Conquer Club

Map Name:The Black Sea
Mapmaker(s): tkr4lf
Number of Territories: 71 for now (may be more when/if I add cities)
Special Features: none for now
What Makes This Map Worthy of Being Made: new location

Map Image:

Version 2:

show: Previous Versions

show: Pre-File Loss Versions

New to Version 2:
-Region names - Some of these will be changed soon, likely in the next version. I will also be changing some of the region borders. I will be striving to make the regions as accurate as possible. Expect this in the next update.
-Mini map added to legend - The bonus values on the mini map are tentative. Once I get impassables on the map, I can figure out proper bonus values.


To do:
Territory names
Sea Routes
Impassables
Mini Map
Fill out the legend
Better background for legend
Find a better map border than the black line
Add the cities back in (probably)
Probably some more stuff I can't think of right now


Feedback/Discussion wanted: - Still need some discussion on these issues...
Does this one look ok so far? Are the colors acceptable? I really liked the previous version better, but not much I can do about it. I can keep tweaking the colors, but they're pretty close to how they were. As long as people don't hate them, then I'll probably leave them be.

I'm going to abandon the victory condition idea. I don't think it really added much to the gameplay. Will anybody really miss it?

I am probably going to keep the cities. They will just function as either autodeploys or a +1 per 1 or 2. Is this something you guys would like to see? Or would you rather just see them scrapped and have this a straight up geographic map?

Instead of having the Black Sea be a killer neutral that assaults and is assaulted by every land region it touches, I think I'm going to have a killer neutral terit on the sea, and have 1 or 2 terits from each bonus region around it connect to it via sea routes. Does this sound like a better route to go, or did you like it better before?

Yeah, I actually think this is a really cool idea. It's an interesting selection of land you've picked here. It creates some cool shapes and features a lot of different cultures.

I think I could get behind this project, I like the idea. If you can get the graphics going, it looks like a fun map!


--Andy

looking good.

the most of cities by sea are also seaports. maybe they would be connected?

Oneyed

Or the black sea could be a killer neutral giving access between areas (killer neutral due to pollution).

either way shouldn't this been in the drafting room?

The Bison King wrote:either way shouldn't this been in the drafting room?

Yeah well, in case you haven't noticed, threads don't move very fast here... oh, if only we had a drafting room mod who would be invested enough in the foundry as to check all of the threads every day...

The Bison King wrote:Yeah, I actually think this is a really cool idea. It's an interesting selection of land you've picked here. It creates some cool shapes and features a lot of different cultures.

Cool, thanks. I was just browsing through maps seeing what looked fun to draw, and it popped out at me. Seemed like an interesting area for a CC game.

AndyDufresne wrote:I think I could get behind this project, I like the idea. If you can get the graphics going, it looks like a fun map!


--Andy

Thanks. I'll be trying, on the graphics front.

On that note, I've been searching for a way to make the water look more like water. Right now the texture I have on it doesn't really cut it. I haven't come across any good tutorials yet, as most of them seem to deal with water drops, not bodies of water. Anybody know any good tutorials for that sort of thing?

Oneyed wrote:looking good.

the most of cities by sea are also seaports. maybe they would be connected?

Oneyed

DJ Teflon wrote:Or the black sea could be a killer neutral giving access between areas (killer neutral due to pollution).

I'm not sure what I'm going to do in that area. My original thought was to have some sea route connections on the black sea, but I suppose it could get rather busy looking in that area if I have too many.

I like the killer neutral idea, but I'm not positive that it would work if the objective remains the same. Since capturing and holding the 10 cities around the black sea would result in victory, it seems almost too easy to have 1 terit separating them all. Seems like it would make the objective harder to only have a few connections on the black sea, so there aren't too many ways to get across, forcing you to hold more terits and be more powerful in order to make a grab at the objective.

Thoughts on this?

The Bison King wrote:either way shouldn't this been in the drafting room?

Eh, based on my track record with maps, it's probably better to wait until I actually get the full draft ready. Right now it doesn't meet the guidelines to be a draft. Let me get the rest of the work done (I may hold off on impassables, we'll see), then we can get it moved into drafts.

natty dread wrote:

The Bison King wrote:either way shouldn't this been in the drafting room?

