Haha thanks! He was a quickie. But to punch him up you could add more colors, and really finesse the contour part, spend a bit more time blending or creating contrast and such.

For sure! If you got him that'd be fun to see the starting point. The more visual information you find at the outset the more stuff can be noodled. Or if the starting image has a very different look, you can also adjust opacity/saturation or add a quick contour to carve it out. It's nice to start larger, just cause it's easier to make out what's there and to apply transformations when it's bigger so you don't get too much fuzz.

One thing I forgot to mention, basic but which is helpful is to leave a little room to play when you set your canvas sizing. This can help later if you need to add a thicker contour or want to light the unit like with actual shadows, so you don't clip at the edge of the canvas.

To extend the canvas go to

Image tab > Canvas

Here you can clip or expand the transparency. You can also position where the new canvas will be by centering or dragging the rectangle in the mini. This is also a quick way to control your crops by using the px entered. To cut canvas away rather than extending.

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When you copy one image into another Layers at different sizes will show a yellow highlighted marquee where the edges are.

If you need to bring these back in line click

Layer > layer to image size

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When you paste something into your image click the floating selection in the layer menu on the lower right, and choose "To New Layer" from the drop down menu to give it a home. I mentioned that in the other guide, but it's a good one to remember. Otherwise the new thing will paste into the current layer.

Layers can be raised or lowered, in order, or have different adjustments made to them. To select the layers go to the menu at the bottom right and select the images with the eyeballs next to them. Doing this you can apply color to only one layer at time.

To get extra fancy you can search alpha channels and color masks, to see how using the eraser/paintbrush to slowly change from one color to another can be done. Basically the same way people would digitally colorize a BW photo, WW2 in color style. Although for our purposes with images that are smaller using the selection tool and colorize can get you pretty close to that with fewer steps, so that's why I thought it made sense to begin with that.

Oh and one other cool trick for units

Transform > Flip Horizontal

This is the way to quickly see if the image is going to carry facing the opposite direction. Sometimes if you're adding in stuff with drawing, if you goof a hand or a boot or whatever, you will be able to tell more easily by doing the flip. Like holding up a drawing in the mirror, the stuff jumps out where it's wonky when you invert hehe.

And finally one quick mention, but it has a bit more to do with the placement of the unit. Or like if you're trying to combine multiple units together into a single graphic I guess. When putting stuff together it's usually more visually appealing when shapes strike each other in particular ways. Here's a quick guide that describes what tangents are and how to avoid them. https://emptyeasel.com/2008/11/18/avoiding-tangents-9-visual-blunders-every-artist-should-watch-out-for/ For our purposes this would be stuff like where one unit clips into another and dismembers it, or where two shapes touch along an edge in an awkward way, crowding essentially. So having a little bit of canvas can help for that. Then when you're doing the unit place it's less likely for one shape to run into another in ways that create visual confusion or a sense of unease.

Similarly when you set up the placement, you can do stuff like having the infantry be lower down within a tile, so that the larger type units like a big bomber or giant tank won't challenge the sense of perspective as much. Basically so it looks like the infantry guy is standing closer to the viewer and the big stuff is more behind him.

Other stuff you can do for consistency is to make units of the same type at the same size or same rotation/tilt, or using abstract shapes to help organize the look. Or basically to choose one dimension along which the units will look similar and keep that consistent (say the hue range of the tint) but then to play up some other element for the differences. Like a painted on roundel to the fighter's wings or just showing the faces and hands of the infantry but otherwise having them dress to color. Kinda like picking a major color and then a safety color. That sort of stuff.

Ok second wind, last step

Run the Placement Picker

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If you're making a new map, or you want to do all your placements at a new size (new unit dimensions/Height), then you can use the Automatic Placement Finder, but this will redo all the placements.

For our purposes we just want to mess with the placements around the part we modded. So we'll go straight to Run the Placement Picker.

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It's going to ask you 3 prompt questions. Unit zoom (you can use 1 for the standard 100% unit zoom) and then Width and Height. This will define the default dimensions of the placement reticle you'll see in the UI.

Default will be 48x48px, but if your unit graphics are larger this is where you need to define that for the place. You can push up to 68x98px, but this will show some clipping in many of the UI windows. If you want the full image to display height of 54px width 70-80px range works pretty well. Finally it will say that a polgygon file was found and do you want to use it? Click Yes.

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Now it'll launch an image of your baseline

File > Load Placements

Navigate to your place.txt file

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Now click Edit > Show All Placements Made

Your screen will light up with all the tiny yellow rectangles at the dimensions you specified, wherever placements were made in v3.

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What we want to do is blank the placements associated with the Italy tile so we can add in a place for the new Southern Italy spot.

Left click on the map over Italy, when you click OK it will light up red with all the associated placements.

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Right click and it will begin removing placements. You'll notice the first time you click that the Red rectangle at the bottom of the boot will disappear

Control+Shift right click to save out the new placement for Italy.

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Now Control+Shift left click the newly blanked spot to add a placement for our new Territory.

