posted 02-17-99 03:16 PM ET        

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Don't mean to complain too much, because I love this game, but I'd like to see two changes with the way the map is handled.

1) There is no North/South wraparound! I understand that to make it a "realistic" world, when you went north, you'd have to end up not just south of your original position, but on the complete other side of the map. Who cares though? I'd like to see a N/S wraparound and I would DEFINITELY like to get rid of those moronic strips of land that run along the N/S borders which you can use to walk from one continent to the other. Come on, gimme a break on that one! It's just silly! In Civ 2 I used to found bases on them called "Arctic Station Alpha" and such, but they really are useless and can only provide annoying backdoors for civilizations to expand to places they shouldn't be able to get to by land. How many times have you seen a computer build a city on one of those bits just because its continent is connected to it? *sigh*

2) What's with the minimap? It remains fixed in one place, and if you're the unlucky sucker who's on one of the continents at the borders, your entire civilization is split on either side of the map. In Civ 2 the minimap centered on where you were looking in the main map screen. In SMAC, the minimap just shows a rectangle indicating where you are looking which ALSO gets split up and stuck on both sides of the minimap if you are looking at that area. If you look at world maps made in the United States during the Cold War, you will notice that the Soviet Union is split up onto both sides of the map. This has the effect of making it look smaller and less important. The Soviets did the same things with they maps and split the US. In SMAC I can't help get the feeling that whoever is in the center of the map doesn't really like me. This is a relatively unimportant observation, but if you're going to do another patch, please fix this asthetically disturbing problem.