Hello, I really enjoyed Kingdoms and Castles and I'm very excited to begin playing Nova Roma! I had a blast on the demo, but now that we have more map generation options, I noticed the system is a bit flawed. I understand this is still in early access but I find it difficult to settle on a map because most of them have kinda big flaws. Look at the first two images. In it, you can see the furrow where the river is supposed to be, but the water instead takes the path of least resistance and just goes over the cliff. This is extremely common, where there is a furrow by a cliff and the water physics act as they should but the map isn't made for it.

The third and fourth slide show an egregious example of this. It looks kinda cool but it's a bit unplayable, especially because once the water spills over to flatland, it just pools up and renders the entire area unusable.

The penultimate image is just a funky but usable example that I thought looked cool

Another issue I have is resource distribution. As you can see, the water functions fine here but the rivers are very short. Further, all the resources occur in clusters near the highland. The screenshot encompasses all resources on the island, and as you can see there's a very large barren wasteland that you can't really use for anything. There's no resources, which makes it hard to justify turning it into an industrial zone because of how far you'll have to haul everything. You can't just put housing there because nothing else is there. You can use it for foresters basically. You could theoretically send an aqueduct out there but by the time you get to doing that, you basically already have the core of your city done.

I am still really excited for this game, but these issues make it hard to play at times because it feels like the actual area you can work in is very narrow, just based off my experience with the demo and K&C. You aren't able to spread things out without significant investment into waterworks, which I get is the point of course. I'm just making this post to highlight issues with map generation and resource distribution. I don't know how difficult these issues are to fix but I still just wanted to point out that a majority of maps can be unusable because water flows where it isn't intended to.

Some feedback on map generation