LOL. Thanks. If you want to accept weird contour line colors instead of just brown ones.
Having said that, here are the great imponderables about contour lines and wargaming.
Go from light colors (low) to dark colors (high) (First pic) Go from dark colors (low) to light colors (high) (Second Pic) Change the width from thick (low) to thin (high) using the same color throughout (Third Pic) Change the width from low to high with one of the color change schemes
The lightest color is 47 and the darkest color is 32. (almost everything on the left side of the color palette looks black to me) The line thickness varies from 0.019 to 0.00 using color 41.
What bothers me a lot is when I have more than 16 contours I need to show.
Going from dark brown (at the highest) to dark gray and then to light gray or white would give me a lot of range. Obviously for a military style map, many different colors are not really appropriate.
The conventional way of doing it in maps of the real world is to have a bold line every 5th contour and a really bold line every 10th contour. Usually this results in bold lines at the 500 and 1000 levels throughout. But this requires that you label the contours, and I think you rejected that idea before.
Understand. On the maps I am using the contour interval is 10 meters with an Index Contour every 50 meters. Maps from different German states I am currently using amazingly have contour lines drawn with different widths, although each are labeled, but not consistently. The different line widths make it difficult to follow a given contour.
Normally wargames just have a terrain effects chart which shows the key to elevation in terms of color. Many, but not all, fill in the color so it is more obvious and I frequently do this.
I place a contour every 100 meters, so in this case there are only contours from 200 to 900m.
I haven't yet ruled out filling in the contours, but that still leaves me with wondering what order is better (dark to light or light to dark) but does away with worrying about line width.
I have placed labels on some maps, but is somewhat difficult although I never tried using Text Along a Curve, though now that I have used the Symbol fills, that might be useful.
Mapped contour fill colours tend to run from greens through yellows and browns to purples, grey and white, lowest to highest. Sometimes several shades of each can be used, dependent on the number of contour intervals, though personally, I find this can be confusing sometimes where the colour difference between different shades isn't great enough. I realise this may be of limited help for you though, Mike.
If you're going with lines instead of fills, I'd opt for a single colour, because frankly, with the samples you showed, I'm not seeing anything much beyond that some shades are paler than others; the colour difference is almost nonexistent (I have so-called "normal" colour vision). I may be atypical in other respects though, as I tend to "see" landforms from contour maps quite readily anyway, which I know some folks find much more difficult. Sometimes I also see them inverted, but usually river lines will follow valley bottoms, not mountain top ridges!
I think you need to determine what's really important in game terms for what you're trying to show here. Is every 100 m contour line essential to the game? Could you skip to every 200 or 300 m instead with any actual loss to the game mechanics? Is the density of contour lines going to obscure more important aspects which are key to the game? Will they simply confuse players, or do players need to be able to see every contour line?
Board wargame maps always tend to be abstracted to a greater or lesser extent. That needn't detract from their visual appeal of course, indeed ideally, it shouldn't. However, there is a balance between visual appeal and what's needed for the game, and the two don't necessarily match perfectly with real-world map detail.
Landforms pretty much leap off the map for me as well. I think it is due to my aerial photograph reading classes where I learned to see 3D without the Stereoscopes! However, my color vision is not normal.
I agree the line shading does not vary very much from line to line. Since I only have 8 or 9 contours, I'd use the middle value which show better variation. I have to say though, when I fill the contours, I get some very pleasing effects.
A military game called Land Power uses 1:100000 maps, 10km hexes, and the pieces are all battalions. They don't worry about line of sight at all. This works for them because the students are not wargamers for the most part, the game is adjudicated by umpires, and the focus is on the division staff or higher. They just overprinted the military map with a hex grid.
If you remember, I started this game using a 1:100000 map and I initially used 1500 meter hexes without contours. I decided the 1500 meter hex didn't really model the capability of the Armored Cavalry Troop to control 3000 meters of terrain with fire nor did it adequately permit the punch of a Soviet Regiment conducting the Division main attack inside a 3 or 4 km area, so I went to 3km hexes. And it required a lot of zone of control rules.
Some testing convinced me I needed contours, but the resolution was too poor in may areas for me to discern many of the contour lines, hence the move to a 1:50000 map and contours.
I blew up a section of the map to the size it will be when I print it, the hexes are 6cm wide. You can see in the view, the contours don't seem to have effect of LOS as much as the forest. This is the area my squadron defended. My battle position is in hex 0512 in the West corner where the small section of woods is. The portrayal of what I could shoot is pretty decent.
Part of me wants to go back to no contours because I want to break the gamers, in this game, of worrying about where individual vehicles are; they are to imagine the commanders have placed their units on the best terrain. The only LOS consideration would be if both guys are "inside" the woods, they they have to be in the same hex to shoot at each other. Units in different hexes can shoot as long as the hex edge between them is not blocked. (Again, saying they are on the best ground).
Clearly I am having issues breaking out of my own comfort zone.
End of Day 6. I think it is pretty complete. Still a couple of check passes to do, then switch the colors to brown. Enough of terraforming Earth, time to Terraform MARS!
Contours Day 7. While this still needs further fine tuning, the mapping is basically done. Basically I did 2 horizontal sweeps of the map in rows three or four grid squares high from left to right, got to the end, went up 3 hexes and went to the other side, making corrections along the way as needed. Sometimes there would be big gaps, so I would have to follow the contour. Then I would start over. When I got to the bottom, I reversed course and went back to the top. Amazing what considering a change of direction reveals. Then the same thing vertically.
Then displayed one sheet at a time, starting from 200m and worked my way and found more gaps in my work. This of course led to more corrections. Sometimes I had to bring the BMP back in and display the adjacent sheets in order to figure out the individual contour trace. Also discovered contours on the wrong sheet of course, and on the map BMP. So that's done.
Tomorrow switch the colors to brown.
You will probably see some difference in today's map from yesterdays, but not much is really noticeable. Nice to complete this part. I thought it would take at least a week more.
I decided to get it over with and convert it to game colors. The background is palest green (color 95). The contours start at pale brown (46 - 200m), then skip every other color to really dark brown (32-900m). I turned on the rivers (blue obviously), the Inner German Border, and the hex grid.
