Something for the Pacific Tile Set - 2

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I noticed it takes awhile for the pages to load up. So I'm continuing in a new post.


This is the last time I can use the painting tool that allows me to specify an elevation band to globally lay down a tile on all of the terrain. I've painted from 200ft - 25,000ft now and the islands when I sculpt them will be hand painted. So these ridges have that sharp course look of volcanic rock and are almost completely covered with palms and jungle like islands get over grown in the Pacific.


Look at all of that green, 8 hours to cut all of the steps into canyons, 5 minutes to run the paint tool by elevation bands. There is the ability to set the brush from 25%-100% which acts like an air brush for blending. Some blending is better done setting the brush to a very tiny diameter and rapidly working over the area in strokes which gives you a different randomizing effect. When I eventually play down the HQ\city\strats\AA bases\Uncapturable airfeilds, I will have to rework the painting in that area because players will get up close to the terrain there.

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One of the things you have to come to grips with is scale. The smallest brush is 1\8 of a mile in diameter, so you can only do so much to create the "illusion" of a real world. At some point you have to just stop doodling in the small stuff no matter how good you think you can get it. Most players won't care, and most players will only ever see your fine scale work in the 6 mile diameter around each field. Still, when they are flying over the large scale of the world, if it looks clunky, it looks clunky. One of the reasons you have to fly around every base looking out to maximum distance along with right under your plane. If it dosen't look right, it dosen't look right.

A bit of doodling, mostly because I'm avoiding something I have to sit down and do for the whole terrain outside of the terrain editor before I can start sculpting the islands.

[bustr]

I hate this part, setting up the fields, then I hate just as much setting up the GV spawns.

The land mass shape and rules for minimum distances between feilds mostly dictate how bases will be positioned. Then there is some lee way like strat placement, Vbases and ports. Also the total number of fields that can be captured for each country. 20% of say 117 capture able feilds, CV\BB and ports, airfeilds, and Vbases comes to 23 or 24 feilds.

Right now I have the total number of feilds down to 74 which 20% is 14 to 15 feilds. With our current community average nightly numbers, 14-15 feilds can keep a map around for a long time. A long time is a double edged sword if the terrain cannot engage activity out of small numbers. Unlike the good old days of 400 a night and massive hoards rolling bases, back then you designed a map to impede a hoard and the challenge created activity. Today with smaller numbers you have to encourage the numbers to create activity.

I'm basing 74 capture able feilds on being able to assign a CV and BB to each of the 5 ports and no Vbases on any island. Vbases are an interesting strategy you use to slow down a hoard by keeping a threat of M3 resupplying a reality, or using the Vbase to create a distance buffer between airfields to string out groups from effectively acting in concert against targets say 1.5-2 sector away versus 1 or .75 away. Having multiple GV hangers maintains an irritating persistence which can ultimately stop reginal base captures or even stall an initiative. Everyone has watched a Vbase take an irritatingly long time to be captured when it should have been flattened by a box of lancasters and the troops run in. And everyone has watched your country's air combat evening go to poop because half your country population decided to sit in tanks for the rest of the night at a Vbase.

Honestly I can see a minimum of 7 locations for Vbases as strategic linchpins to 4 of the islands. 20% of 81 is.....16 bases for the war win. It's all fun and games until someone gets bored.......  Hmmmmm, and two more flak bases.....

Did I mention how much I hate designing GV spawn flows, my own squad mates have questioned my choices of base placements or spawns or other objects on my first terrain because it didn't seem like an advantage for them. Even members of the country I was in questioned my decisions for the same reason. But, there is lots of "activity" on that terrain......
 
I'm showing two views, one without the sector lines and one with for perspective. The island formations in the two other countries are mirrors of this country rotated 120 degrees. I still have to add field type abbreviations and spawns before rotating a copy of this 120 for the other countries. Then number every single airfield, port-CV\BB, Vbase, Flak base. Thennnnn, I can get back to sculpting all of the islands by hand....

 

Red-strats, blue-flak base, yellow-port, orange-airfield.

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Let's hope Hitech's comment concerning advertisement increases the community numbers.

The addition of 8 vBases balances the proportions. I added two additional flak bases to support the Radar and Troop factories.

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I've reduced the number of bases by a few, and made the vBases have more of a purpose in a Pacific themed arena, spawning to the ports. I probably should use the large vBase object for the vBases on this terrain since they are harder to capture. In the Pacific resupply was performed as much by sea and air as it was locally by land. So the strats as I've positioned them are now air targets for the most part, so c47's will be used to supply them. The orange dots near the HQ are super large airfields. I'm still mulling over the GV spawn direction flow through the country.

I've noticed over the years some segments of the community want new terrains like everyone else. Then scream bloody murder if you don't replicate how they poke the other guys in the eye from one boring base and strat combination to another, terrain after terrain after terrain. At least on this terrain each country will have 10 task groups to get into trouble with.....

