This is Sparta!? [2 JUL 2012] v4 P. 1 & 2

[Campin_Killer]

Map Name: This is Sparta!
Mapmaker(s): CampinKiller
Number of Territories: 33
Special Features: Thermopylae Pass loses one troop per turn
What Makes This Map Worthy of Being Made: It's an intresting concept, with the Spartans being warriors. The Battle of Thermopylae had 300 Spartans and 700 other Greek soldiers defending against a Persian invading force of over 250,000 troops. The Spartans held out for 3 days. Anyways, it's a map that I haven't seen an idea for, and would be an intresting map to play on

~Version 4 Added
Too many mountains?
Change to Key color?
And I'm still working on those borders

Map Image:
Large

Click image to enlarge.

[Campin_Killer]

Older Versions

show: v3

show: v2

show: v1.7.5

show: v1.5

show: v1

[koontz1973]

Campin_Killer, firstly welcome to the foundry, and do not worry, we will treat you with kid gloves from the outset. Some things first before we get onto the map. Have you read this? It will give you everything that you need to make a map.
Can I ask what programme you are using? When I know this, I can help you more.

koontz

[Campin_Killer]

GIMP 2.6 (for some rediculous reason 2.8 won't run on my computer, but 2.6 runs fine >_>)

As for the ahndbook I read the topic title rule/draft and map requirements, and skimmed the rest.

[The Bison King]

Shouldn't you gain troops at the pass since it's the stronghold?

[koontz1973]

GIMP 2.6 (for some rediculous reason 2.8 won't run on my computer, but 2.6 runs fine >_>)

As for the ahndbook I read the topic title rule/draft and map requirements, and skimmed the rest.

Good, now we can get onto the map.
Here are a couple of good gimp tutorials that you can use to get your map really looking nice. I would suggest that you read them and start again. Do not worry, you will find that will be easier than trying to get what you have up to par and as you already have done it once, it will go quicker. Call it good practice for later.
viewtopic.php?f=649&t=140723
viewtopic.php?f=466&t=141577
And one more for you to look at.
viewtopic.php?f=649&t=123772

I would advise you to go through these tutorials step by step. You will end up with a map that is 100% better than what you have.

Text - to large, it needs to sit in the territories.
Font for name and legend - hard to read and does not look good. Make sure Hinting and Antialiasing are turned on in the text tool.
Black lines - Follow the guide.

Best advise for you is this - every spare minute you have, practise and experiment with GIMP. Try everything out that you can. It is the only way to learn as guides on the internet, while good, will not cover everything that you want.

koontz

[x-raider]

This is great.
Good luck and I hope to give some more substantial feedback soon.

[Dibbun]

Oh snap, Doxa Sparta!!

show

[Campin_Killer]

Click image to enlarge.

Changes:
Added new territories
Added new bonus
Added Spartan symbol (left side in the gray)
Changed Graphics
Added rivers and land routes
Changed text for Title and Key
Cleaned up borders

[Campin_Killer]

Shouldn't you gain troops at the pass since it's the stronghold?

The location of the pass on the map is infront of the Phoenician Wall (the front line of the Greek/Spartan phalanx). Since the Persians were originaly (before finding the mountain pass) trying to assualt through the phalanx, and were taking such heavy losses, I felt it would be better for the pass to lose 1 troop per turn.

However I'm also leaning towards the "Spartans" region having a +1 or +2 bonus/auto-deploy

[tkr4lf]

Hey, this version looks much better than the first one. I like the changes you've made.

One thing that pops out to me immediately is the borders. I know you worked on them some already, but it looks like you may need to work on them some more. They look kind of blurry in some places, kind of jagged in other places. You will want to get them as smooth as possible. It's hard and a bit of a chore at first, but it's definitely worth it, it will make the map look much better as a whole.

Another thing I see is that your mountains aren't completely covering up the border lines. This one probably isn't as important, but you may want to move some of them just a hair or two south to completely cover that black line.

And one last thing I immediately see, you should probably come up with a better name than "More Ruins"...perhaps a certain type of ruins, or something else entirely.


Nice work so far! I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops.

[tkr4lf]

One more thing...I really like the look of the water! Very nice!

[Campin_Killer]

Hey, this version looks much better than the first one. I like the changes you've made.

One thing that pops out to me immediately is the borders. I know you worked on them some already, but it looks like you may need to work on them some more. They look kind of blurry in some places, kind of jagged in other places. You will want to get them as smooth as possible. It's hard and a bit of a chore at first, but it's definitely worth it, it will make the map look much better as a whole.

Another thing I see is that your mountains aren't completely covering up the border lines. This one probably isn't as important, but you may want to move some of them just a hair or two south to completely cover that black line.

And one last thing I immediately see, you should probably come up with a better name than "More Ruins"...perhaps a certain type of ruins, or something else entirely.


Nice work so far! I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops.