It occurs to me in this quick view, I would probably benefit by moving starting the contours at 43 (200m) and end them at 36 (900)
The latest iteration does highlight the fact the contours and hex grid don't match, of course, so does that mean you'll need to simplify the contour mapping to work for the game? (I'm not even mentioning the river lines here, naturally - oops, just did; sorry...)
The contours, rivers, forests, and roads are not intended to correspond to the hexes. I will adjust the roads so they don't cut across tiny (a size determined soley by me) will not provoke debates about how far a unit can move.
The hexes are large: 6cm wide/3km). A unit is assumed to occupy the best terrain in the hex for its mission. Detailed LOS is not going to be worried about overmuch. The hex size is to force the players out of their comfort zone to consider broader aspects of military operations. A single Cavalry Troop of the era can pretty much control a 3km zone and an attacking Russian Regiment can be in as little as 3 - 5 km when making the divisions main attack.
OK, earlier in the thread Monsen convinced me that using the real world distance for the map is better than manipulating the map so it will print out in the configuration I am interested in. So, I selected the SS3 Modern Political Map (Metric) and input the map size as something close to 58 km wide and 71 km tall.
For the current map, I want it to print out at 51 x 17 inches so the map sheet prints edge to edge without any white space at the top and the bottom. To print the map, I then said I want to have the map be printed on a 3 x 5 grid of 11 x 17 inch map sheets and I said use Paper Distance = 1 and Map Distance = 1. This prints out the map with the correct number of sheets, but the printed map does not display the desired area;it cuts off about 1.5 hexes off each side of the map. Unacceptable.
Clearly I need to scale the map differently. My attempts to calculate the size for the Map Distance merely frustrated me, so I started to guest (yes, Brute Force and Ignorance [BFI] raises its ugly head again). Having adjusted artillery I immediately try to go over (blank space all around the map) to short (less and less cut off hexes) and get to the point at which Map distance = 1.24 fits the height quite well, but gives me about 3 inches of blank space on each side, which I do not want, because I want to have the map extend to the sheet edge.
Before I would get the actual map into my photo editing program and determine the operational area I wanted to cover for the game and I would crop the image to cover that area. I would then measure how big the map was and decide how much space I wanted it to take up and it varies based on how many meters I want to have a hex cover. For example, if a hex is 100 meters, and the grid square is 1 cm wide, I resize the map so the grid square is 10cm. If I want the hex to be 1 inch in diameter I calculate any adjustment, then cut the map to cover the final map layout and resize it so it is at the correct physical size when printed (say a 2 x 2 sheet grid that is 34 inches wide and 22 inches tall.) (Yes, this is confusing to be reading the map in metric and then changing it to a "standard" size in inches).
I craft the map, proof it, and print it. Poof! The map prints in the correct size with the right number of pages. Next, since the printer can't print the image edge to edge on 11 x 17 inch paper, I order Cute PDF to convert the file to images, then take each sheet and paste it into a template for a 12 x 18 inch sheet of paper and they cut it for me.
However, after a lot of calculation and reading and re-reading the blog tutorial written by Monson and examining the manual, I am befuddled. Obviously at the start I sized the map in a manner such that the size is not compatible with printing out the map in the size I want.
What I am faced with doing is printing out the file such that it is in some other number of sheets (say 5 x 7) and scaled 1:1, export the PDF as images, reassemble them in my photo program, resize it, and then cut the thing again or print out a map that has blank space around it or has hexes which are cut off. Both are bothersome to me.
I was also advised that I can't use the measuring tools if I don't input the "actual" size which doesn't much bother me because I am concerned with the hex size that I want in the final product and don't really need to measure inside the CC3.
Sometimes I can master quite complex tasks and sometimes seemingly things that are simple are quite impenetrable.
This view of the map shows pretty much everything: Contours, roads (improved, light, medium, heavy duty, Autobahn, rivers and streams, railroads, inner city and out city zones, industrial area, forest cover, parks, orchards, swampy/boggy areas. I also adjusted the contour line color so it is in the middle of the color band for the browns.
It's pretty much done except for final editing, which will include:
Adding trails to allow a little better mobility to those forested areas not penetrated with roads. Adding railroad tunnels. Comparing 2000 era road network to the 1970s era network and remove/downgrade roads as needed. Adjusting roads so it is obvious which hex they are in (unlike rivers/streams, and roads which I don't tend to adjust much). A hex by hex process. Assigning mobility codes to each hex (Go, Slow Go, Restricted, which affects speed and provides modifiers to combat). Another hex by hex process. This takes into account forest cover, slope in a hex, and cities/towns. Adding the names for cities, roads, and watercourses, and probably contour elevations, as well as some point elevations.
At some point, I may have to relook the contour interval and place contours at the *50 meter intervals. Also to make it easier to find the interpet altitude, make the odd numbered contours a different thickness than the even numbers.
This is a close up at approximately full size of my squadron's sector which was hexes 0312 - 0412 - 0511- 0512- 0413 - 0313. My positions were in 0512 in the forested intersection in the west corner of the hex.
I'm struggling to see the hexes in places, Mike. If they're game-critical, I think maybe they need to be more obvious. The black roads seem too dominant right now especially, but also where there are lots of contour lines, the hexes just vanish.
I don't know what the 1970s roads near the Western side of the border were like, but I know I was surprised the first time I visited what had been East Germany in the mid-90s to find many stretches of roads in the countryside were still cobblestone-paved (this was around the Berlin-Potsdam area).
The hexes will probably be changed to black or a darker gray. The black roads are actually gray with the outline in black, i'm gonna change them all to gray. Many times though, after printing, things that look to faint to be seen or look garish display nicely. And my printer is different than the professional ones so it's somewhat of a crap shoot.
There were places where roads in the country were still cobblestone. Once I was on a Roman Road that had no modern pavement.
A subtle white glow on the hexes with the hexes right on top of everything but the text will help to lift the grid to the front without making it oppressively dark. Those black roads might be better not quite so very black.
You now have the job of juggling the appearances of everything until it all looks ok. Maybe make a list of things in order of visual importance and try to start with medium-dark grey as the darkest, working down towards pale at the bottom end of the list. It would help if the roads were all the same colour.
Difficult to see what is what with all those many different colours involved.
I have changed the grid to black. It is much easier for me to see than the gray. I suppose it would be true for most gamers, but many games have the grid very faint in order to not detract from the map.
