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Thread: How do you make tactical war maps?

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    Default How do you make tactical war maps?

    Such as the one seen in this Papal apocalypse AAR


  2. #2
    Caillagh de Bodemloze's Avatar to rede I me delyte
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    Default Re: How do you make tactical war maps?

    Hi, hobololgag1.

    That is a really cool map - I can see why you'd want to be able to make a similar one.

    As you can see, I'm not Decimus Milo, so anything I say here will be a wild guess, and also very vague. In fact, you will probably already have thought all the things I'm about to say. Still, there's a tiny, tiny chance you might not have done, so I'll post anyway. If anybody else has any other ideas, they might also post - but it's really hard to tell you how somebody else did this kind of thing. Anyway, here's how I'd do it, if it were me...

    Step 1: Find a nice map of Europe that has no copyright restrictions. (Or draw one yourself, if you're a cartographical wizard. I'm not.) You need it to have no writing on it - or as little as possible, anyway - because you'll probably want to change it.
    Step 2: Fire up something like Photoshop (if you can afford it) or the GIMP (if, like me, you can't). Actually, given the nice arrows on this one, it might have been done in Inkscape, or another vector graphics program. (If you want to use the GIMP for this, though, Zeion linked to a nice script for arrows in this very forum...)
    Step 3: Accumulate a bunch of nice fonts that you're allowed to use free for non-commercial projects, so you can label all the factions and geographical features you want to.
    Step 4: Also obtain a bunch of nice brushes that you're allowed to use free for non-commercial projects, so you can add markers for cities/armies/any other things you want to show (the rectangles with diagonal crosses through them and red squares with dots on Decimus Milo's map).
    Step 5: Play around with your map - if you're me, using lots of different layers to try different things out - till you're happy with the result. You'd have to draw in the boundaries you wanted for different faction borders, of course, because they're unlikely to match any real historical map you could use.

    Sorry - that's probably not at all helpful, but I'm afraid it's the best I can do.






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