Looking for Advice with FT3+
I am looking to build a world map for an existing project and I was looking for some advice on a couple of points.
First, I have some geography reasonably well laid out in the main theater of interest, and some broad strokes around lay of the land/continent size position for a few key regions, but the rest of the world is largely a black box. I have been looking at FT3+ capabilities, but I'm not sure whether I'd be better off trying to insert my known topography into a random map, or if I should just "bite the bullet" and craft the entire world by hand, letting FT3+ just "fractal" it up afterward ala CA155.
Second, there are some areas of this world which have additional biomes separate from default set, not solely indicated by temperature and rainfall. I'm fine with painting those biomes in by hand, but I would like FT to fractalize up and blend the borders of these biomes, and ideally export them in my climate map. It seems like what I need primarily to be able to do is add a new climate, but I haven't found a way to do that?
Third, I wanted to paint a variety of coral reefs. I'm not really sure how to get this into FT. Perhaps I just need to do this on CC3 exports? But I was hoping to have a master FT3 geography file and do targeted exports for various theaters of interest. Any advice on how I might accomplish this?
Comments
To me, FT3 is a way to find and/or sculpt new worlds, rather than detail existing ones. It's quite a lot harder to use if you already have lots of ideas already set in concrete.
It might be easier to start this in Campaign Cartographer by creating a world sized map (each map unit is either a mile or a km), and drawing the predefined parts of the world as simple land shapes using the native land drawing tool. That way you can try out land shapes for the rest of your world relatively quickly, rather than sculpting and resculpting in FT3 several times over, which takes much longer.