The black roads were actually gray outlined in black. I have switched them just to gray.
Roads need to be different colors so the players can easily distinguish one class from another because you can move faster on heavy duty/all weather roads than you can go medium, light duty, or improve roads (those topped with gravel or light concrete) or trails (just smoothed dirt, of which I have none at the moment)
I have prepared for you three views. This is about the size the paper map would be printed. One hex is 3km/6cm tall.
First is the topongraphical Map with the Grid and IGB displayed on top. You can see the map is very detailed. Now, just for fun, picture it at night, in the rain, with a red or blue lens flashlight, and grease pencil (china marker) scribbled on top of it.
Second is the CC3 map with all the layers turned on without the map background turned on, so it is white as the base color. Just by only modeling the 100m contours, the map is much simplified and you can see I have not included nearly all the roads, much less all the other fine detail the skilled German mapmakers have added.
Third is the CC# map with all the layers turned on, including the background which is shade 95, the lightest green. I tried it earlier with the lightest shade of brown, but that washed out the other contours. Right now the contours are sort of in the middle of the brown shades. I could move them so they are all on the upper side of the brown shades.
The Red circle is my position as before.
Question. Interestingly, enough I was able to remove the black gray roads merely by selecting all of them and changing them to just gray. But when I try to change the border from Red with black outline to no outline by changing the color and/or the size of the border, it keeps the outline. Other than redrawing the road, is there a way to just easily remove the outline? Of course, redrawing the line is trivial compared to doing contour lines.
The problem is that real world published map styles have been honed over many decades to be what they are - perfectly balanced in every way with just exactly the right emphasis on everything. Harmony. If you change just one little thing on that published map, perhaps made all the contour lines a bit darker than they are, it would fall apart and become pretty unreadable.
So what you are doing is a thousand times more difficult to get right, because you aren't just changing the contours, you're changing everything - the entire style. And you are attempting to achieve the same kind of balance that took the professionals many decades to get right. Your mapping is spot on. No problems there. But here are a few of my thoughts on the colour scheme.
- The white background is better than the green one.
- Try putting all the roads on one sheet and adding an Outer Glow sheet effect to that sheet. Make it a very thin black glow with little or no fade. that should give you the black outline without any extra entities to deal with, and can be adjusted or switched of with just a click.
-The orange and yellow roads are distractingly bright. I get that the red road has to be highly visible, but the others could be toned down a bit to match the colours of the original map. The white ones should be white. With that Outer Glow I mentioned above they will still be visible against the white background.
- Make those contours zero line width and make them all the same paler brown? I know that doesn't help you decide what altitude you are at, but is knowing the actual altitude really important? They will already show you if you are moving perpendicular or across a slope.
These are just suggestions, Mike. Don't listen to me if you disagree
Thanks for the detailed feedback. I need that sort of thing, especially with colors since I am mostly color blind, I need loud colors to distinguish most things and small gradients are practically invivisible. It's fortunante each color has its own number in the pallete. 1970/1980s maps were not as detailed as these newer maps. It must be computers. Or aliens. Maybe both.
I toned down the orange and yellow roads. It may also help to make them the same size instead of making the Autobahn one width, heavy duty an other, and so on. On the 70's era maps the Autobahn and heavy duty were both red, just different widths (most of the time) so that would not be a huge problem for me. The yellow roads were red and white. I am totally unsuccessful in duplicating that because when I use those dashed lines, the individual dashes are all over the place and not consistent. The roads are currently on different sheets so they pass over each other in the correct manner. Once everything is settled, that would not be so important.
While you don't need to know exactly how high you are, you have to know if you have line of sight between two hexes. If they are all the same color, then you won't have any real idea and I don't think the 0 width lines are discernable, but I could make them 0.005 instead of 0.01. I have to think about that. The alternate is to fill in the contours. I like that look, but I shudder at the work involved in converting the existing lines into paths since they are made up of segments. Experimentation.
Glow. I don't know about it. More experimentation.
I always listen to the comments people make about maps. There is a certain amount of artistry required and to paraphrase Wellington from the movie Waterloo, "If there is one thing I know absolutely nothing, its artistry."
Here are toned down roads in the same area and scale (almost) as the previous bunch.
Edit: The second shot below is still more changes. I changed Orange to a lighter shade of read (the Autobahns too, but they aren't shown) and reduced the diameter of the the formerly Orange roads, yellow, and gray roads to 0.015 while leaving the Autobahn at 0.2.
I wanted to post some other maps covering the genre I am working on, so I e-mailed two of my fellow developers if I could post samples of their maps. (To be fair, I advised both of them on aspects of game design, but our approaches to maps and the game rules/engine are different.) They both use professional artists while I am using just me. Both their games model a much larger area than mine.
First in Compass Games' Fulda Gap by Adam Starkweather. https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/261160/fulda-gap-battle-center His map is based on 1:00000 maps but one hex is 500m and is 2.5cm wide, about 1:25000 map. Can be much more detailed than the 1:50000 ones I use, or at least there is more space between contour lines. It is not normally used by the US Army (1:50000 is the standard). Like my game, this is US Companies versus Soviet Battalions. His contour lines are more stylized than mine.
Second is Thin Red Line's Less than 60 miles, by Fabrizio Vianello. https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/259121/less-60-miles. His map uses a 1:500000 Joint Operational Graphic, hexes are 5 miles and are 2cm wide. His scale is US Battalions versus Soviet Battalions. What makes Fabrizio's game interesting is that if the tiniest bit of bad terrain is in a hex, that is what the hex is. Needless to say, a magnifying glass and bright lines are in order. I use 4 power flip down telescopes over glasses with my reading prescription in them, sort of like what use see dentists using.
The area from my maps above are contained in the shots below, but they cover more ground. My game only models the covering force portion of the game, which is only 8 - 12 km deep as opposed to all the way to Frankfurt.
I wanted to post some other maps covering the genre I am working on, so I e-mailed two of my fellow developers if I could post samples of their maps. (To be fair, I advised both of them on aspects of game design, but our approaches to maps and the game rules/engine are different.) They both use professional artists while I am using just me. Both their games model a much larger area than mine.
