Depicting Towns

mike robel

It's me again. I'm working on yet another topographic map for a different game. (No, covering force is not finished yet, but I am currently on the horns of dilemma about it over counters, and a friend would like this map for one of his next games.)

The subject is towns. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to do these towns like they are portrayed on the map below. Placing individual symbols would of course work* (and has the benefit of being a brute force and ignorance method) But its very tedious. There are probably all sorts of issues. (1) these are tiny (2) there are roads everywhere (3) to look really good, you have to rotate them, and (4) I'm sort of tired of just using the different shades of pink to portray built up areas.

I tried Symbols in Area with the symbols found in Overland.FSC but it doesn't seem to work. I read the Command of the Week thread on it as well as the other thread I started, and all other threads dealing with it, but have failed to get anything to look even close to right. IN some cases, the symbols don't print. It seems some things I just have to learn everytime I use them.

I'd be okay with some generic ones that I could rotate. Most of the towns are about as big shown below, but some of course have very dense city centers and span several grid squares.

* But I do not have anywhere near Quenton's store of patience for such detailed work.

Loopysue

To align anything with the roads like that you would have to use the STREET tool, which means you would need to set up the HOUSE tool with a new style of house that has a suitable flat roof of the right colour. It would also mean that you would have to set up the STREET scaling and spacing just right, and then also make sure that you had a line of some kind to use as a ghost street to use the STREET tool on where there are no roads on the map.

All in all, it might just be easier to make a handful of small single poly shapes that are your houses, turn them into vector symbols, and place them one by one with your fingers hovering over the SHIFT and CTRL keys to continually scale and rotate between placings.

That second option would be more accurate too.

Loopysue

Or you could use Symbols along, but again - there's not as much control over the spacing and exact position as there is with individual placements.

mike robel

Thanks Sue, that's kind of what I thought.

Of course, for a more generic map, perhaps I could make various sizes and orientations of towns, with "built in" roads and place them on the map more or less aligning the roads of the map with the town's roads.

This comes to mind from the game "sands of war":

kristof65

Posted By: mike robel
Of course, for a more generic map, perhaps I could make various sizes and orientations of towns, with "built in" roads and place them on the map more or less aligning the roads of the map with the town's roads.

If this is for wargame hex maps and I knew I would eventually be making a bunch of them, that would be the approach I would take.

I would also sort them by number of roads in and out of the hex, make 5-6 variants of each, and then sort them into collections that would be randomly chosen from when placing.

It would, of course, take more time upfront to create the symbol set, but in the long run it would probably save time.

mike robel

It is for wargaming and a good idea. Don't know that I am up to creating symbol sets though.

kristof65

It's not hard, and these would be a good one to learn on.


Some good resources for guides on making your own symbol are in the Tome of Ultimate Mapping and Cartographer's Annual 2008 (volume 2) - February issue.

I'm sure there are others around if you don't have one of those.

mike robel

I have those. I mostly base my work (read trace) topographic maps. Generic maps hurt my head.