Add another red square over Sicily

Control+Shift right click to save out the placement to Southern Italy.

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To change the direction of the overflow lines for placements go to Edit > Show overflow

this will show you which direction the units will spill when they run out of placements. It will be based off the last placement made , so in this case Sicily.

When you're building out the placements for spots you know will be crowded you leave gaps in the overflow area so units don't bunch up on top of the placements in a neighboring TT too hard.

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Then once you got it all set

File > Save placements

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Now when you close out of tripleA and relaunch your v3

You'll see that the fighter has moved from his old spot. Now he's into overflow position. Since our last placement for the Italy tile was Sardinia, he's over there now, with the line leading off to the right.

Southern Italy hasn't yet been assigned a home in the games XML so it'll still be showing white.

To get it looking the way it's supposed to now we need to open the v3 game xml and create some entries for our new spot. Open the xml in notepad.

In the Territory Name Definitions section we'll add...

<territory name="Southern Italy"/>

In the connections section we'll add...

<connection t1="14 Sea Zone" t2="Southern Italy"/>
<connection t1="Italy" t2="Southern Italy"/>

In territory attachments we'll add...

<attachment name="territoryAttachment" attachTo="Southern Italy" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.TerritoryAttachment" type="territory">
<option name="production" value="2"/>
</attachment>

And in Owner Initialized we'll add

<territoryOwner territory="Southern Italy" owner="Italians"/>

When you do all that, the next time you fire up TripleA you'll see Southern Italy under Italian control with a value of 2.

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Now we can add units to the tile within the game XML, and make sure that Italy's starting income matches the new addition, and that sort of stuff within the game file. Figure out what we want to do about Corsica and the like hehe.

One final step would be to noodle our labels and decorative stuff, and to make sure our new Tile also works with our Map Relief. But that'll have to be for another night.

If using WOPRs v3 relief, you should be fine at this stage, since that relief is semi transparent throughout you'll see the new baseline drawing beneath it. If your relief is more opaque or you want to show the baseline at 100% opacity, bring your baseline into GIMP along with your Relief, and use the trick described in the Map Relief guide to open a 1px border where your new line is.

Hopefully that helps a bit. If I think of anything else I try to add it in later, but that should at least get the ball rolling.

@black_elk It is an awsome work. Thank you so much. I've just uploaded the game on Github.

https://github.com/triplea-maps/axis_ascension

Update : fixed the capital input not appearing

@cernel Thx for sharing!

@beelee So for the first one:

<attachment name="triggerAttachment_Battleship_Ordered_to_Vichy_Port" attachTo="French" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.TriggerAttachment" type="player"> <option name="conditions" value="conditionAttachment_Axis_Conquer_All_France:Vichy_active:conditionAttachmentFrenchBB"/> <option name="chance" value="3:6"/> <option name="when" value="before:frenchCombatMove"/> <option name="uses" value="1"/> </attachment>

I believe uses only is used up if it actually fires (you hit the chance) so you can't use that for what you are trying to do. You instead need to have another trigger that does fire after this one (say during after:frenchCombatMove) which sets a condition to false which is used in your trigger. As you also mention, if it only happens on a certain turn(s) then you could use the turns parameter instead.

The second one looks correct except that if the BB would arrive before the 2 uses, it then fires once the BB leaves. So you would need to set a condition to be false once the BB returns so the notification doesn't show when it leaves.

Wikimedia has a lot of assets that can be used. Example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Castle_icons

@rogercooper said in Map Making Q&A:

@cernel I am using the term scenario from wargames. To me every entry on the load game screen is a scenario. To me "TripleA" is the game.

I'm not strongly against "scenario", but the term "game" (which TripleA already consistently uses) is just better for it. Whenever you change ANYTHING, you have a different game. It can be the scenario, like in V3, or it can be a rules-set change, like going from basic Revised to Revised LHTR (while the scenario remains the same). I would agree that different games within the same map make the most sense when you have different scenario for the same map (like in V3 or for the 1940 and 1942 scenarios of Global), but it is a fact (like it or not) that this is not the only case.

I can even make a variant of Classic in which the "only" difference is that armour defends at 4 (instead of 2): would you call that a different scenario? Guess not, but it is a different game.

The term "mod" (modification) is somewhat confusing as there is no base game in TripleA but I don't see a better one. In the Civ series, there is a base game and you can download mods that change the game in various ways.

Are you SURE that "mod" there stands for "modification"? It can stand for anything starting as "mod", can't it? Likely not "moderator" or "model" but maybe "module".

By the way, Vassal calls "modules" the type of things which TripleA calls "maps".

In the in-game downloader uses the term "Download Maps" which makes no sense, as what is being downloaded is more than a map.

I'm not seeing how "mod" is really better, however. I guess it should be called something like "package". I'm not sure what's a good name for it.

Anyway, the map is the main part of the skin, isn't it? It's like saying that the United States of America need to be renamed "United States of America and Oceania" to be 100% geopolitically correct.

@jkprince Your map is in the Github repository.