First in Compass Games' Fulda Gap by Adam Starkweather. https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/261160/fulda-gap-battle-center His map is based on 1:00000 maps but one hex is 500m and is 2.5cm wide, about 1:25000 map. Can be much more detailed than the 1:50000 ones I use, or at least there is more space between contour lines. It is not normally used by the US Army (1:50000 is the standard). Like my game, this is US Companies versus Soviet Battalions. His contour lines are more stylized than mine.
Second is Thin Red Line's Less than 60 miles, by Fabrizio Vianello. https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/259121/less-60-miles. His map uses a 1:500000 Joint Operational Graphic, hexes are 5 miles and are 2cm wide. His scale is US Battalions versus Soviet Battalions. What makes Fabrizio's game interesting is that if the tiniest bit of bad terrain is in a hex, that is what the hex is. Needless to say, a magnifying glass and bright lines are in order. I use 4 power flip down telescopes over glasses with my reading prescription in them, sort of like what dentists use.
The area from my maps above are contained in the shots below, but they cover more ground. My game only models the covering force portion of the game, which is only 8 - 12 km deep as opposed to all the way to Frankfurt.
I agree with Sue about the white background being preferable as the clearer version, Mike.
I'm still struggling to see how all the detail squares with this being a game map, however. The hexes just don't seem to have any purpose right now, beyond providing a degree of scale. The two other game map samples you've shown throw this into even starker perspective, I think, because to a large extent in both, that hex grid is king. That's pretty much how it should be, as even where there are variations off the hex grid in the Less Than 60 Miles map, I'm guessing those won't have a significant game effect; just makes the map look prettier (or less clear - I'm undecided on the point, as not knowing how its mechanics run).
It's interesting to see how both the Fulda Gap and Less Than... map-makers have tackled the river-line-as-hex-delimiter problem, making the rivers look naturally winding while still showing clearly which hex edge is affected by their presence.
I am going with white, but I may test print with the green or light brown.
Hexes. Well, this is an evolution for me. Long ago (like 2014) I started with hexes = 1000 meters. This didn't give the right feel for me because a cav troop would never occupy such a small space. It would be for a platoon. I went to 1500 meters, which was better, but still was a little small for the cavalry troop and in all but extreme circumstances too small for a Soviet Regimental Main Attack, which normally is 4 - 6 kilometers, but could be as large as 10 - 12 if it is not the main attack. In order to defeat a regiment, you need to mass 3 - 5 companies in front of it. With the size hexes I started with, this results in huge stacks of units, plus all the other markers you have. Plus I needed more counters to show a unit was doing something on an extended front. Then different units would need different size zones of control.
My fingers and tweezers just aren't good enough for that. Thus I ended up with a 3 km hex. Just big enough for a Cavalry Troop, and by putting the counter on the Hex edge, you can cover a 6 km zone.
The larger hex allows one to spread the counters out so they are easier to see and manipulate. There isn't a real need to place them in "the real" position, becaues the players will have to assume the units have "found" the best place within the hex for them to use.
This first photo shows the difference between a M4A3E8 Sherman's range in WWII with an M60A1/A3 and/or TOW Missile range in 1970.
The second shows a shot of the map using 1000m hexes (about 2cm tall).
The Third shows a shot of the map using 3000m hexes (6cm tall).
Continuing on, this shows a single Soviet Regiment attacking a cavalry squadron. The Regiment is making the Division and Army Main Attack, he has units conducting reconnaissance, attack by fire, he's placed artillery targets on the US guys, the Regimental Artillery Group is a hex behind. The 2nd Echelon Regiment is marked so he can exploit if the regiment breaks through.
The US player has cleverly placed an obstacle belt in the hex (which is countered by the Engineer unit) and has massed 2 troops against the attack in the central hex and the two troops on each side can range the fight. Artillery is raining down on the enemy and the unit in the center is the Corps, Regiments, and Squadrons Main Effort. They are all fortunately dug in. The Squadron's supporting artillery is deployed slightly to the rear.
if this was a 1km grid, then many of these counters would be piled in the same hex. I'd hate to see how crowded it would be and stacks would be falling off everywhere.
This picture also shows the counters face up. They are normally displayed face down and only turned over when identified and/or in combat. There are a number of decoy counters to deceive the other player and the players will also be able to use blank counters underneath real counters so one can not easily discern what a given unit is doing. I want to have good fog of war going on.
1000m hexes would be fine if I was doing US Platoons against Soviet Companies, and if I wasn't trying to maneuver 8 US battalions with 8 artillery battalions in direct support, plus the air cavalry squadron of the Regiment, against the four divisions of 8th Guards Army and all the Army Troops.
I think this does a better job of showing the effects of combat power today and will be easier for the players. But perhaps it won't work out well in testing, although they guys that have done a little for me like it.
In Less Than 60 and Fulda Gap, you have bigger counters and larger than normal hexes, but you still can end up with 6 - 10 counters piled up in a stack. 3-5 for units and 5 - 7 for markers.
Each hex is going to have a dot in it (sort of like the Fulda Gap map, but I didn't know he was doing it when I thought of doing it for mine) that tells at a glance what the movement rate is through the hex, and applies the modifiers for target acquistion and combat. No need to look at a terrain guide to know what it is. Nor do you have to really follow the roads and the rivers are included in the colored dot.
The Army uses a similar system using a 1:100000 map with 10 km hexes (10cm each) and has US battalions versus OPFOR battalions, but the brigades in general manuever in a single block and the game is designed to get the officer students out of their very tactical frame of mind (positioning vehicles/platoons) and instead positioning battalions/brigades. The whole rule book is only about 10 pages, but they also play double blind and with umpires.
But who know? I'll have to see how it tests out more. maybe I go back to 1000 m or 1500m hexes.
I will be adjusting the roads and rivers somewhat to avoid have teeny-tiny intrusions into surrounding hexes and I might move the contours a little. But for the most part, the units are distributed throughout the hex and again, on the "best terrain".
I quite understand your reasoning, Mike, but I'm just not seeing what the purpose is of all the very detailed terrain features you've so laboriously constructed, given that each hex's effect on the game is still going to be dominated by at most a couple of significant features only, like "main road", "trees", "elevation", "built-up area", etc.
