will see monsters and NPCs moving around in the automap before they will appear on the playing screen. Downside is that automap won't show things on the other side of walls that appear on the playing screen.

[Krafen]

I was disappointed to see this "feature" crop up again. It makes sense that the mob detection would be based on current Cartography skill, but static features should be added to the map permanently.

[muze]

Seriously? you'll actually erase map details if you go through again with a lower cartography skill? Don't like that at all.

[silverkitty]

It does kind of ruin immersion when you realize your character is a moron who takes an eraser to perfectly good maps.

[wayninja]

It doesn't make any sense no matter how you slice it and and clearly it's simply an artifact of how the mapping was programmed.

[Grey Alien]

Yep I agree that this should be altered. Basically I had crappy cartography and was using Reveal Map to boost it quite often which was cool. Then I boosted cartography (spent money on it + levelled it up) and now it erases details that I mapped with Reveal Map.

As a game designer I believe it should be altered because all it does is cause player frustration, it doesn't add to the game in any way. Even if it's an "engine limitation", workarounds can still be programmed.

[Dragonlady]

Possible solution to problem. Take screen shots and paste them together and print it out. Someone has already gone to a great deal of trouble already for a generalized map else where in the forums. Doesn't show enemies or other finer details, but very useful.

[CrazyBernie]

Personally I don't agree that the mapping spell should do anything other than reveal enemies, treasure chests, etc. It's a bit of an oddball spell.

[xolotl]

Cartography in general is quite weird, really. You'd think that even with only 1 Cartography point for your char, you'd think to mark down where large bodies of water are. "I'll definitely mark down that tree over there, but this gigantic river bisecting this entire map? Meh, just leave it blank!"

Too bad the disappearing-map thing is still here in Book 2; I had been kind of hoping that'd be changed. Ah well! It's rarely been an actual issue for me.

[zZZz]

I have to agree, this may be the only thing I really don't like. It makes cartography items and spells kinda useless to me. I'm not going to wear my compass amulet at endgame, but I don't want to lose my map detail, so I just train cartography to level5 asap and forget about it. I know we've been over this with book1 already, but maybe an in-game challenge option to not erase map detail could be provided...?

[xolotl]

I know we've been over this with book1 already, but maybe an in-game challenge option to not erase map detail could be provided...?

Yeah, that'd certainly be nice, though I admit that it's probably a much more complicated problem than just a simple fix. Right now the mapping routines must just automatically "fill in" the map based on your current cartography level; in order to not erase bits of the map done with a higher level, the game would have to keep track of what level each pixel on the minimap was drawn with, and know not to overwrite it with a lower level. (That or keep track, on a per-square basis on the map, what your highest effective Cartography skill was.)

Not impossible, of course, but I'd guess that it's more work than we can expect to see in a Book 2 patch. Perhaps Book 3!