[Mustang]

Attached is a map of the area west of El Alamein, Egypt, and grid-map showing how I made it. I've seen that most people use Pyros's way of desiging maps, but I like mine better (I've never tried his, it just seems to complicated for me).

Look at the attached bitmap. It contains a color-coded grid, with each different color representing 1/5 of a mile or 8 hexes. Using this system, you can go grid-by-grid down your entire map, filling in terrain as you go (there's no need to painstakingly put in specfic grid coordinates over the entire map in my system). It seems to me like a very easy and simple way to build a map, and I decided to use it because this is my very first realistic map design and I wanted to keep things simple. You could probably do something similar in Google Earth by labeling elevation at regular intervals on the map to find out where hills are (Google Earth only shows mountains, not 10-100 meter hills that you usually encounter in a tactical situation, but it does tell you the elevation of the point under your cursor accurate to one foot- this is why you will have to "search" for hills).

The other bit of advice deals with map text. On this map, you will notice two things- a telegraph line composed of "\\" and "====" characters, and a water pipe.

Tip 1 is to label any long map feature (like a highway) at frequent intervals along its length, as opposed to just once at one point, so you can be sure that the player will know what the map feature is called. This is what I did with the water pipe.

Tip 2 is that text dosen't have to be used just for words. There are a million creative things you can do with it, from making a fancy title for the scenario on the map ("ASCII Art"), a compass rose, and telegraph lines (like on the attached map). There's much more to the SPMBT map editor than meets the eye.