[bustr]

Country-1 updated with airfield types, Vbases, ports and strats in the master blueprint multi-layer art file. Now I just duplicate this to Country-2 and Country-3 in yellow and orange. Still have the GV spawns to consider. That medium field in the center will be duplicated around that spoke, I see a three way spawn out side of the town for each medium field just to give the tank guys something like the V85 fight from one of the old maps. This being islands made by volcanic activity like many in the Pacific Solomons region, I can experiment with some features while working at keeping the tank eating trees from being a spawn nightmare.....

[bustr]

Creating the 1:1 blueprint so I can layout my terrain\bases\spawns is a bite. Especially bases, numbering and GV spawns. It's a given on a Pacific themed terrain with 10 task groups per side, any base on the water will have shore batteries and PT spawns. The GV spawns have to be mapped out so you can see the flow to invading and defending\resupply.

I decided to play with the map center and do a three way spawn area at each medium airfield. GVers like elevation over looking things, so I can play with the volcanic terrain to give the three spawn points some separated elevation on ledges to snipe at each other, with runs down to the town. It quickly gets frustrating for the air combat guys if the elevations allow a single tank to take down an airfield, then run down a slope at 100mph and suddenly camp the runways. The palms in the Pacific terrain tile set hide GVs from the air almost to well for defending a town or airfield with a tank attacker. I'll do something with that to make attacking the town worth the risk of getting bombed.

It's all a balancing act to provide activity for the different types of game play.


Overview to see all of the spawn paths.





Closeup of one country.

[bustr]

The bulldozer tool can be used to pull ramps, cut troughs through things and create the spine for a mountain line.

You will run into having a mountain line you want to lay down longer than a sector which is all the work space will let you see to work on. I wanted a mountain line with a 3000ft spine down the center of a long island. So I used the elevation tool and put down 3000ft tall cylinders which I then pulled the bulldozer between which created a long line 3mile wide 3000ft tall.

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Then I pulled tiny ramps off the sides and ends of the spine. Oh, I narrowed the spine by 1mile on each side, the last post 3miles was just to show up well in the screen shot. so with a 1mile wide 3000ft tall spine, I pulled 1mile wide ramps all around a segment of the mountain line on the island.


You will have to play with the smoothing tool and the raise\lower hill tool to get the hang of mixing the two to blend together rough block shapes, then cut them a bit leaner into your finished mountain, or canyon, or cliff, or whatever you dream up.

Turning it into a volcanic mountain line segment.





Pulling the ridges and canyons with the bulldozer tool.





Sometimes you have to change the tile to get a better contrast to see what you are cutting.





The finished volcanic mountain line. I used a 50% blending with the brush to blend the two tile types. Here is where perspective in the terrain editor will bite you. That mountain segment is 3000ft tall, looks wayyyyy too low. Stick to using the y-axis elevation guide, not the scewed visual perspective of being 50,000-70,000ft above the landscape as you create your features. The size of the polygons in the overall mesh limits your smallest size of a canyon to what you see. Any smaller and trying to cut into the surface only produces holes.

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My first 3000ft volcanic island mountain line is clunky, I'll have to revisit it and put it on a diet. It is the island below the one I've pulled screen shots from on the clip board map.

But, this is an area of the terrain that will have no bases, so I'm working on it to learn more about the terrain tiles and how they work together. And I'm refining my sculpting techniques to standardize them so I can quickly build the foundation passes, then sculpt and finish. I've found that a tool pass along the ridge line center with a 1.5mile wide brush using the raise hill tool set at 2000, pulls together the runoff canyons and the ridge line at the tops. You only need a few moments and a steady line pull. Do 3 to 4 segments with small gaps for a random look. I applied the light brown volcanic rock tile to those higher segments.

Except for coral atolls, most natural sand beaches on average reach maybe 1\4 mile inland between low tide. I tried to keep that in mind building the beach areas. Some number of our terrains have beaches of several miles on almost every shore on the terrain. These beaches in the screen shots were created with the elevation terrain tile paint tool by choosing the elevation band of -10ft to 9ft. I was careful to run a 1.5 mile wide brush setting the elevation from the water inland to 25ft. Then I ran a smoothing brush of 3mile diameter over the area. You have no control over the "make beach" tool and how much land it will add or subtract to make your beaches. Not every where an island touches water has a sand beach if the island has mountains. I've experienced the "make beach" tool destroy the ocean face of cliffs to build a beach at the cliff's base.

A finished island in the group I'm working with.

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Yeppers, all it needed was a diet and a ridge line lift.

Before:




After:

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I think I'm getting this island thing now....

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About 40 minutes of work after using the first two islands as prototypes to get the techniques down. I now have several looks for volcanic ridge lines and runoff canyons.





You can see the three islands, I cut them out of the single long strip. I cut the passages through them to take away some of the blind spot the continuous island would give to a task force.