Venus Terraformed

This map represents the current surface of Venus if 70% of it were covered with water like the Earth is, with a modeled Earth-like climate on the new topography.

Venus’ surface is relatively flat compared to the Earth’s, and it has high volcanic activity. This map accordingly features both its fair share of volcanoes and many small islands/archipelagos. Regarding gameplay, this map is perhaps similar to the archipelago, fractal, and primordial maps.
This is a Huge map that uses the Gathering Storm ruleset and also has a moderate number of coastal lowlands.
There is a moderate amount of Tundra but only a Small amount of Desert.

For anyone interested, I’ve placed a fairly lengthy explanation of how the map was made.

BACKGROUND
The first map that I saw of Venus’ surface with water like this was one by Alexis Huet, which can be found here: https://ahstat.github.io/Topography/. This was the primary basis of how I placed the landmasses.

To do this, I overlaid a hex grid, then looked at the average elevation within each tile.

TILE PLACEMENT
For the most part it was easy to look at the topography and use green = land, tan = hills, brown/white = mountains, and light/dark blue = coastal/ocean water. Following this process was fairly straightforward, but I was limited by the terrain rules in Civ VI. For example, an ocean tile cannot be placed directly adjacent to land, but this would have been more accurate for many islands or sections of coastline.

Additionally, there were many cases where there was a lot of overlapping detail that could not all be accomodated in a single hex. Many of the Reef tiles actually represent small clusters of several islands all within a single hex. I placed coastal lowlands in sections of coastline that had complex terrain with a mix of land and water, with the level corresponding to the amount of land/water in each. Many of the marshes/floodplains reflect this as well, covering inland lakes that were too small to justify making the entire hex a water tile.

Sometimes, I also opted to adjust the placement of certain tiles to better preserve the defining features of a landscape (such as by representing the iconic, crescent-shaped gorges of Aphrodite Terra as lake tiles instead of rivers). I used Snowy Mountain tiles even in tropical regions to show the highest mountains, but could not do so on Aphrodite Terra (the Eastern continent) without screwing up a few wonders (namely Galapagos and GBR).

Lastly, many of the rivers I placed actually represent large bays, fjords, or even sections of ocean between tightly packed islands. Therefore, these do not always follow the typical flow patterns of real rivers.

CLIMATE
I based the climate for each hex off another map I found online, by u/CactusCartocratus on reddit. They modelled an Earth-like climate on Venus’ surface with 70% water. Here is a link to the version of their map that highlights shallow/deep water in the oceans: https://www.reddit.com/user/CactusCartocratus/comments/u2llo8/venus_with_deep_water_as_i_forgot_to_put_that_it/

In order for them to model an "Earth-like" climate on Venus’ surface, they had to make certain generalizations about Venus to, unsurprisingly, make it more Earth-like than it actually is (things like assumming 24hr days, Venus spinning forward not backwards, Hadley cells that don’t extend most of the way to the poles, etc).
I opted to follow CC’s map closely, since this more Earth-like climate creates a more balanced map for civ and one that I think is more interesting than a more "Accurate" simulation of what the climate on Venus would be if it were actually terraformed.

Anyways, I used this to determine a number of things, like a tile’s biome (grassland, plains, tundra, snow), if a forest I was going to place should be Rainforest or Woods, if a certain area was floodplains or a marsh, and etc.

VOLCANOES
Venus has over 85,000 volcanoes. These have been mapped in painstaking detail by Paul Byrne and Rebecca Hahn from WashU. Here’s a link to an article about it https://spacenews.com/a-comprehensive-map-of-the-volcanoes-on-venus-all-85000-of-them/.

Due to the immense number of volcanoes on Venus and the depth of detail of this map, it was much more challenging to accurately place volcanoes than I’d hoped. I was only able to loosely follow this, even when only looking at the largest volcanoes (>100km diameter). I placed Volcanoes in corresponding mountain tiles where possible, but there were still many issues. For instance, due to all the water from the "terraforming", many volcanic hotspots were either underwater or on flat/hill tiles from the topographic map. Since volcanoes in Civ can only be placed as features on mountain tiles, I opted to scatter Geothermal Fissures along these regions to represent their increased volcanic activity. Even so, Venus’ volcanic activity remains quite underrepresented in this map due to how unplayable it would be with complete (i.e. nearly total) placement of these features.

OTHER FEATURES
For many of the remaining features, such as continents, wonders, and tribal village placement, I just had to wing it and place these in a way that felt organic.

I tried to place wonders where they made sense. Everest is in the mountain ranges on Ishtar Terra, where the highest mountains on Venus are. Many other mountain wonders are located at higher peaks throughout the planet, while the watery wonders like the Fountain of Youth or Ik-Kul were placed on tiles that would’ve been lakes.
While a majority of the wonders from the game are placed, not all are. For instance, most of the desert wonders were not placed since there are so few desert tiles.

The resources were completely randomized, and the tribal villages were placed manually in random areas. Since the map contains more wonders than usual, there’s fewer of these than typical for a Huge map. I believe it’s roughly 2/3 the amount.

Finally, I painted continents in game to mach existing regions on Venus. There is a slightly higher than average number of continents in this map.

CONCLUSION
To all those that did, Thanks for taking the time read this! Hopefully you can all enjoy the map as well.

If there’s any issues with the map, feel free to reach out.

And of course, I wanna give a big thank you to those I mentioned above, that did all that excellent work I used as a basis for making the map.