To be honest, for the array of counters being used per hex, and the kind of detailed understanding of the effects of terrain you're aiming for, I think you might be better switching to a tabletop tactical game with 3D models and more-nearly-actual terrain pieces, or simply a paper map of the genuine terrain, to allow the level of close-action detail you're after, without hexes. The hexes are more or less redundant at this level of complexity, given also things like the weapon ranges involved.
It feels like you're trying to get the hex-game to do too much; showing the strategic level of a large area of the front line, yet at the same time, wanting to show detailed tactical operations within each individual hex's area. I think it might be better to concentrate on one or the other.
I appreciate and understand your feedback. Just overlaying the grid over the real maps is not a possibility for me because the German's copyright their state/national maps and prohibit scanning, except for the military. While I am okay with scanning to use as the basis for my map, I can't just scan the maps and overlay the grid. Though the thought is tempting. Sigh.
If you remember, the 1:100000 version did not have contours and for various reasons I became convinced they needed them. I am conflicted with taking them out again on this version. Fortunately, it is easy to do.
I don't think 1/285 scale armor models would scratch my itch. They are great for my MBT modules that I also make, but then those have 1 inch hexes = 100 meters and the maps look empty due to the space between contours and such. And plastic/metal models would be prohibitively expensive for me and the customers.
Here is a shot of the map at full scale with the contours off. Much less busy and it might be good enough. If I was an artist, perhaps it would look good with 19th century contours like Napoleonic, Civil War, and American Indian battle maps.
Edit: I think that laying the hex overlay on top of the base map would not appeal to gamers. If I was just catering to Army/USMC officers, I don't think I'd have any qualms about it, except for copyright issues.
Well.... since you mention Napoleonic wars, there is always the option to do this in the Ferraris Style?
Only joking! I think that given the area it would probably take you at least a couple of years to map every field and tree with it, and I'm not sure you really want to go down to nearly 1:10,000 scale!
So, I've been thinking about these here contours, and I've been looking at that map several images up the thread where the contours are filled. I think the only option here is to reduce the sheer buzzy-ness of the linework (which is complicating the appearance of the hexes) is to do away with as many lines that you can that aren't roads, rivers or bits of hex grid. To do that you would need to fill the contours. I don't really like filled contours with filled forests, but that map I've been looking at seems to get away with it, so how about filling the contours with the palest browns, starting with white as the highest altitude and going down through the browns as far as you need to go, one step at a time? By my reckoning you could get away with that as long as you didn't have too many contours. You don't want to end up getting too dark.
I don't even think you need a line around the contours - just plain filled polygons underneath the forests, but with the forests blended to the contours using a Blend Mode set to Multiply, perhaps. Try it and see.
I would leave the settlements and rivers and roads completely opaque and not have the contours show through them. That would be too much of a muddle to cope with visually.
Comments
Turned the hexes on for this one.
Having said that, here are the great imponderables about contour lines and wargaming.
Go from light colors (low) to dark colors (high) (First pic)
Go from dark colors (low) to light colors (high) (Second Pic)
Change the width from thick (low) to thin (high) using the same color throughout (Third Pic)
Change the width from low to high with one of the color change schemes
The lightest color is 47 and the darkest color is 32. (almost everything on the left side of the color palette looks black to me)
The line thickness varies from 0.019 to 0.00 using color 41.
What bothers me a lot is when I have more than 16 contours I need to show.
Going from dark brown (at the highest) to dark gray and then to light gray or white would give me a lot of range. Obviously for a military style map, many different colors are not really appropriate.
Comments? Other solutions? Suggestions?
Normally wargames just have a terrain effects chart which shows the key to elevation in terms of color. Many, but not all, fill in the color so it is more obvious and I frequently do this.
I place a contour every 100 meters, so in this case there are only contours from 200 to 900m.
I haven't yet ruled out filling in the contours, but that still leaves me with wondering what order is better (dark to light or light to dark) but does away with worrying about line width.
I have placed labels on some maps, but is somewhat difficult although I never tried using Text Along a Curve, though now that I have used the Symbol fills, that might be useful.
If you're going with lines instead of fills, I'd opt for a single colour, because frankly, with the samples you showed, I'm not seeing anything much beyond that some shades are paler than others; the colour difference is almost nonexistent (I have so-called "normal" colour vision). I may be atypical in other respects though, as I tend to "see" landforms from contour maps quite readily anyway, which I know some folks find much more difficult. Sometimes I also see them inverted, but usually river lines will follow valley bottoms, not mountain top ridges!
I think you need to determine what's really important in game terms for what you're trying to show here. Is every 100 m contour line essential to the game? Could you skip to every 200 or 300 m instead with any actual loss to the game mechanics? Is the density of contour lines going to obscure more important aspects which are key to the game? Will they simply confuse players, or do players need to be able to see every contour line?
Board wargame maps always tend to be abstracted to a greater or lesser extent. That needn't detract from their visual appeal of course, indeed ideally, it shouldn't. However, there is a balance between visual appeal and what's needed for the game, and the two don't necessarily match perfectly with real-world map detail.
That's muddied the waters further for you!
Landforms pretty much leap off the map for me as well. I think it is due to my aerial photograph reading classes where I learned to see 3D without the Stereoscopes! However, my color vision is not normal.
I agree the line shading does not vary very much from line to line. Since I only have 8 or 9 contours, I'd use the middle value which show better variation. I have to say though, when I fill the contours, I get some very pleasing effects.
A military game called Land Power uses 1:100000 maps, 10km hexes, and the pieces are all battalions. They don't worry about line of sight at all. This works for them because the students are not wargamers for the most part, the game is adjudicated by umpires, and the focus is on the division staff or higher. They just overprinted the military map with a hex grid.
If you remember, I started this game using a 1:100000 map and I initially used 1500 meter hexes without contours. I decided the 1500 meter hex didn't really model the capability of the Armored Cavalry Troop to control 3000 meters of terrain with fire nor did it adequately permit the punch of a Soviet Regiment conducting the Division main attack inside a 3 or 4 km area, so I went to 3km hexes. And it required a lot of zone of control rules.
Some testing convinced me I needed contours, but the resolution was too poor in may areas for me to discern many of the contour lines, hence the move to a 1:50000 map and contours.
I blew up a section of the map to the size it will be when I print it, the hexes are 6cm wide. You can see in the view, the contours don't seem to have effect of LOS as much as the forest. This is the area my squadron defended. My battle position is in hex 0512 in the West corner where the small section of woods is. The portrayal of what I could shoot is pretty decent.