Yeah the borders can tend to be a general pain in the ass. I'm trying to get both the bonus borders and territory borders smoother, but I accidently jerk my mouse every-so-often using free select and it makes the bonus borders jagged and I have to start over. So that needs to be fixed. The territory borders I'm just drawing by hand (or mouse ) so I'll probably be redoing those in a bit.

More ruins was just a temp name, I was completely brain-dead on the topic of territory names at that point and just put that for the time being.

One more thing...I really like the look of the water! Very nice!

Thanks. My strongpoint...water

[tkr4lf]

Yeah the borders can tend to be a general pain in the ass. I'm trying to get both the bonus borders and territory borders smoother, but I accidently jerk my mouse every-so-often using free select and it makes the bonus borders jagged and I have to start over. So that needs to be fixed. The territory borders I'm just drawing by hand (or mouse ) so I'll probably be redoing those in a bit.

You should definitely take a look at Natty Dread's GIMP tutorial. When I first started, I also was trying to draw the borders by hand using a mouse...it's difficult, to say the least (as I'm sure you know!). A much better and easier way to do it is to use the paths tool. It makes it much easier to get smooth lines and generally eliminates the whole "jumpy mouse" thing. Natty elaborates on it in his tutorial. I think (?) it's in the second part of the tutorial, but I could be wrong. Koontz linked to both of them in one of his posts above.

More ruins was just a temp name, I was completely brain-dead on the topic of territory names at that point and just put that for the time being.

Fair enough.

[koontz1973]

Much better. Well done.

show: paths

Your colours are very bright. Is there a reason why these ones in particular?

koontz

[Campin_Killer]

To be honest, red is my favorite color, so I put that in there. As for blue, it was just something I thought should also go in there. I had to adjust the lightness on blue to make sure it wasn't too close to the sea color. The other colors I just played around with the spectrum and put in the ones I liked. I'll probably end up having to adjust the colors because it might be a disadvantage to colorblind people. I haven't run a Visicheck on it yet, though.

[koontz1973]

Do not worry about the CB tests yet. Everything will change between now and then.

[ManBungalow]

Hey, now here's an idea I really like.

Lots of work will have to be done, but that's to be expected.

The main problem I notice is how many regions are in each bonus relative to the total number of regions on the map.
Given any drop, it would be almost impossible to take an entire bonus.

There are lots of things you could do. I'd probably split the purple/red areas into smaller bonuses, but that's just me. Perhaps you could make a map inset of the Greek HQ in which you could capture regions in the city.

Also, there are some aspects of the battle which could be really cool if incorporated properly into this map. Perhaps you could have a series of 1-way attacks from the Persian side to attack the pass. Maybe you could split the pass into several regions...with the front line being a killer neutral...I'm not sure about that bit though.
At a stretch, you could think of a novel way to include the Ephors, who had a political power to remove (attack?) the Spartan king.

This could potentially be an exclusively 1 vs 1 map, but it's probably better not to be.

People here can offer you all sorts of graphics tips, but that will come later.

[Campin_Killer]

Version 1.7.5

Click image to enlarge.

Changes

• Faded the Spartan symbol out
• Redid the borders *although I did go over and too short, so I'll be cleaning that too*

Hey, now here's an idea I really like.

Lots of work will have to be done, but that's to be expected.

The main problem I notice is how many regions are in each bonus relative to the total number of regions on the map.
Given any drop, it would be almost impossible to take an entire bonus.

There are lots of things you could do. I'd probably split the purple/red areas into smaller bonuses, but that's just me. Perhaps you could make a map inset of the Greek HQ in which you could capture regions in the city.

Also, there are some aspects of the battle which could be really cool if incorporated properly into this map. Perhaps you could have a series of 1-way attacks from the Persian side to attack the pass. Maybe you could split the pass into several regions...with the front line being a killer neutral...I'm not sure about that bit though.
At a stretch, you could think of a novel way to include the Ephors, who had a political power to remove (attack?) the Spartan king.

This could potentially be an exclusively 1 vs 1 map, but it's probably better not to be.

People here can offer you all sorts of graphics tips, but that will come later.

As for the bonuses, I didn't even think about that when I put out the last version. I'll split purple and maybe red, I might leave it as the big bonus.

I like the idea of the one-way attacks for sure, and might have the last part of the pass as one-way attack routes into the Greek HQ, as that was how the battle went.

The point about the inner-HQ buildings, it could be done, but I am average pretty bad at drawing buildings. Overhead maybe, but....I'm not sure. I might play around with GIMP a little later.

If I did the Ephors of Sparta it might get out of whack then. Not only because of the Spartan warrior mindset but, years before the battle the Spartans had visited an Oracle at Delphi that allegedly told them that to save Sparta, a king must die for it. So I don't think they'd remove a king that was in battle. It just doesn't go with the map, in my opinion.

