Dale and bustr out here I hijacking threads 
Just figured I'd share the wonderfulness of the fact that everyone is qualified to build a terrain with no experience what so ever. All I did was open the program and started pushing buttons to see what broke. There are a number of ways to do it, and to enumerate them.
1. - This is how I created my first ever MA terrain.
Manually lay down large swaths of land with a 6 mile diameter brush on a 250,000 square mile(4096x4096 pixel) project space. I did that and it took me a month to get the gross land masses laid down and another month nibbling away the edges, while creating a new clip board map each time to check the results. It took another month to sculpt the finished terrain features, then a month to paint the thing. The rest of the time was tied up in laying done bases and spawns, then testing the whole assumption called the terrain. Fortunately those months of practice made the changes to the terrain that Hitech wanted take about 7 days. And adding the battleships only a few more days.
2. - This is what I've been posting the latest screen captures of to kill time waiting for my temporary license from L3DT.
Create a PNG format heightmap in grayscale as a 4096x4096 art file. Massage it, then convert it to raw format, then import it into the terrain editor. Then create a clip board map to see how that turned out. Then probably massage the PNG file numerous more times. And generate clip board maps to check out your work. You can actually create the whole thing as a JPEG 4096x4096 file then convert that to a grayscale PNG file. I work faster in a JPEG art program called Paint.Net than I do in one called Krita where I do the conversion to PNG. It's probably because I used Paint.Net to create my gunsights all of these years.
3. - This is the preferred method as recommended by Hitech.
Go to the L3DT webpage and submit a request for a temporary 90 day license to review the professional version of L3DT. It is an editor similar to the AH3 terrain editor in which you can create your 3D terrain and export it as a heightmap which imported into the terrain editor will produce a stunning MA terrain. Then you navigate it to perform touch ups, paint it and set in place all of your bases, fleets and spawns. A single license for L3DT is about $35 if you decide you like it.
Hijacking, naw, just trying to get you gents to stop whizzing at each other over ridiculous BS. If you want a terrain that does everything you want in the MA, fire up the terrain editor and create it like I did. Unless you "pay someone" to do exactly what you want, they will always build their terrain to make themselves happy playing on it in the MA.
