This is a fun map I made in the game Age of Empires II - The Conquerors Expansion.
If you have AOE II, you can download the scenario and discover the place. There is only 1 player in this scenario and I have set the winning
condition to be a score of 100,000 so you can wander around as long as you want. The only goal is survival.
I made this map a while ago and I was going to piece together screenshots so the map could be viewed without Empire, but, there would have been hundreds (well, at least lots) of them and I decided not to. But what I did do is get a few screen shots and photos and put them together with the aerial photo for a bit of a tour around the place, but I've found an undocumented bug in Internet Explorer with image maps, so it'l
l have to wait.
I've put in the kind and number of animals that I think are usually around, but since AOE doesn't have a large enough variety of wildlife (;-), I've used substitutes. Turkeys are really spruce grouse. Wild horses are really moose. Also, they have no coyotes, so I've used the wolves, which will attack you in AOE, while real coyotes and wolves just run away.
I supposed I could have used the cougars for my cats, but I don't think you'd live very long with 6 cougars right around you at the start of the game (haha), so I've left them out. There is, however, one hidden in the bush, so make sure you've enough food to generate another villager before going too far.
AOE doesn't have any town centers made of cordwood, so I used the Aztec one, as this looked kind of funky. The cabin is the house.
Spruce forest is, in reality, white spruce with a sprinkling of black spruce, tamarack and jack pine. Oak forest is white and black poplar. Bambo is willow and grass wetlands. Fruit bushes are a mix of saskatoons (mostly), pin cherries, chokecherries, and wild roses. The Flower Gardens in the yard are my garden, and the ones on the other corner of the property are where the Wood Lilies and Indian Paintbrush grow.
These started when I first loaded the home page over a 26K dial-up connection and it took 75 seconds to load. I thought that I wondered how many people knew how to turn off Show Pictures.
Then I thought of how much I'm going to miss cooking toast on the stove, so I wrote that little bit. And then..... well you get the picture.
So I wrote this nifty javascript function that put a random bit at the bottom of each page. It looked really cool. And after a few more bits, the page was taking a second to load Off-Line at my house.
So, I decided that the random bit at the bottom of the page just had to go. But I couldn't let all those "Nibbles and Bits" go to waste, so I made separate pages for them - this is the entrance to those pages.
If you have comments on these or any other "Nibbles and Bits" you'd like to see here, and I'll give you a byline (link exchange to your site).