Yeah well, in case you haven't noticed, threads don't move very fast here... oh, if only we had a drafting room mod who would be invested enough in the foundry as to check all of the threads every day...

Ha, I'm used to it.

Could be a cool theme! One thing I see straight away is that you'll have to make Adygeya much larger in order to fit in the army numbers.

Version 2:




New to version 2:
Finished up all of the city, terit, sea labels.
Added army circles.
Filled in the legend.
Gave the cities a drop shadow.
Adjusted the water texture a bit, I think it looks better than it did, but I'm still not satisfied with it.
Cropped out an extra 2 pixels of nothing that somehow got added to the bottom of the version 1 picture.
Adjusted some terit borders, got rid of a few terits, got rid of 1 city, Chisinau. It was just too small of an area to have labels for both the city and the region, so I just scrapped having a city in that bonus.

I decided to go with the Black Sea being a killer neutral, capable of assaulting any bordering land region. To fix the issue of that being a very easy way to capture all of the objective cities, I made it to where each city is inside of its territory. So you would have to assault the black sea, then say Crimea, then you could assault Sevastopol.




Some things I need to do for next update:
Fix the Rostov city/territory labels, I must have forgotten that one.
Add in impassables.
Add in sea routes (mainly for Aegean/Mediterranean Seas)
Adjust territory borders to ensure the army circles will fit. As gilipig pointed out, Adygeya will definitely have to be enlarged. A few of the terits in Greece and Georgia will have to be either enlarged or deleted/merged with other terits in order to ensure the numbers will fit.
Update continent bonus values after adding impassables. (This is a major one. Right now, the bonus values are all way too high, and rightfully so, since most of them would be nearly impossible to defend, given how open the map is currently. Once the impassables are in, the bonuses can be re-calculated.)
Drop the shadow around the land, and replace with an outer glow.
Fix the font. (Get rid of/adjust the drop shadow, change font to something a bit "cleaner" and less imposing, etc.)
Decide upon and implement all seas being playable terits. (If they will be, then no need for sea routes. If they won't be, then either remove or make less prominent the names of the various seas.)
Update the legend with suggested fixes.
Correct "Isle of Rhodes." Change to "Crete.


Some feedback I would like:
Does the water look better? I'm still not satisfied with it, so I would still be curious as to whether anybody knows of any good tutorials for making realistic looking bodies of water.
How readable is the font? Is it too dark? Too bold?
Are the borders clear enough? Do they look pixelated?
How is the placement for the army circles? Any issues anybody notices with those?
Will it be an issue with how I've handled cities/terits with the same name? As you can see, I named the region (e.g. Antalya) and then simply added (City) to the name for the city (e.g. Antalya (City)). Is that an acceptable solution or do I need to find a different name to use for those terits?
The cities...Do they look ok? I'm sure they will probably need to change eventually. An idea I had is to have one icon for the victory condition cities and one icon for the rest of the cities. Do you guys think that will be necessary, or is it clear enough which cities I'm referring to in regards to the victory condition?
Any other complaints, suggestions, issues I need to address, etc.?

Gillipig wrote:Could be a cool theme! One thing I see straight away is that you'll have to make Adygeya much larger in order to fit in the army numbers.

Thanks. You're right, it will need to be. A few others will need to be as well. Thanks for pointing it out!

Any other thoughts?

Anyone?

Continue on my son!! This is starting to look better. The water, well it looks like you use the cloud filter for it. Keep up the good work!!

isaiah40 wrote:Continue on my son!! This is starting to look better. The water, well it looks like you use the cloud filter for it. Keep up the good work!!

Yeah, it's the cloud filter with the solid noise sub thing. In version 1 I then went on to use the Ripple and Wave distorts over the Solid Noise, but it really didn't look so good. Then I just used the Solid Noise but checked the Turbulence box and I think it looks much better, still not so good.

Thanks for the support though!

I know natty can help you with that, since you're using gimp if I remember correctly.

MOVED into the Drafting Room!!

isaiah40 wrote:I know natty can help you with that, since you're using gimp if I remember correctly.

MOVED into the Drafting Room!!

Yup, still using GIMP.

And thanks for the move!