Part of me wants to go back to no contours because I want to break the gamers, in this game, of worrying about where individual vehicles are; they are to imagine the commanders have placed their units on the best terrain. The only LOS consideration would be if both guys are "inside" the woods, they they have to be in the same hex to shoot at each other. Units in different hexes can shoot as long as the hex edge between them is not blocked. (Again, saying they are on the best ground).
Clearly I am having issues breaking out of my own comfort zone.
Then displayed one sheet at a time, starting from 200m and worked my way and found more gaps in my work. This of course led to more corrections. Sometimes I had to bring the BMP back in and display the adjacent sheets in order to figure out the individual contour trace. Also discovered contours on the wrong sheet of course, and on the map BMP. So that's done.
Tomorrow switch the colors to brown.
You will probably see some difference in today's map from yesterdays, but not much is really noticeable. Nice to complete this part. I thought it would take at least a week more.
It occurs to me in this quick view, I would probably benefit by moving starting the contours at 43 (200m) and end them at 36 (900)
The latest iteration does highlight the fact the contours and hex grid don't match, of course, so does that mean you'll need to simplify the contour mapping to work for the game? (I'm not even mentioning the river lines here, naturally - oops, just did; sorry...)
The contours, rivers, forests, and roads are not intended to correspond to the hexes. I will adjust the roads so they don't cut across tiny (a size determined soley by me) will not provoke debates about how far a unit can move.
The hexes are large: 6cm wide/3km). A unit is assumed to occupy the best terrain in the hex for its mission. Detailed LOS is not going to be worried about overmuch. The hex size is to force the players out of their comfort zone to consider broader aspects of military operations. A single Cavalry Troop of the era can pretty much control a 3km zone and an attacking Russian Regiment can be in as little as 3 - 5 km when making the divisions main attack.
For the current map, I want it to print out at 51 x 17 inches so the map sheet prints edge to edge without any white space at the top and the bottom. To print the map, I then said I want to have the map be printed on a 3 x 5 grid of 11 x 17 inch map sheets and I said use Paper Distance = 1 and Map Distance = 1. This prints out the map with the correct number of sheets, but the printed map does not display the desired area;it cuts off about 1.5 hexes off each side of the map. Unacceptable.
Clearly I need to scale the map differently. My attempts to calculate the size for the Map Distance merely frustrated me, so I started to guest (yes, Brute Force and Ignorance [BFI] raises its ugly head again). Having adjusted artillery I immediately try to go over (blank space all around the map) to short (less and less cut off hexes) and get to the point at which Map distance = 1.24 fits the height quite well, but gives me about 3 inches of blank space on each side, which I do not want, because I want to have the map extend to the sheet edge.
Before I would get the actual map into my photo editing program and determine the operational area I wanted to cover for the game and I would crop the image to cover that area. I would then measure how big the map was and decide how much space I wanted it to take up and it varies based on how many meters I want to have a hex cover. For example, if a hex is 100 meters, and the grid square is 1 cm wide, I resize the map so the grid square is 10cm. If I want the hex to be 1 inch in diameter I calculate any adjustment, then cut the map to cover the final map layout and resize it so it is at the correct physical size when printed (say a 2 x 2 sheet grid that is 34 inches wide and 22 inches tall.) (Yes, this is confusing to be reading the map in metric and then changing it to a "standard" size in inches).
I craft the map, proof it, and print it. Poof! The map prints in the correct size with the right number of pages. Next, since the printer can't print the image edge to edge on 11 x 17 inch paper, I order Cute PDF to convert the file to images, then take each sheet and paste it into a template for a 12 x 18 inch sheet of paper and they cut it for me.
However, after a lot of calculation and reading and re-reading the blog tutorial written by Monson and examining the manual, I am befuddled. Obviously at the start I sized the map in a manner such that the size is not compatible with printing out the map in the size I want.
What I am faced with doing is printing out the file such that it is in some other number of sheets (say 5 x 7) and scaled 1:1, export the PDF as images, reassemble them in my photo program, resize it, and then cut the thing again or print out a map that has blank space around it or has hexes which are cut off. Both are bothersome to me.
I was also advised that I can't use the measuring tools if I don't input the "actual" size which doesn't much bother me because I am concerned with the hex size that I want in the final product and don't really need to measure inside the CC3.
Sometimes I can master quite complex tasks and sometimes seemingly things that are simple are quite impenetrable.
It's pretty much done except for final editing, which will include:
Adding trails to allow a little better mobility to those forested areas not penetrated with roads.
Adding railroad tunnels.
Comparing 2000 era road network to the 1970s era network and remove/downgrade roads as needed.
Adjusting roads so it is obvious which hex they are in (unlike rivers/streams, and roads which I don't tend to adjust much). A hex by hex process.
Assigning mobility codes to each hex (Go, Slow Go, Restricted, which affects speed and provides modifiers to combat). Another hex by hex process. This takes into account forest cover, slope in a hex, and cities/towns.
Adding the names for cities, roads, and watercourses, and probably contour elevations, as well as some point elevations.
At some point, I may have to relook the contour interval and place contours at the *50 meter intervals. Also to make it easier to find the interpet altitude, make the odd numbered contours a different thickness than the even numbers.
Appreciate any comments.
Thanks.
I don't know what the 1970s roads near the Western side of the border were like, but I know I was surprised the first time I visited what had been East Germany in the mid-90s to find many stretches of roads in the countryside were still cobblestone-paved (this was around the Berlin-Potsdam area).
There were places where roads in the country were still cobblestone. Once I was on a Roman Road that had no modern pavement.
You now have the job of juggling the appearances of everything until it all looks ok. Maybe make a list of things in order of visual importance and try to start with medium-dark grey as the darkest, working down towards pale at the bottom end of the list. It would help if the roads were all the same colour.
Difficult to see what is what with all those many different colours involved.
The black roads were actually gray outlined in black. I have switched them just to gray.
Roads need to be different colors so the players can easily distinguish one class from another because you can move faster on heavy duty/all weather roads than you can go medium, light duty, or improve roads (those topped with gravel or light concrete) or trails (just smoothed dirt, of which I have none at the moment)
I have prepared for you three views. This is about the size the paper map would be printed. One hex is 3km/6cm tall.