To-Do

• Split Mountain Pass bonus region
• Add 3-5 one-way attacks into Greek HQ
• Greek HQ Minimap? (possibly)
• Mountains at bottom (not happening if I do HQ minimap)

[ManBungalow]

Changes

• Faded the Spartan symbol out

Go to the layer with the lambda/Spartan symbol.

Choose the tool for 'selection by colour' (middle of the top row on this image - ignore the rest of that, it's just an image I found on google);



Select the white bit around the lambda.

Select -> Feather -> 2.5 (ish).

Delete.

This will get rid of the white box around the symbol.

=========

You could also go to the layers selection and change the mode from 'normal' to 'overlay'. See what it looks like, anyway.

[Campin_Killer]

v2

Click image to enlarge.

Changes

• Added Win Condition (Tentative)
• Split up Mountain Pass Bonus
• Added Inner Greek HQ map
• Took out the white around the symbol (thanks MB)
• Added one-way attack thru mountain pass
• Added army circles for clarity

Yes those are my buildings and, yes, they do suck. I can't exactly figure a way to put a building on there unless I copy and pasted a big tent and 2 other tents.

To-Do

• Clean up that ugly border with the end of the pass and Greek HQ
• Better Inner HQ buildings
• Clean up borders in general
• Should probably make the win condition clearer

On the topic of feedback, one question was nagging me.

Do you think I went overboard with the mountains?

[ManBungalow]

Okay, cool.

Yes those are my buildings and, yes, they do suck. I can't exactly figure a way to put a building on there unless I copy and pasted a big tent and 2 other tents.

Do you think I went overboard with the mountains?

One thing about pasting images from the internet...
...many things are copyrighted.
I don't think an organisation is going to come knocking for the sake of a picture of a tent - even if somebody did make a connection - but as a general rule of thumb, graphics on maps have to be original.
Maybe some cartographer could give some better guidance on this matter.

As for mountains, they can be dealt with later. I've never had a map quenched, but I know that a map has to have well-developed gameplay before proper progression can be made anywhere else. The buildings, too, can be developed later.

Oh, one other thing...I like the look of the water. How did you make it?

[Campin_Killer]

Overhead view of the Gulf (of Mexico) that my brother took when we were taking a helicopter tour of the area around Perdido Key. I put it above my sea layer and turned to opacity down to around 25.

[tkr4lf]

Overhead view of the Gulf (of Mexico) that my brother took when we were taking a helicopter tour of the area around Perdido Key. I put it above my sea layer and turned to opacity down to around 25.

That's awesome.



Some feedback for your latest version:
I like the changes you've made. The Greek HQ inset adds a nice touch. Is it necessary to hold all 3 terits of the inset as well as all 3 terits of the Greek HQ bonus area to receive the bonus?

I like that you broke up the bottom bonus into two different ones. I still think you should break up the Persian bonus into 2 smaller ones. As it is, it will be very difficult to hold that with how big it is. I also think you could probably fit a couple extra territories in there. Supply dump jumps out at me immediately as one that could be split into 2 or more territories. I say this because the map is pretty low on terit count as it is. I count 29 territories including the Greek HQ inset, but not including the 2 one-way assaults, since I assume those start neutral.

Again, love the water.

As for mountains, I don't personally think you went overboard, but perhaps others might. Like ManB said though, all of that can be worked out later.

It says that rivers are impassable, but it looks like there is a river between the Pass Entrance terit and the Rocky Wasteland terit, with no route. How do you get from one side to the other?

Overall, nice update. Looking forward to more!

[Campin_Killer]

Some feedback for your latest version:
I like the changes you've made. The Greek HQ inset adds a nice touch. Is it necessary to hold all 3 terits of the inset as well as all 3 terits of the Greek HQ bonus area to receive the bonus?
Yeah I gotta make that more clear in the key. But, yeah, it would require the holding of the pass, Greek HQ (inner & outer) and Persian Camp

I like that you broke up the bottom bonus into two different ones. I still think you should break up the Persian bonus into 2 smaller ones. As it is, it will be very difficult to hold that with how big it is. I also think you could probably fit a couple extra territories in there. Supply dump jumps out at me immediately as one that could be split into 2 or more territories. I say this because the map is pretty low on terit count as it is. I count 29 territories including the Greek HQ inset, but not including the 2 one-way assaults, since I assume those start neutral.
Yeah, I've probably given some territories too much room and will be working towards adding more territories in the next update. The Persian rear may be split into 2 different bonuses, but I'm on the fence right now as whether or not to split it.

Again, love the water.

As for mountains, I don't personally think you went overboard, but perhaps others might. Like ManB said though, all of that can be worked out later.

It says that rivers are impassable, but it looks like there is a river between the Pass Entrance terit and the Rocky Wasteland terit, with no route. How do you get from one side to the other?
I got too conservative, for lack of a better word, and was afraid of accidently overlapping the bonuses when I was using free select. Something else I need to fix in the next update

Overall, nice update. Looking forward to more!