Arduria map + a new one in the works

Crandaeolon · #1 May 27th, 2004, 12:54 PM

Well, the new project just ceased to be fun - I had drawn about 3/4ths of the borders when PhotoShop complained about "corrupted pixels" due to a "disk or SCSI malfunction" when loading the image. And sure enough, there were large discolored and garbled stripes across the map.

I had saved the image frequently, but all the borderwork was done on the same file, and now it's corrupt. Bugger that. Any ideas on how to recover from that? Scandisk reported nothing to fix, BTW.

Knowing myself, I probably won't restart the work unless the summer is _really_ boring. So, if someone wants to carry on the torch, give me a holler and I'll make the original available.

Here's a preview (the original is 4600x2300 pixels):

Gandalf Parker · #2 May 27th, 2004, 04:04 PM

Wow it looks nice. Please keep working on it. How "large" did you have in mind (land province, water provinces)? I have a little talk-paper on maps which might have some things to consider though its more about random-generated maps.
http://www.dom2minions.com/maps.shtml

Im not sure how large the provinces were going to be but your terrain areas might be large enough that a nation might end up surrounded by only one terrain type. Something to keep in mind (ctis cant take anything but mountains, ulm surrounded by all the good farmlands, etc)

I know more gimp than photoshop so this next part might need some translating. In general terms.... make a copy of the map, lower the colors gradually to something like 16 colors you should get a cartoon image of your map with big areas of brown, blue, green, white. Select a color like red. Then use an "edging" option (might be named something like borders?) which shouild draw red borders around all of the large color areas. Now go in with a line command and draw some lines chopping areas that seem too large into smaller portions. Remove everything but the red (drop paint, or "mask", or select-color and copy-to?). Bring up the original (well for safety, anothe copy of the original) and paste the red lines on top of it.

Usually this isnt perfect but its often enough of a start to change it form a massive job to a tweaking/editing one.

[ May 27, 2004, 15:07: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Crandaeolon · #3 May 27th, 2004, 06:05 PM

Never mind - I figured out a way already. I drew the borders on a separate layer, and it's easy to fix the corruption.

It looks to be around 300-400 provinces. I'll have to decide the size of water provinces still, and whether I'm going to make it appear like Mercator projection or not.

Quote:

Im not sure how large the provinces were going to be but your terrain areas might be large enough that a nation might end up surrounded by only one terrain type. Something to keep in mind (ctis cant take anything but mountains, ulm surrounded by all the good farmlands, etc)

I took that into account, lesson learned from making the previous map.

Norfleet · #4 May 27th, 2004, 08:09 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by NTJedi:
In one game Ermor(computer AI) had 1,200 troops on a single province.

You know, the interesting drawback of a "huge" map in this regard is the fact that the battle map is 58x28. Assuming that the map is absolutely jampacked wall to wall with human-sized units, this means that there is room for, at most, 4872 units. Halve this number for the number of units that a single side can consist of and still fit on their side of the battlefield at start, resulting in 2436 mans per side. The 1200 troops you mention comes rather dangerously close, especially if not all of them are human sized, such as longdead horse.

Obviously, this number can be larger if the army consists of longdead hoburgs. But you're seeing a clear problem here.

NTJedi · #5 May 27th, 2004, 08:20 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Norfleet:

quote:
Originally posted by NTJedi:
In one game Ermor(computer AI) had 1,200 troops on a single province.

You know, the interesting drawback of a "huge" map in this regard is the fact that the battle map is 58x28. Assuming that the map is absolutely jampacked wall to wall with human-sized units, this means that there is room for, at most, 4872 units. Halve this number for the number of units that a single side can consist of and still fit on their side of the battlefield at start, resulting in 2436 mans per side. The 1200 troops you mention comes rather dangerously close, especially if not all of them are human sized, such as longdead horse.

Obviously, this number can be larger if the army consists of longdead hoburgs. But you're seeing a clear problem here.

Well hopefully the developers will provide a solution in Dominions_3 for the number of units in battle. Probably the best solution is something similar to what Lords_of_the_Realm_2 did for battles.

Crandaeolon · #6 May 28th, 2004, 09:55 AM

Dunno how it's done in LotR2, but as a fanatic Medieval: Total War player I'd advocate a method similar to MTW's "reinforcements", but modified to the Dominions system.

For example, there could be an auto-assigned "priority rating" to units (heavier, more expensive and more experienced units have higher priority) that the player would later be able to modify if he so desires. When the battle starts, the game would place all commanders and then pick from the other units according to their priority rating until a set amount of squares (say, 500 per side) are filled. Any leftover units would then arrive on the battlefield when a specified amount of space (50% or whatever) has been freed up by death or retreat, repeating the cycle if necessary.