First is the topongraphical Map with the Grid and IGB displayed on top. You can see the map is very detailed. Now, just for fun, picture it at night, in the rain, with a red or blue lens flashlight, and grease pencil (china marker) scribbled on top of it.
Second is the CC3 map with all the layers turned on without the map background turned on, so it is white as the base color. Just by only modeling the 100m contours, the map is much simplified and you can see I have not included nearly all the roads, much less all the other fine detail the skilled German mapmakers have added.
Third is the CC# map with all the layers turned on, including the background which is shade 95, the lightest green. I tried it earlier with the lightest shade of brown, but that washed out the other contours. Right now the contours are sort of in the middle of the brown shades. I could move them so they are all on the upper side of the brown shades.
The Red circle is my position as before.
Question. Interestingly, enough I was able to remove the black gray roads merely by selecting all of them and changing them to just gray. But when I try to change the border from Red with black outline to no outline by changing the color and/or the size of the border, it keeps the outline. Other than redrawing the road, is there a way to just easily remove the outline? Of course, redrawing the line is trivial compared to doing contour lines.
Thoughts? Opinions?
The problem is that real world published map styles have been honed over many decades to be what they are - perfectly balanced in every way with just exactly the right emphasis on everything. Harmony. If you change just one little thing on that published map, perhaps made all the contour lines a bit darker than they are, it would fall apart and become pretty unreadable.
So what you are doing is a thousand times more difficult to get right, because you aren't just changing the contours, you're changing everything - the entire style. And you are attempting to achieve the same kind of balance that took the professionals many decades to get right. Your mapping is spot on. No problems there. But here are a few of my thoughts on the colour scheme.
- The white background is better than the green one.
- Try putting all the roads on one sheet and adding an Outer Glow sheet effect to that sheet. Make it a very thin black glow with little or no fade. that should give you the black outline without any extra entities to deal with, and can be adjusted or switched of with just a click.
-The orange and yellow roads are distractingly bright. I get that the red road has to be highly visible, but the others could be toned down a bit to match the colours of the original map. The white ones should be white. With that Outer Glow I mentioned above they will still be visible against the white background.
- Make those contours zero line width and make them all the same paler brown? I know that doesn't help you decide what altitude you are at, but is knowing the actual altitude really important? They will already show you if you are moving perpendicular or across a slope.
These are just suggestions, Mike. Don't listen to me if you disagree
I toned down the orange and yellow roads. It may also help to make them the same size instead of making the Autobahn one width, heavy duty an other, and so on. On the 70's era maps the Autobahn and heavy duty were both red, just different widths (most of the time) so that would not be a huge problem for me. The yellow roads were red and white. I am totally unsuccessful in duplicating that because when I use those dashed lines, the individual dashes are all over the place and not consistent. The roads are currently on different sheets so they pass over each other in the correct manner. Once everything is settled, that would not be so important.
While you don't need to know exactly how high you are, you have to know if you have line of sight between two hexes. If they are all the same color, then you won't have any real idea and I don't think the 0 width lines are discernable, but I could make them 0.005 instead of 0.01. I have to think about that. The alternate is to fill in the contours. I like that look, but I shudder at the work involved in converting the existing lines into paths since they are made up of segments. Experimentation.
Glow. I don't know about it. More experimentation.
I always listen to the comments people make about maps. There is a certain amount of artistry required and to paraphrase Wellington from the movie Waterloo, "If there is one thing I know absolutely nothing, its artistry."
Here are toned down roads in the same area and scale (almost) as the previous bunch.
Edit: The second shot below is still more changes. I changed Orange to a lighter shade of read (the Autobahns too, but they aren't shown) and reduced the diameter of the the formerly Orange roads, yellow, and gray roads to 0.015 while leaving the Autobahn at 0.2.
First in Compass Games' Fulda Gap by Adam Starkweather. https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/261160/fulda-gap-battle-center His map is based on 1:00000 maps but one hex is 500m and is 2.5cm wide, about 1:25000 map. Can be much more detailed than the 1:50000 ones I use, or at least there is more space between contour lines.
Second is Thin Red Line's Less than 60 miles, by Fabrizio Vianello. https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/259121/less-60-miles. His map uses a 1:500000 Joint Operational Graphic, hexes are 5 miles and are 2cm wide. His scale is US Battalions versus Soviet Battalions. What makes Fabrizio's game interesting is that if the tiniest bit of bad terrain is in a hex, that is what the hex is.
The area from my maps above are contained in the shots below, but they cover more ground. My game only models the covering force portion of the game, which is only 8 - 12 km deep as opposed to all the way to Frankfurt.
First in Compass Games' Fulda Gap by Adam Starkweather. https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/261160/fulda-gap-battle-center His map is based on 1:00000 maps but one hex is 500m and is 2.5cm wide, about 1:25000 map. Can be much more detailed than the 1:50000 ones I use, or at least there is more space between contour lines.
Second is Thin Red Line's Less than 60 miles, by Fabrizio Vianello. https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/259121/less-60-miles. His map uses a 1:500000 Joint Operational Graphic, hexes are 5 miles and are 2cm wide. His scale is US Battalions versus Soviet Battalions. What makes Fabrizio's game interesting is that if the tiniest bit of bad terrain is in a hex, that is what the hex is.
The area from my maps above are contained in the shots below, but they cover more ground. My game only models the covering force portion of the game, which is only 8 - 12 km deep as opposed to all the way to Frankfurt.
I'm still struggling to see how all the detail squares with this being a game map, however. The hexes just don't seem to have any purpose right now, beyond providing a degree of scale. The two other game map samples you've shown throw this into even starker perspective, I think, because to a large extent in both, that hex grid is king. That's pretty much how it should be, as even where there are variations off the hex grid in the Less Than 60 Miles map, I'm guessing those won't have a significant game effect; just makes the map look prettier (or less clear - I'm undecided on the point, as not knowing how its mechanics run).
It's interesting to see how both the Fulda Gap and Less Than... map-makers have tackled the river-line-as-hex-delimiter problem, making the rivers look naturally winding while still showing clearly which hex edge is affected by their presence.
