Oh neat. Thanks.

Out of curiosity, I downloaded the mojoworld demo and did the tutorial. The tutorial made mountains with a noise formula called 'Ridged Value'. That is actually the same as what I'm calling 'turbulence'. It's a special kind of noise that inverts the data at some point (usually zero) to create a random ridge like shape. If you turn the 'noise' weight all the way down you can see it more clearly.

I'm actually creating mountains from local differences in value. Over the whole map I store standard deviances from a small surrounding area of a tile. One thing about noise altitudes that's difficult to get away from is that 'mountains' tend to always be in the middle of the continents, because that is the nature of brownian motion that the noise field is trying to capture. It's kindof what makes it believeable and useful, but in this sense highly predictable. By using standard deviance, I'm creating anomalous features that still have a natural looking shape. That is how I'm getting mountains near the coast and valleys near the middle of continents. It's really kindof a slapdash solution but it works well on game maps where you have distinct terrainst called 'mountains', 'hills' and 'flat'.

I didn't even know it existed actually. I'll have to come up with some rules for placement. Any suggestions? It functions like basic land correct?

I must add that i'd LOVE to see, at least a version (a checkbox to be ticked, or whatever) that also adds environments to the maps upon generation.
It could also use the noise filters that the terrain generation (the physical terrain) uses, to make it appear natural.

Such as, snow near the top and bottom of the map, blending into the standard barren, or / and grasslands near the middle of the map (very broadly and varied), with some nice deserts as are already placed, but mostly on the equator and in more coherent shapes.
And perhaps some fallen terrain in rare places, like a dark valley or peinsula somewhere.

It'd add more variety to the maps, not only the terrain itself, but now also the texture, the same map could have several different looks, an ice world, a normal map with a mordor-lookalike valley surrounded by mountains, or a desert world with occational grassland bordering the oceans or lakes.
Perhaps as simple as making the forest noisemap include grasslands terrain, and making the swamps a bit more random (not just tied to the center of forests).
Maybe the current Barren terrain could be imagined as steppe, or plains (if going by Civ4 mapscript examples), acting as a soft buffer between desert - grasslands, or grasslands - arctic, or anything - fallen. Or even just randomly spread between most to form a natural looking terrain without clear cut borders.
I dunno how much more work it would be, but that remains my wish

The rules in the Perfect World mapscript for Civ4 were very good, although produced a bit too large deserts. Meh, i wish Elemental had a proper random map generator by default, the more i think about Civ4 again

I don't actually have control over anything except the landforms at this point. Hopefully in the future I will be able to do something with those things but not yet. 'Frequency' is actually the frequency of the noise signal that makes the land forms. High frequency makes smaller features and low frequency makes larger features.

As for being outpaced by the monsters, I think the adventure tech tree needs to be used with care. It raises the level of monsters that spawn so you want to be ready for that.

Thanks for the reply.  Maybe I am too eager to increase the adventure tech tree in my gaming.  I will use your advice and see how it goes.  Appreciate your assistance.  Keep up the good work.

That would definately be alot of work, and the only really big problem with that is that Civ5 comes out in a week!!!!! I'm definately gonna be out of commission for a month or so. Hopefully while I'm in Civ5 land SD will expose some of this stuff in a way that makes it a bit easier to get to. My next item on the Elemental wish list is to control the placement of resources and shards. 

I'm also looking forward to civ5 immensely. I'll be keeping an eye out for map generators, cephalo!

For those interested in procedural terrain generation, here are a few useful links I have found:

Generating Random Fractal Terrain

http://www.gameprogrammer.com/fractal.html#ref

http://www.vterrain.org/

http://www.vterrain.org/Elevation/Artificial/

http://www.lighthouse3d.com/opengl/terrain/index.php3?introduction

home brew algorithm

http://www.devmaster.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3593

Terrain Generation Using Fluid Simulation

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2001.asp

landscapes and terrains

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=188

agents

http://www.eng.unt.edu/ian/pubs/terrain.pdf

some java code – like C++

home brew algorithm

http://mavdisk.mnsu.edu/kallhw/world/world.txt

It may be beacuse the default settings in this map generator has ALOT of forests, baddies spawn in forests
Try reducing the forests and the inevitable baddie-count should reduce too (i think).

Doesn't seem to work with the latest version released on October 7th.  Worked on the 6th before the new release

I'm getting a game crash when trying to load maps by Elementera Mod?

Updated to 1.09e.

Great job. I've tried it and have fun playing the map.