Map: Greenland

[Valerius]

Several years DominionsFan created a couple of maps (Ossya and Fourmageddon) that I liked the look of. I finally got around to downloading the map editor he used (at least for the initial image) and here's my first attempt at a map.

The mountain ranges divide the map into six areas that each have the same mix of terrain types (1 forest, 1 mountain, 1 border mountain, 2 forest/border mountain, 1 farm, 1 swamp, 1 wasteland). The map is not perfectly balanced, as the areas do not have identical province layouts, but is intended to be balanced enough to be MP friendly.


Attachments

The attachment named greenland1.zip contains the map image as well as four different versions of the map: fixed and random starts in both normal and no-indie flavors.

The attachment named greenland1_gimp.zip is a GIMP file that contains three layers: the land, the province borders and the white pixels indicating the province locations. The second attachment may be useful if you like the map, but not the way I've divided the provinces, and you would like to create your own version. Or if you would like to change the look of the image (for instance, if you find the green too bright). In the latter case you can make adjustments to the layer called Land and then just export the revised image as a .tga file. If you name this file greenland1.tga and save it into your maps folder (replacing the greenland1.tga image from the first attachment) you'll now have an image more to your liking. Note that if you do this you do not want to resize the image or make changes to the layer that has the white pixels.


About the map editor

The map was made using the map editor for Spartan, by Slitherine. If you go to their site you'll find it stickied at the top of the Spartan forum. The map editor was not actually part of the game but released as an unsupported product. You don't need the game in order to to use the map editor - it was quite nice of them to post it as a free download.

There are some quirks to the editor as it was written pre-Win XP. One thing is it doesn't seem to like 32 bit color so you'll probably have to reduce your display settings. Also, it doesn't actually generate an image - since it was intended to be used with the game it generates instructions for the game as to which tiles to use. This of course isn't very useful for creating a Dominions map so you'll need to take a series of screenshots and piece them together in your image editor in order to create the map.