Isle of Rhodes in your map is Isle of Crete in reality.
will be also Aegean Sea, Sea of Azov and Sea of Mamara playable territories? because I can not see place for army numbers.
in legend, replace "Each" with symbol of city and delete part where is "city symbol = city".
each city lies in "its" region, but Rostov does not.
maybe some impassables would help.

Oneyed

Oneyed wrote:Isle of Rhodes in your map is Isle of Crete in reality.

Good catch. Not sure how I missed that. Thanks!

Oneyed wrote:will be also Aegean Sea, Sea of Azov and Sea of Mamara playable territories? because I can not see place for army numbers.

I hadn't planned on making them playable terits, but it's something I can look into. Anybody else think this would be a good idea as well?

Oneyed wrote:in legend, replace "Each" with symbol of city and delete part where is "city symbol = city".

Can do.

Oneyed wrote:each city lies in "its" region, but Rostov does not.

Yeah, I missed that one. I had it in my mind to go back and do it, but I had gotten busy with doing something else on the map, and completely forgot about it. It's in my list of things to do for the next update.

Oneyed wrote:maybe some impassables would help.

Oneyed

Impassables are in my list of things to do for the next update as well. They're pretty much a must for this map. Otherwise, the map is way too open and most of the bonuses will be almost impossible to hold.

Thanks for the input! Please keep coming back and commenting, I can use the extra eyes. Mine seem to miss things...

I'll be working on the next update tomorrow/this weekend, so expect an update before too long. It does take me a while to do things though, I'm kind of slow with it.

tkr4lf wrote:

Oneyed wrote:will be also Aegean Sea, Sea of Azov and Sea of Mamara playable territories? because I can not see place for army numbers.

I hadn't planned on making them playable terits, but it's something I can look into. Anybody else think this would be a good idea as well?

I just ask, because I saw sea names. if they will not be playable territories delete names or make them less visible.

Oneyed

I realy like you idea for this map, and Its a good start too.

personaly I think this would do good for graphics, dont use drop shadow on outer border for the land areas (looks confusing and flikers my eyes) use outer glow instead, make a copy of the border and put on outer glow and insert layer in middels of water and land.

Your font for territorys names, "strong" are to much when so many names are close together, try smooth or crisp, or non also here, drop shadow dont work, especialy when its not global, get rid of the shadow and try outer glow, or aleast tune down the shadow and give it some distance.

I love the colours your using, very nice, also the texture are nice. good work so far

Oneyed wrote:

tkr4lf wrote:

Oneyed wrote:will be also Aegean Sea, Sea of Azov and Sea of Mamara playable territories? because I can not see place for army numbers.

I hadn't planned on making them playable terits, but it's something I can look into. Anybody else think this would be a good idea as well?

I just ask, because I saw sea names. if they will not be playable territories delete names or make them less visible.

Oneyed

Ok, I can do that.

If I decide to make them playable, I can just make all sea terits killer neutrals able to assault all bordering land regions and all bordering seas. That would eliminate the need for sea routes, but it would also serve to make the map less open, especially in the Aegean/Mediterranean Seas, since I planned on having multiple sea routes, for example, From Laconia to both The Greek Isles and Crete, from The Greek Isles to Tekirdag, Republic of Cyrpus, etc.

Well, so I guess it would serve to close off the map a little by making only one assault route through the seas, but would open it up by making the seas able to assault any land region it borders.

I don't know, I'll have to think about which way works better with the current gameplay.

Flapcake wrote:I realy like you idea for this map, and Its a good start too.

Thanks!

Flapcake wrote:personaly I think this would do good for graphics, dont use drop shadow on outer border for the land areas (looks confusing and flikers my eyes) use outer glow instead, make a copy of the border and put on outer glow and insert layer in middels of water and land.

Ok, I can do that no problem.

Flapcake wrote:Your font for territorys names, "strong" are to much when so many names are close together, try smooth or crisp, or non also here, drop shadow dont work, especialy when its not global, get rid of the shadow and try outer glow, or aleast tune down the shadow and give it some distance.

Ah, thanks for this feedback. I was wondering how the font was being perceived. I really like the font I'm using for this map, it seems to go well. Luckily, there is a standard font and then the bold font, so I can switch from the bold to the standard for the terit labels and see if that looks better.

