The HOTW VII - Setup Thread III - The Trilogy

[Toni]

Lz just to let you know that we all gave up on the new patch and switched to the vanilla. Shame you weren't here

[Robert]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
That is a ridiculous commute.

Ok, what's a commute?

[Toni]

Ok, what's a commute?

Commuting is the process of travelling between a place of residence and a place of work.

[Robert]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
That is a ridiculous commute.

Yeah, it is. But i work as a freelancer, so sometimes I have a project for which I have to travel a lot. Now you understand the laptop, I really need one!

BTW: the map you made in the story thread is really amazing! Great work!

@Toni: thanks!
Btw: you really did a good job during last session not hurrying everybody all the time

[OzzyKP]

Originally posted by CyberShy

BTW: the map you made in the story thread is really amazing! Great work!

Thanks

I've always loved maps, and have taken it upon myself to make nice maps for nearly every diplogame I've been in. I am exceedingly anal about maps too, they have to be just right. It took a few hours of work last night and this morning to do them. I really wish there were some really nice political maps included in the game that resemble the final replay maps. Those are much clearer and would save me some work.

The map on the military advisor screen is probably the nicest we have available, but it just shows a hazy culture border over the land, so it isn't very clear. The different nations aren't always distinguishable. Plus, it shows the culture over water, which I don't like. You never see a political map that shows borders extending out across water. And it makes it difficult to see offshore islands, they look like all part of one land mass. So I couldn't use this one:



The other option is the mini map. But it fails from the same problems with culture borders extending out across water. Plus after blowing it up to a proper size it looks blurry and ugly.



Zooming out to globe view I could have used the culture layer, but again it goes over water, and it shows mixed culture, which again doesn't help me. So I figured I'd have to make the damn thing by hand. I zoomed out and got a good shot of the continent:



Then came the pain in the ass job of trying to make the million colors and shapes and landforms seen in that above pic into one uniform color that I can edit easily. I can't just use the paint bucket easily since there are too many little parts. I use the paint bucket and it changes the color of like 3 tiles of desert, ugh. I'm not all that great with photoshop, so I did my best. Also the paint bucket sometimes will bleed through, and I wanted to preserve the coastline and the lakes and water. I found some tool and did my best to get this:



Then I painted it a solid color:



Then using the military advisor map as reference I painted in each nation's borders by hand. I used whatever frames of reference I had, but it wasn't perfect, so some borders may be a bit out of whack. But if I wasn't totally anal, trust me they'd be much, much worse, hehe. So after a while of that, I produced this:



I played around with it a bit to try and get rid of the black, but nothing I did really looked natural:



I also spent some time looking for a "here there be dragons" thing from an old map, but after a bit of research it seems that is a modern myth.

So then I started writing my story and went off to Wikipedia to try and find a name of some famous Arabian map maker and ended up finding Muhammad Al-Idrisi. I initially was just going to use his name, but he had a cool looking map that Wikipedia had a great pic of:



So I decided to extend my map project by another hour or so, heh, and try to emulate the style of his map with one of my own. i struggled with my old nemesis the evil Adobe Photoshop for a while trying to get the right effect to work properly, but after a lot of trial and error I ended up with a satisfactory spherical look. Then I put it inside the frame Al-Idrisi used and got this:




You guys seriously need to start paying me.

[Robert]

I would but I can't.
That last map, how did you do all the colors, etc?
Btw, I think that there's an option to get rid of the clouds when you zoom out, anybody knows how to do that? Those clouds are really annoying! (eventhough they were fun in the begining)

[KunojiLym]

And you say that CS and I bring diplogaming to a new level of geekiness?

But yeah, nice work. As soon as my exams finish I could probably dedicate some more time doing stuff like this... *mumbles*

[Robert]

And you say that CS and I bring diplogaming to a new level of geekiness?

Wel said, Kuno, well said!!

[Robert]

I always hate it when people make in-game negotiations out of charachter!

Join the geek world, stay in character

[Toni]

Btw: you really did a good job during last session not hurrying everybody all the time

I try

[Toni]

Session 11 = 25 turns

[OzzyKP]

That's all? Seemed like a busier session to me, heh. Guess I just had a lot going on.

[LzPrst]

any updates on what happened last session?

I'll be back at full speed on friday, I just really had a bad time last weekend. and yes. the usual. girl issues. the kind that gnaws at you from the inside until sanity loses its grip and you cant sit still or concentrate or sleep or anything. not a very practical state of affairs. good news is, its passing, little by little, so by friday all that should be left would be a strong desire to commit genocide. which I could possibly do through civ

[Robert]

The update:
- Choson have made peace with Arabian
- Arabia invaded the Kusrhen (after demanding the Kushren would adopt Islam)
- Ghandi has been murdered, Ashoka has recovered and is ruling India. Vikings declared war on Carthage. (but I logged in as the Vikings to establish peace again) (yes, an AI played you)

I think that's mostly what happened.

[Levi_the_Oracle]

Correction: Vikings (controlled by AI) declared war on Inca and you logged on as Vikings so I wouldn't wipe the Vikings off the continent of Pangaea.