Archives of Fantasy Maps
 

They're not in Dom3 format - but for those of you thinking of making custom maps, I ran across some interesting links:

http://hiddenway.tripod.com/images/maps/
http://wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/ag
http://www.legolas.org/gallery/fantasymaps
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=5106409

Re: Archives of Fantasy Maps
 

Use a paint progam to add pure white dots (color setting 255,255,255) to the middle of each area that you want to be a province, then save it to either rgb or tga format. Then create 4 line text file for the .map part. That will let you bring it up in the Dom3 map editor to add everything else. It will even make a good guess at filling in things like names and neighbor lines.

Re: Archives of Fantasy Maps
 

Your effort is appreciated. The problem is that you need some seriously high definition images in order to create good maps for Dominions. And those kinds of images tend to be copyrighted and thus can't be used.

I've searched high and low on the web and so far I've come up empty. There's a really nice satellite photo of Mars that NASA published, but I can't find a working link to it.

Re: Archives of Fantasy Maps
 

Actually I find really high definition maps to be a bad thing. When you are playing the game you have flags, structures, troops, movement arrows, etc all showing up on the map. The map becomes a background image. A fuzzy soft general idea of mountains, forest, sea; tends to work better for me. Too much detail makes it hard for me to see the other items.
Just IMHO

Gandalf Parker

Re: Archives of Fantasy Maps
 

I think the resolution depends on the "busy-ness" of the map itself. Look at Shahrivar (old Dom2 map), it's an extremely large graphic file, but it's absolutely gorgeous and uncluttered to play on.

Re: Archives of Fantasy Maps
 

Speaking of Shahrivar, has anyone updated it to work with Dom3? Or will it work OK as is? That was always one of my favorite maps.

Re: Archives of Fantasy Maps
 

It works just fine as it is. It's still available on Arryns site. http://www.strife.com/dominions-2/

I found that this map worked well with Ballbarians SemiRandom utility. The boosted province defences creates a lot of "soft" chokepoints in unexpected places.