I can also mess around with the drop shadow for the font and see if I can't give it a little more distance. Or, it may look better the way it is when I switch from the bold font to the regular version of the font. As far as tuning the shadow down, it's already down to 50% opacity, I can set it down further if need be. But I'll wait and see how it looks with the skinnier font first.

Flapcake wrote:I love the colours your using, very nice, also the texture are nice. good work so far

Thanks! The color scheme is basically a rainbow, lol. It goes around the black sea, green to yellow, yellow to orange, orange to red, red to purple, purple to blue, blue to green.

Thanks for you feedback and support! Keep an eye out sometime this weekend for the next update.

Oh, also, I've updated the first post with new stuff for me to do for the next update, based on the feedback I've received so far.

Some more feedback I could still use:

Are the borders clear enough? Do they look pixelated?

How is the placement for the army circles? Any issues anybody notices with those? (Other than the obvious places where they don't fit without going over/under borders and names.)

Will it be an issue with how I've handled cities/terits with the same name? As you can see, I named the region (e.g. Antalya) and then simply added (City) to the name for the city (e.g. Antalya (City)). Is that an acceptable solution or do I need to find a different name to use for those terits?

The cities...Do they look ok? I'm sure they will probably need to change eventually. An idea I had is to have one icon for the victory condition cities and one icon for the rest of the cities. Do you guys think that will be necessary, or is it clear enough which cities I'm referring to in regards to the victory condition?

tkr4lf wrote:Some more feedback I could still use:

Are the borders clear enough? Do they look pixelated?

They do look pixelated, you'll probably need to eventually fix 'em up. In terms of actual border placement, some places seem often linear...like the bonus zones at the top of the map. Turkey's region look more natural. What did you use to base your borders on?

Will it be an issue with how I've handled cities/terits with the same name? As you can see, I named the region (e.g. Antalya) and then simply added (City) to the name for the city (e.g. Antalya (City)). Is that an acceptable solution or do I need to find a different name to use for those terits?

I'll let some of the more advanced Foundry folks comment on this, since I am not sure.

The cities...Do they look ok? I'm sure they will probably need to change eventually. An idea I had is to have one icon for the victory condition cities and one icon for the rest of the cities. Do you guys think that will be necessary, or is it clear enough which cities I'm referring to in regards to the victory condition?

I think you've probably got the right idea for the icon (a couple of buildings), but they'll probably have to evolve as the graphics get better.

I'll dig more into this map hopefully in another couple of days or a week or so!

Keep up the work,


--Andy

I really like this idea--both the area and the concept.

I think graphics will work themselves out over time and you have a good start, so nothing much to add there at the moment. I would suggest you're going to need a new, clearer font, but that might just be my personal taste. I also think the symbol for the city should (and eventually will) be more sophisticated.

For gameplay, a few questions/points:

1) Each city autodeploys +1 and gives a +1 bonus? I know there's a lot of territories on the map, but that seems like a lot. How are the cities going to start? Neutral 2? Regardless, I think the autodeploy is going to be more than enough and might even be too much already given how many cities there are on the map. Perhaps something more like Fractured America/China or the USA Map pack, where X number of cities equals a bonus.

2) Is the Black Sea as a killer neutral the best method to go about connecting the territories around the perimeter? What about making the cities on the Sea act as ports, which can attack each other? Just seems like using the Black Sea as a giant territory that appears to border at least 22 land territories is a recipe for disaster.

3) I think the victory condition is arbitrary and somewhat ambiguous. Why should the 10 cities "around" the Black Sea be worth more than the others? Plus, if you need to hold a specific 10 cities, I think they should look different than the other cities. I think I know which 10 you mean, but it would be much easier to make it visually clear. Regardless, I think a victory condition based on the cities might be too much here. I think this could work better if it were more like Fractured China/America or Nordic Countries, where the capitals are just part of the game.

4) Is there a Rostov and a Rostov city territory? It seems like something is omitted there.

5) I think that, in general, you're going to have to make the city names much more clear (perhaps a different font) and you're going to have to make it clear which territories that cities can attack. Can they only attack the territories that contain them? Can they attack adjacent territories to the territories found within? I think a very clear, more visually-pleasing legend is going to be an absolute must.