Hexes. Well, this is an evolution for me. Long ago (like 2014) I started with hexes = 1000 meters. This didn't give the right feel for me because a cav troop would never occupy such a small space. It would be for a platoon. I went to 1500 meters, which was better, but still was a little small for the cavalry troop and in all but extreme circumstances too small for a Soviet Regimental Main Attack, which normally is 4 - 6 kilometers, but could be as large as 10 - 12 if it is not the main attack. In order to defeat a regiment, you need to mass 3 - 5 companies in front of it. With the size hexes I started with, this results in huge stacks of units, plus all the other markers you have. Plus I needed more counters to show a unit was doing something on an extended front. Then different units would need different size zones of control.
My fingers and tweezers just aren't good enough for that. Thus I ended up with a 3 km hex. Just big enough for a Cavalry Troop, and by putting the counter on the Hex edge, you can cover a 6 km zone.
The larger hex allows one to spread the counters out so they are easier to see and manipulate. There isn't a real need to place them in "the real" position, becaues the players will have to assume the units have "found" the best place within the hex for them to use.
This first photo shows the difference between a M4A3E8 Sherman's range in WWII with an M60A1/A3 and/or TOW Missile range in 1970.
The second shows a shot of the map using 1000m hexes (about 2cm tall).
The Third shows a shot of the map using 3000m hexes (6cm tall).
The US player has cleverly placed an obstacle belt in the hex (which is countered by the Engineer unit) and has massed 2 troops against the attack in the central hex and the two troops on each side can range the fight. Artillery is raining down on the enemy and the unit in the center is the Corps, Regiments, and Squadrons Main Effort. They are all fortunately dug in. The Squadron's supporting artillery is deployed slightly to the rear.
if this was a 1km grid, then many of these counters would be piled in the same hex. I'd hate to see how crowded it would be and stacks would be falling off everywhere.
This picture also shows the counters face up. They are normally displayed face down and only turned over when identified and/or in combat. There are a number of decoy counters to deceive the other player and the players will also be able to use blank counters underneath real counters so one can not easily discern what a given unit is doing. I want to have good fog of war going on.
1000m hexes would be fine if I was doing US Platoons against Soviet Companies, and if I wasn't trying to maneuver 8 US battalions with 8 artillery battalions in direct support, plus the air cavalry squadron of the Regiment, against the four divisions of 8th Guards Army and all the Army Troops.
I think this does a better job of showing the effects of combat power today and will be easier for the players. But perhaps it won't work out well in testing, although they guys that have done a little for me like it.
In Less Than 60 and Fulda Gap, you have bigger counters and larger than normal hexes, but you still can end up with 6 - 10 counters piled up in a stack. 3-5 for units and 5 - 7 for markers.
Each hex is going to have a dot in it (sort of like the Fulda Gap map, but I didn't know he was doing it when I thought of doing it for mine) that tells at a glance what the movement rate is through the hex, and applies the modifiers for target acquistion and combat. No need to look at a terrain guide to know what it is. Nor do you have to really follow the roads and the rivers are included in the colored dot.
The Army uses a similar system using a 1:100000 map with 10 km hexes (10cm each) and has US battalions versus OPFOR battalions, but the brigades in general manuever in a single block and the game is designed to get the officer students out of their very tactical frame of mind (positioning vehicles/platoons) and instead positioning battalions/brigades. The whole rule book is only about 10 pages, but they also play double blind and with umpires.
But who know? I'll have to see how it tests out more. maybe I go back to 1000 m or 1500m hexes.
I will be adjusting the roads and rivers somewhat to avoid have teeny-tiny intrusions into surrounding hexes and I might move the contours a little. But for the most part, the units are distributed throughout the hex and again, on the "best terrain".
To be honest, for the array of counters being used per hex, and the kind of detailed understanding of the effects of terrain you're aiming for, I think you might be better switching to a tabletop tactical game with 3D models and more-nearly-actual terrain pieces, or simply a paper map of the genuine terrain, to allow the level of close-action detail you're after, without hexes. The hexes are more or less redundant at this level of complexity, given also things like the weapon ranges involved.
It feels like you're trying to get the hex-game to do too much; showing the strategic level of a large area of the front line, yet at the same time, wanting to show detailed tactical operations within each individual hex's area. I think it might be better to concentrate on one or the other.
I appreciate and understand your feedback. Just overlaying the grid over the real maps is not a possibility for me because the German's copyright their state/national maps and prohibit scanning, except for the military. While I am okay with scanning to use as the basis for my map, I can't just scan the maps and overlay the grid. Though the thought is tempting. Sigh.
If you remember, the 1:100000 version did not have contours and for various reasons I became convinced they needed them. I am conflicted with taking them out again on this version. Fortunately, it is easy to do.
I don't think 1/285 scale armor models would scratch my itch. They are great for my MBT modules that I also make, but then those have 1 inch hexes = 100 meters and the maps look empty due to the space between contours and such. And plastic/metal models would be prohibitively expensive for me and the customers.
Here is a shot of the map at full scale with the contours off. Much less busy and it might be good enough. If I was an artist, perhaps it would look good with 19th century contours like Napoleonic, Civil War, and American Indian battle maps.
Edit: I think that laying the hex overlay on top of the base map would not appeal to gamers. If I was just catering to Army/USMC officers, I don't think I'd have any qualms about it, except for copyright issues.
Only joking! I think that given the area it would probably take you at least a couple of years to map every field and tree with it, and I'm not sure you really want to go down to nearly 1:10,000 scale!
So, I've been thinking about these here contours, and I've been looking at that map several images up the thread where the contours are filled. I think the only option here is to reduce the sheer buzzy-ness of the linework (which is complicating the appearance of the hexes) is to do away with as many lines that you can that aren't roads, rivers or bits of hex grid. To do that you would need to fill the contours. I don't really like filled contours with filled forests, but that map I've been looking at seems to get away with it, so how about filling the contours with the palest browns, starting with white as the highest altitude and going down through the browns as far as you need to go, one step at a time? By my reckoning you could get away with that as long as you didn't have too many contours. You don't want to end up getting too dark.
I don't even think you need a line around the contours - just plain filled polygons underneath the forests, but with the forests blended to the contours using a Blend Mode set to Multiply, perhaps. Try it and see.
I would leave the settlements and rivers and roads completely opaque and not have the contours show through them. That would be too much of a muddle to cope with visually.