Mapmodding

[Jopo_80]

The total war series has great potential as strategy games, it is only in their scope that they are hampered by something, I don´t know, is it lack of ambition or something, but the games have failed to take on an ambitious enough of a scope.

Already, Rome Total War, or Medieval 2 Total War, not to mention Empire Total War, could have taken on the whole world map as an arena of conquest, but failed to do so, why?

I would have liked to have seen ancient romans battling chinese armies on the plains of India in Rome Total War or at least to have that option in the later games of the series, but so far none have had the Far East as a theatre, why?


But Never Fear! The mapmodders are here!
They are the intrepid bunch that make these dreams come true! They will bring about the expansion of the game maps when the CA fails to do so.
Along with the modding community, they will expand the games to new frontiers never before seen.

...and enough of flattering the modsters, good job though with all the mods out there...

I´ve explored the game engine of RTW a bit and am sorely disappointed by the limit of only 200 provinces. Could this be changed? Of course it could, Paradox´s Europa universalis 3 has a completely similar map system and a similar "provinces" map file than the RTW´s "map_regions" file, with patches of colour denoting provinces and in EU3 there are over 1700 provinces, that means a colour count of over 1700 in the "provinces file"... ...and EU3 works perfectly, as does Paradox´s Hearts of Iron 3, with over 14000 provinces, again drawn in a similar map file.
The same system, but vastly more provinces and larger map files than the limited 500x500 pixels said to be the upper limit of picture size for RTW, the EU3 map file is, let me check... ...1872x720 pixels in size and covers the whole world.
Why were such limits imposed on the TW series of games by CA? It only serves to hamper the games in their popularity as it becomes impossible to expand them via modding.
I would personally be delighted to serve as help in a modding group, enlarging the games to a global scale and I encourage EVERYONE who reads this to do the same. EVERYONE has some talent, artistic, coding, knowledge, ideas, video and movie making etc., something that would help make even better and more ambitious mods.

---------
I would like to call the attention of all experienced mapmakers to group to this thread.
---------

Please post here INSTRUCTIONS and complete TUTORIALS on how to make better maps for the whole TW series.

I believe Paradox´s Europa Universalis 3 map files could be used successfully as a basis for a map, there are over 1700 unique colors in the EU3 "provinces" map file, that means over 1700 provinces and Hearts of Iron 3 map file has over 14000 unique colors (provinces). With a little editing to add settlement places and such, and a translation of the "province-definitions" map file, which translates the colors to province names, there could be an enormous amount of provinces to play on.

I would post the EU3 files here, but I´m worried about legal issues in distributing these files openly.

Good luck in mapmaking!


- Cheers from Finland!