If you've been following the development of Colonies & Empires for a while, this preview is nothing new, but as I am setting up the new forum I wanted to showcase the map in its own thread.
The Colonies & Empires Map
After 2 years and 3 months worth of tutorials, tests, failures, re-starts, successes, development and, most recently, finishing touches, my enormous map of the Americas is all-but complete. This map was made solely by me, from scratch, based on tutorials by the legendary Gigantus, who also helped me solve a number of issues I stumbled across whilst making it.
I am delighted to be able to release the following preview of 43 screenshots which showcases most of the map. If you'd rather not spoil the surprise(s), maybe just look at a couple...
The preview features roads in most regions, most of which will be removed (they've only be added to make sure they all behave how I want them to). Many ports have not been placed yet either.
More on roads:
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I'm hoping to find a way to disable or at least discourage the building of roads for most factions, because when one thinks about the pre-Columbian Americas and its types of terrain, and the sheer distances between many places, roads are something that could not exist. Not many factions would have the time, money and manpower required to clear hundreds of kilometres of dense jungle and lay out a road, particularly when ships would be much quicker and cheaper. Therefore, I might make roads expensive and time-consuming to construct, rather than this 1 year, 200 florins nonsense.
The Incas are an obvious exception, and thus they will begin the game with their historical road system already in place.
The map has a LOT of trees, but runs perfectly fine on my computer. Also, I believe I can change the battle maps associated with the strat map, so even though there is a lot of forest, those unbearably horrible forest battles you may be familiar with (particularly for the tropical climate) will not exist in this mod. I know they aren't popular and I don't like them either.
The map has not been play-tested. For now I've just tried to make it look as good as I can, and I will change it where needed for gameplay, pathfinding and any other reasons that crop up as the mod progresses. Also, many strat models will be changed at a later date. This is the first map I ever started and it's the first map I've ever "finished". Perhaps other modders may have suggestions on where I can hopefully improve.
Right now the map has 160 regions + 4 sea regions, giving me plenty of room to add more down the track.
Anything I've missed or that you would like a better look at? Let me know and I'll get a shot for you. I hope you enjoy this preview as much as I've enjoyed putting it together. Within the next few weeks I will release the map on its own for anybody who wishes to download it and use it for their own purposes.
The Caribbean
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Central America & the Great Plains
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Eastern North America
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South America
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Map files showing the full dimensions of the map
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map_regions.tga
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map_heights.tga
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map_ground_types.tga
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Cheers,
Frunk
Last edited by Frunk; July 14, 2017 at 09:24 AM.
Reason: Photobucket kicked the bucket.
I just now realized exactly how big the map is...nice work!
If you feel like you want to add more regions somewhere, Rusichi Total War did something where they put really small regions inside other regions to represent small villages inside of a province. I don't have any real suggestions, but it's just a possibility.
Certainly an option. We'll see how the AI works and the game flows (for the player) once all factions are in. There are 36 spare region slots which we can make use of down the track for balancing, etc. Particularly if more factions are added.
Hopefully, the map isn't too big that the AI just can't handle it. Only beta testing will tell, and we're a while off that stage.
Or you can just take a mental screenshot of your screen, open up Microsoft Paint, draw the entire thing by hand and memory only using the single-pixel pencil tool for the most precision, upload the .png (instead of spoiler tags, zip up the picture before uploading) file onto Google Drive, and post the link here
Jokes aside, I think Imgur might work. It seemed to whenever I used it back in the day.
I do know that imgur deletes images over time, or rather, reuses the URL, which can lead to some amusing results. Never made an account there, but assume making an account would preserve links going forward. I'll check it out.
Incredible map Frunk. I can see how much work you have invested in it. If I may humbly and respectfully inquire if it is possible to add more regions. I absolutely love the amount of work you have done in the Caribbean area, this interests me greatly because I still have models for Island Carib units that I created long ago in the Frontier mod. I have a couple of pics in an album on my profile page if you want to have a look. Keep up the good work.
Member: The Frontier. Researcher, Skinner, and Modeler.
@Jaguar Paw: Thanks mate! It's been a real labour of love. A pet peeve of mine is trees growing out of the sea, and I've done my best to eliminate this from any angle, which took a decent amount of pixel-work on its own.
Certainly, I've purposefully left us plenty of room to move when it comes to additional regions, because no doubt balancing will be vital. With 160 regions + 4 sea regions (Atlantic, Pacific, Amazon and Great Lakes), we have 36 to play with and I expect to be using all of them. Even looking at the map currently, there are noticeable gaps in each of North, South and Central America. I'm curious (even slightly nervous) to see how the AI handles "island hopping" in the Lesser Antilles. As for Cuba and Hispaniola, I could easily give them 1 and 2 regions, respectively. The latter is too big for just one region (not including the fact that Tortuga overlaps it) so that will definitely change.
The only problem with extra regions in the Caribbean in particular is, since the inception of this mod, there have been no plans to include a native Caribbean faction (and any extra Rebel regions would logically get chewed up by New Spain sooner or later). The only reason for this omission was because I knew when I started that the more stuff I and/or the team need to create from scratch, particularly things which are possibly a bit beyond our capabilities (speaking mostly of myself ), the less chance this mod has of coming to fruition. (It's also what's led to a lot of outside the box ideas for this mod.) That said, the faction list has not yet been finalised and I'd be more than open to a faction there.
I just checked out your album and those models look absolutely superb! Really well done mate. If you would be willing to see them come to life in C&E, we would love to make that happen!
@Macrath: Thanks mate! Mine too! Hopefully, at least as many as I've spent on this map.
Well I assumed you wouldn't want to add the Tainos as your mod starts kinda late, but I figured a few more regions in the Greater Antilles would allow more campaign options for other European factions to do battle on... and also possibly after the mod is made maybe a mod for the mod that starts in the precolumbian era. As far as the models are concerned, I don't have a problem with letting the mod use them, but you will need to have a coder and or skinner work on renaming the mesh and texture files when they are in the game. All of the models are made with milkshape for the 3d files, and gimp for the texture files. Some of the files are converted back into the game file types, some of them still need to be converted to the in game file types. So they will need some tweaking to get them game ready.
Member: The Frontier. Researcher, Skinner, and Modeler.
[C&E] Map Preview
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Originally Posted by mad orc
