I know, this map thing.
Let's just refresh in our minds what we're talking about.
Here's the scan and rebuild of the Mighty Empires tile map that I made with my gaming buddy almost 30 years ago.
This was my hand drawn interpretation that I colored in. I made lots of xeroxes of the base map and we used it for a play by mail campaign.
As I have shown, many many times on this blog, I've been trying to input this into Worldographer and get a usable hex map that I can drill down into. So I did this.
This is just one section of the the whole map that I input into the program. You can see I'm using the trace underlay feature and doing 4 hexes to one from the paper map. My idea was to make a Kingdom level map, where each hex is about 6miles. One day of travel for a large army across wilderness. Actually 6 miles is a measurement from Adventure, Conqueror, King and it correlates fairly well with 5 mile breakdown from Charles S Grant's Wargame Campaigns. The problem is that the major cities were way too close together at this scale.
After faffing about with trying to copy this map into one up a layer of size, I gave up and bit the bullet. I decided to redo the map from scratch increasing the scale of my paper map hex by 4. So 16 6mile hexes instead of 4 per paper map hex.
I almost didn't do it, I have a long history of getting frustrated with making this map, but I let my stubbornness take over. Originally I had dreaded having to go back in, hex by hex for a 208 hex square map instead of the original 52. Then I realized there was a paint bucket function. Duh!
So, still a fair amount of work, but much quicker at the moment.
Not bad. I filled in all the Grassland and three colors of ocean. Just did it here and there when I had time during the week. The plan is to fill in all the basic terrain types. Plains, Forests, Hills, Mountains and then massage the individual hexes as I drill down into the individual political divisions.
I also finally started putting together my unit of Skaven Slaves. I'll post more on that another time.
Thanks for looking.
Cool. Intrigued by the play by mail idea. Would love to know more when you have some time
ReplyDeleteHi Anthony, sure. It was back in the days before I used the internet or email. So around 1992-93. I have some ideas for how to handle it now in the age of computers. We would mail each other our map moves and scouting rolls etc. We used the basic combat by point value and the tactics cards since we couldn't set up and play table top.
DeleteThis is very deep to make a map. The hand drawing is always easier, but having a clean and good map is harder. What is the best software you found?
ReplyDeleteHi Cedric, sorry I missed your comment. I have been trying to use Hexographer, and now Worldographer, for several years now. The biggest obstacle has been trying to fit my original map into a new one and deciding on the scale etc. If you are not as indecisive as I this program is a good choice. If you are creating from scratch, and not trying to use a hex grid, then Campaign Cartographer was one that looked promising. I have never used it though. I have also made maps in GIMP/Photoshop. You can get some pretty satisfying results that way. Hope that helps.
DeleteThank you for the reply. I'll take a look at the software.
Deletecan you tell me how you made those titles for mighty empires, Ive been trying to import them into Tabletop simulator but they always come up imperfect
ReplyDeleteHi Steve, originally I scanned in all the tiles and then cropped each image to give a transparent background and then put them back together into a hexagon grid that covered up any edge inconsistencies. I did that original in GIMP but now I use photoshop for stuff.
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