Hello, everyone.

I've been playing a handful of games on the "Battle of Dresden" map, and trying different distribution settings, along with a good number of random wastelands.

It seems to me that the game does NOT seed wastelands in "in-distribution" territories when I do this. I recently tried the Scenario distribution which has the two sides as two distribution zones, and it seems to have placed all the wastelands only in non-distribution territories.

I was under the impression (as is the wiki) that Warzone/Warlight does not allow this. I'm very curious, because it could be a useful thing for map makers and scenario/template designers.

What's happening here?

Unfortunately the game isn't over, so I can't link to it, but if no one has ever seen this before, I could always start a new game with the same template (just ask!).

Did you use Normal Scenario or Custom Scenario? In custom scenario, you can set armies for any territory.
In normal scenario, based on distribution (full, cities, warlords, random) the distribution of wastelands changes. For in-distribution territories, there is an option (under Initial distribution tab) to set the armies- Number of armies each netural territory starts with (applies to territories that are in distribution, but a player did not end up with).

It seems to me that the game does NOT seed wastelands in "in-distribution" territories

I don't think that's correct. Wastelands can appear anywhere. How many times did you test it? Wastelands are random, so of course that *could* happen, but it may have just been random chance, especially if you had a low number of wastelands.

It's easy to test. Just load up your template in single player and see where they appear. You can increase the number of wastelands to a high number so that they scatter all over the map. It would be extremely visible if wastelands were avoiding an area.

"It seems to me that the game does NOT seed wastelands in "in-distribution" territories"

I was always under the impression that it worked this way, was intended to work this way, and should work this way.

Rationale: It's fairly common to do limited fulldist, which is where you set the number of wastelands to be the number of total territories minus the number of in distribution territories. The end result is that very in-distribution territory has someone start in it, and every territory that isn't in-distribution is a wasteland.

If wastelands could be placed on the in-distribution territories then this wouldn't work properly as you'd sometimes have an odd number of territories available to start in and both opponents wouldn't necessarily begin with the same amount of starts.

Ah, good. I'm not out to lunch:

We're on the same page.

* Warlight is supposed to seed wastelands over the full map.

* When I use wastelands on the Dresden map, wastelands NEVER appear in "in-distribution" territories.

I noticed this particularly when I used a near-full distribution mode: the wastelands were all clustered in the territories which are outside the distribution mode.

I'll post a screenshot, perhaps.

Ok, here's a screenshot.

I used the "Army Zones" distribution, so it's really easy to see.

https://imgur.com/gallery/5oXOVNm

I actually really LIKE this feature (it enables some game modes I'd like to use), but I'm confused by why it's happening and whether it's something I can arrange to have happen reliably. (Toggle on and off, ideally, I suppose, since lots of other people like using limited full distribution or other play modes which wouldn't work with this kind of distribution.)

So, what's happening? Is it possible to take advantage of it consistently?

(It seems quite consistent on this map; I've played a lot of games on it and have never seen a wasteland in a distribution territory.)

Interesting the behavior seems to be inconsistent, but I think there is indeed a toggle.

I guess this is a bug, but I don't think there is any harm in letting it remain as a feature. Anyway, to repro there only seems to be two requirements.

1. The map must have some mapmaker added scenario, in which NOT ALL TERRITORIES* are part of the scenario distribution (they are 'white' and not 'green' in the preview window).
2. The given mapmaker scenario MUST be made for X players/teams. If it is just distributing the territories then wastelands can show up anywhere.

3. Given 1 and 2, the Wastelands will ONLY appear on the 'white' territories in the preview, even if you add over 9000 wastlands.

For example on the map "Siege of Feldmore" using the 'North vs South 2 teams' wastlands will always be on the Island + ships and NEVER in the green 'player pick-able' areas. Another example is the one OP gave. In other words, this is easy to repro on different maps.

The real question is whether this bug has been in WarZone since.... forever :D Either that, or Fizzer just forgot that this is how he intended it to be?

*I haven't tested a map where the mapmaker has a scenario in which all terr are used in the scenario, so don't know what happens if that is the case. However, I would guess zero wastelands or an error or normal wasteland behavior?

Edited 12/28/2018 23:49:30

You're right, I was mistaken. In scenario distribution, wastelands are never put into territories that are in the scenario. This is primarily done to ensure that players will always have at least one territory at the start of a game, as there are edge cases where wastelands could override every spot for a player and break the game.

Ah, thank you! That's great.

That gives me some additional ideas for interesting distributions, as well.

(Although I still think a "toggle wastelands for in-distribution territories" button would be incredibly useful, and it would also solve that kind of potential problem in a much cleaner way - e.g. a distribution where there are 10 starting territories and 10 starting picks, even when not a Scenario, can now no longer by ruined by wasteland allocation.)

Edited 12/29/2018 01:24:35