Some notes on how Got Lakes works with the Civ6 Plus: Harmony in Diversity (HD) mod.

This reference is for Got Lakes v36.2.



Got Lakes is compatible with HD v1.3.6 (Mar 10, 2023) through v1.3.9 (Jan 1, 2024).

Got Lakes is fully compatible with the following features from HD:

• All gameplay overrides such as plot yields, buildings, districts, etc.
  
• Swamp features when JNR's CB Wetlands mod is also enabled.
  
• Improved distribution of resources across continents.
  
• Improved goody hut placement.

The following features of HD will have no effect:

• Tweaks to terrain latitude bands.
  
• Tweaks to mountains near volcanos.
  
• Tweaks to feature placement
  
• Removal of coastal ice.
  
• Tweaks to assigning starting plots.
  
• Tweaks to map utility performance.

Got Lakes has its own overrides to mountains, terrains, features, resources, and civ start placement which eclipse most of the map-gen overrides by HD. The following lists are just a subset of Got Lakes' capabilities for comparison with HD; for a complete list of capabilities, check out Got Lakes versus Base Game.

Additions:

• Added a Mountains option to choose from 7 different ways of generating mountains.
  • Includes Tectonic Plates (similar to the base game), Fractal Ranges (snaky ranges based on Civ V Highlands), Scattered Crags (small clumps inspired by Civ V Highlands, but redesigned for better responsiveness to adjustment options), Clustered Highlands (big clumps based on Civ V Highlands), Uncanny Valleys (designed from scratch), Winding Canyons (designed from scratch), and Everything (runs all of the other mountain generators through fractal filters).
• Added a Mountain Clumps option to choose whether to hollow-out mountain clumps, carve mazes, or leave mountain clumps alone. Randomizable.
  
• Replaced World Age option with Mountain Level and Hill Level options, each of which range from Very Low to Very High levels and provide Random Low-High in addition to Random.
  
• Hill Level defaults to "Same as Mountain Level" so that both Mountains and Hills can still be controlled by a single option (Mountain Level), just like the base game.
  
• Added a Thin Mountain Clump Edges option to toggle thinner edges when hollowing out mountain clumps.
  
• Added a No Coastal Mountains option to revert to base game behavior with respect to coastal mountains.
  
• All mountain patterns also generate trenches, which only appear when Tectonic Extras are included in the Inverted Extras landmass.
  
• Added a Climate Wrap option to control the location/existence of poles (Azimuthal, Globe, or Region). Can also set to Random Globe/Region or Random.
  
• Added a Climate option to choose from 5 distinct temperature ranges (known as climates) ranging from Snowball to Sandstorm. Includes a Standard climate that is similar to the base game. Can also choose Random Ice Age to Greenhouse or Random.
  
• Added a Biome option to choose from 4 distinct balances of rainfall-controlled features (known as biomes). Includes a Standard biome that is similar to the base game.
  
• Added a Sunlight option to control the whether poles are both cold (Standard), one-hot-one-cold (Tilted Axis), or both hot (Two Suns).
  
• Added an Icy Poles option to control whether to include or exclude the coldest regions of the map.
  
• Expanded Temperature option to include Very Cold, Very Hot, and Random Low-High. Stacks with Climate.
  
• Added a Desert Level option to directly control desert frequency and desert latitude bands. Stacks with Temperature.
  
• Added a Tundra Level option to directly control the thickness of the tundra latitude bands. Stacks with Temperature.
  
• Expanded Rainfall option to include Very Dry, Very Wet, and Random Dry-Wet. Stacks with Biome.
  
• Added a Climate Granularity option to control the granularity of all climate fractals (affects clump sizes of all land terrains and rainfall-controlled features)
  
• Added a Grass/Plains mix option to control the balance of grassland and plains.
  
• Added a Forest/Jungles mix option to control the balance of forests and jungles.
  
• Added a Biodiversity option to control various terrain/feature combos via levels of diversity. Defaults to "Climate Based" so that players can ignore this option while still allowing automatic balance changes for extreme climates.
  
• Added a Circumnavigation option which can cut random paths through ice and prevent ice from touching coastal land.
  
• Added a Connected Seas option which prevents ice from touching coastal land in addition to connecting all saltwater seas.
  
• Added a No Coastal Ice option to prevent ice from touching coastal land.
  
• Added a No Ice option to remove all ice from the map.
  
• Added the following options to disable terrain types: No Desert, No Grass, No Plains, No Snow, and No Tundra; enabling all of these will randomly remove 1-3 terrain types.
  
• Added the following options to disable terrain/feature combos: No Desert Forests, No Desert Jungles, No Desert Oases, No Grass Jungles, No Plains Marsh, No Snow Forests, No Snow Oases, No Tundra Forests.
  
• Added a No Reefs option to disable non-wonder reefs.
  
• Added a Volcano Level option to control the frequency of volcanoes. Defaults to "Same as Mountain Level" so that mountains and volcanoes can both be controlled by a single option (Mountain Level), just like the base game.
  
• Volcano Level can also be set to "Same as Hill Level".
  
• Added a Scrambled Land Luxuries option to override most rules for where luxuries can be placed on land.
  
• Added a Land Starts option to control whether civs that start on land start on the largest area, are divided among areas like normal, or each start in a separate area. Set to Landmass Based by default so that landmasses can automatically adjust this option.
  
