Question: Random Maps

[Warnevada]

The maps generated for generated battles are almost always very broken up with trees and terrain contours so that there are no decent fields of fire.

Is there any way, short of extensive editing, to limit the amount of trees and terrain features, such as specifying a percentage?

[DRG]

If you want custom maps like that and don't want to build them by hand use the map generator and you can adjust the amount of trees , houses, fields, streams hill etc and the program will spit out different maps to your criteria

Instructions for using it are in the Game Guild. There's a link to it on index list to the left of the screen

Don

[Imp]

Depends on the BAT LOC (battle location) used for the opponents. Vietnam maps will be mainly jungle. North Africa maps mainly open with sporadic cover as an example.

Try selecting different BAT LOCS to find some you like.

For further modification on the map screen open the random map generator icon or ) key.
It will display the settings for your current map BAT LOC
Adjust things say put trees to 2 & regenerate the map.

Read the map generator help adjustments are interconnected so can have an effect on other settings. Urbanisation for example has a big effect on the map.

Don beat me to it

[Mobhack]

Also, you can use the "View Map" function to look at the current map. That button appears on the main game purchase screen above "Max Points", "Mission", "Encyclopaedia" etc.

Once there you can click on the "Edit Map" button ( text button, bottom centre) and so go to the regular map editor. Then you can remove trees, hills etc to your heart's content. That's possibly a bit hands-on for some though. But it can be useful if a random map is reasonably OK, but could do with a little tweak.

Also, on the view map screen, there is "Redraw a new default map" (Top Row, centre) - this picks one of the possible batlocs for the opponent pair (Often, more than one default map can be chosen). Its short-cut is the "/" key - not the batlocs used, and if it changes over several picks, then you have such a situation.

There is also "Redraw the map for the current battle location" button (top row, centre), which uses the current batloc. The random generators can choose less or more hills and trees for the same data set, so if you generally like the current batloc, hit the "=" short-cut key a few times and look at the variants the current batloc generates for you.

The top right-hand button lets you select a specific batloc - I'd suggest #126 as this produces a generic plains map. Or #19 (Ukraine) or #20 (Mongolia) which is nice and open as is #35 (Belorussia). (OOB locs valid for WinSPWW2). Once loaded, you can use the "=" key to quickly spin through a few variants of the selected batloc number.

This game is not the SP of old, thus you aren't stuck with the one map the game generated (or only with loading pre-made custom maps) any more.