Empire Total War Maps

[Senshi]

Perhaps a stupid question, but I searched and googled for about half an hour and wasn't able to find anything satisfactory.
I'm preparing an AAR and I'd like to include some map screens every now and then, showing the current distribution of land among the powers. I love maps, and I think every AAR should have them every now and then .

Now, the ingame minimap would be ok, but has the problem of being "mini". So I hoped that somewhere someone might have done a good and complete map of the ETW world, showing the regions and borders. The maps one can find in Empire Total War\data\campaign_maps\global_map are better, but kind of featureless/poor contrast and still small. And if one colors them, they kinda look really crappy...

Something like this is what I had in mind, that's the map they made for Europa Barbarorum.

The best I found was this:
http://www2.pic-upload.de/upload/20.02.09/9u2y6.png
But that's only some fanmap that was made prior to the release of ETW. But something simple like that would be totally sufficient for my purpose!

As I kinda suck at painting "creative" I'd rather not paint a map myself and hope some skillful guy already has done this task.

EDIT: If I was just too stupid to search properly and there maps posted already somewhere, feel free to bash me. If I get my maps, I'm happy .

EDIT2: Take a look at post 4, I whipped up my own maps now and you are free to use to them .

[Senshi]

Well, I now did the effort and made a myp on my own.

Here a map showing the standard GC campaign map in the beginning:


I searched the orig. color codes for each nation out of the .esf and added a light water layer to make it easier to read the map. The provinces are only colored with 50% to allow the "map" effect to show through.

Another version is using "Color Burn" (which seems far more vivid IMO this version actually is a bit too strong):


All of this is in .psd format with hundreds of layers, which easily allows to change colors for specific provinces (about 3 mouseclicks to do that) if you want to display a more "progressed" campaign.
Actually, about everything is easily adaptable (color intensity etc.) .

If anybody else is interested in this, just give notice and I'll upload the psd.

[Hesus de bodemloze]

Nice map, well done. + rep. I am sure a lot of people will like it.

[Senshi]

Glad you like it!

I see I forgot to upload the psd file, I have it now attached to this post .

Everyone is free to use it as they wish, though it would be nice if you gave me small credit if you use it in an AAR or any other form of publication as it was quite tedious and time-consuming to get this done (a small note in the AAR or a small "by Senshi" in the corner on the map you post is enough .

Info on usage: If you want to change the ownership of a province, just search the province in the "Provinces" group and select it (make sure you have not selected the layer mask), then pick the nation color by using the pipette tool (or press&holding Alt-Key) on the national color reference tabs, then use the "Fill"-Tool and recolor the whole province layer this way. That's it .

I think this method is rather easy to use once you got the concept and also easily allows to paint emergent/re-emerging factions that might pop up during a campaign, as the color reference is always avaible .

The overall opacity of the province coloring can be set by selecting the "provinces" group and changing its opacity level (currently it's set to 60%). Here you also can try some other settings like Color Burn or Vivid Light. If you are unhappy with the water layer, you can find it in the "mapwork" group. Here you also can recolor the color layer as I layer-masked it or change the layer option (standard is Linear Light).

Feedback very welcome, if I made some mistakes in drawing the borders or provinces are named wrong or whatever, just give a note.

[Molina]

Impressive. I'd use this if I ever made an ETW AAR.

[RMcD94]

What did you use to do that? It's awesome, you should do it for every Total War game (and the mods!), meaning that they were awesome, not that you actually should as I am sure you have better things to do.

Agreeing with Molina's post, if I ever used an ETW AAR I would happily use your maps.

[Senshi]

Glad you like them .

I used Photoshop CS3. The background map images are the one from the minimaps, though I enlarged them by about 200%...then, I redraw all border and coast lines manually with my handy graphic tablet (still took quite a while and was quite difficult, as the borders on the regular minimap are only drawn very very subtle (they mostly are visible because the provinces get colored by the game..). Then, I created vector layers for every single province and painted each province individually by hand (mostly, as the autofill-tools never are that refined, sadly, and yes, this took some hours). In order to assign the nations' colors to these provinces, I then decided to use the "empty black space" to fit in the national color reference table, where I made small squares filling them with the RGB color codes I searched from the ETW data pack files. By using them, it's a piece of cake even for people who only have MS Paint level-knowledge to change colors of provinces quickly . The rest was "just" eyecandy afterwards, tweaking opacities, color display options, smoothing edges, adding title and signature line etc.

[Chirurgeon]

Great map mate + rep to you

[Majonga]

Thank you so much, can I please use this in my AAR? this is fantastic, I was thinking that i needed a nice map for etw. Well done and thank you very much. +rep

[Senshi]

Sure you can . Same goes for everyone: feel free to use my map in your campaign AARs! If you want you can reply here and tell me that you are using it (and point me to your AAR, perhaps), as it's quite satisfying to know my work is put to good use.