• Added a Water Starts option to control whether civs that start in water start on the largest area, are divided among areas like normal, each start in a separate area, or start on land. Set to Landmass Based by default so that landmasses can automatically adjust this option.
  
• Added a Minor Starts option to control whether city-states start on the largest area, start regions like normal, each start in a separate area, are divided amon areas like major civs, or start using the same method that is chosen by the Land Starts option.
  
• Added a custom start positioner (originally based on Civ V's AssignStartingPlots utility) to support a wide variety of maps as well as Land/Water/Minor start options.

Adjustments:

• Adds coastal mountains by default for extra randomness / more interesting maps.
  
• Randomizes input flags for mountain fractals so that mountain fractals are less predictable.
  
• Replaces the base game's temperature variation fractal and latitude threshold system with interpolated fractals and min/max latitude ranges to create gradual transitions between latitude bands.
  
• Treats both grassland and plains as "temperate" terrains to improve playability across various climates and temperatures.
  
• Slightly increased frequency of grassland (instead of plains) on hills to improve fertility of hilly regions.
  
• Slightly increased frequency of plains (instead of grassland) on flat land to improve productivity of flat regions.
  
• Uses a variety of fractal filters to make formations of forests, jungles, marsh, etc. more interesting than mere blobs/clumps.
  
• Enables ice in fresh lakes.
  
• Prevents ice in front of river mouths.
  
• Allows jungles on grassland by default.
  
• Allows marsh on plains by default.
  
• Allows jungles and/or forests on desert for certain maps.
  
• Allows forests and/or oases on snow for certain maps.
  
• River Level adjusts frequency of oases, but only to balance-out frequency of deserts that can have oases (more rivers means fewer potential spots for oases).
  
• Frozen terrain is slightly warmer when adjacent to rivers.
  
• Uses an interpolated fractal to place ice in addition to the base game's interpolated white noise ending with top/bottom rows of solid ice. Results in ice-flow mazes that are interesting to explore.
  
• Uses latitude interpolation to determine ice loss (for GS ice-melt events) for fractal and white-noise ice (for more realistic-looking loss of ice).
  
• Replaces HD's swamp generator with an interpolated fractal layer of swamps.
  
• Uses white noise (per-tile RNG) to determine ice loss for top/bottom rows of ice (for simplicity).
  
• Doubled the "standard" number of geothermal fissures.
  
• Doubled the "standard" number of volcanoes.
  
• Allows all strategic resources to appear on all non-floodplains terrain types for maps that are mostly represented by only one or two land terrain types.
  
• Relaxed constraints on starting major civs and city-states near natural wonders; instead of ignoring such plots entirely, the start positioner now considers such plots as fallbacks in case better plots are not available and factors natural wonders into plot fertility scoring. Gives the start positioner more flexibility in choosing starts; improves support for increased natural wonder spawn; increases start positioner's ability to maximize distance between civs without compromising on start quality.
  
• Enforces civilization-specific start biases with the following algorithm (instead of the base game's ineffective tiered round-robin over a handful of bias-agnostic starting locations):
  1. Choose at least N generic regions for N players.
     
  2. Scan every city-capable plot in every region to determine each player's "interest" in each region based on a sum of tier-weighted start bias plot scores. If a player has no start bias then treat that player as slightly interested in every region.
     
  3. Use backtracking constraint satisfaction (kind-of like solving a Sudoku puzzle) to maximize the number of players that are at least slightly interested in their assigned region, while also initially assigning regions in order of highest interest.
     
  4. Choose a location for each region while considering the assigned player's start bias among other things such as fresh water access and distance to other civs. Locations that have a start bias score and are not completely dry take priority over other locations.
• Improved handling of coastal bias: instead of simply matching a plot's terrain type with coast, Got Lakes measures the size of the surrounding sea/ocean and reduces coastal bias score if the ocean/sea is only a small fraction of the world's water.

Fixes:

• Scans the map for areas surrounded by mountains and creates random mountain passes until all areas are reachable.
  
• All features for climates are fractal-based just like Civ V; the base game uses per-tile RNG (creates incoherent white noise patterns) and adjacency-checks for clumping/throttling (subject to directional biases due to iterating over plots in SW-NE order); using fractals instead solves both of these problems AND allows for granularity control AND allows interpolation of said fractals over latitude band ranges.
  
• Scans the map for areas surrounded by ice and creates random ice passes until all areas are reachable.
  
• Volcano placement respects the No Coastal Mountains option, so that disabling coastal mountains will also prevent coastal volcanoes.
  
• Avoids adding volcanoes on map edges to prevent walls of volcanoes from cutting-off parts of the map.
  
• Volcano placement no longer places hills or non-volcano mountains; improves responsiveness to Mountain/Hill Level.
  
• Added resource-gen plot-sorting tie breakers to avoid descyncs in multiplayer games.
  
• Avoids placing multiple water-start civs near each other in the water.
  
• Allows water-start civs to start in small salt-water seas or even fresh lakes when oceans are not available.
  
• Makes up to three attempts to place starts in order to avoid map-generation failure; will fall-back to default placement if the first attempt fails, and then relax constraints completely (starting major civs like city states, for example) if the second attempt fails.

Adjustments:

• Improved distribution of resources across continents.
  
• Improved goody hut placement.