Arizona: My first attempt at a map, suggestions PLEASE!!!!!!

[Mr_Adams]

This is a very very rough sketch of A final map.



just a general idea, good for a quick 2-3 player rt, like doodle earth =)
not sure what other fetures there will be

Edit: Oh man, I left the "v" out of my own county's name!!!

[Mr_Adams]

here it is so far

I want to get the map completely done before starting the asthetic stuff. I'm thinking a nice sand colored background or getting a picture of the grandcanyon to paste it on.

[Qwert]

If i count good you have only 15 terittory.

[RjBeals]

Whats that huge white space to the right? And the font needs to be changed.

[gimil]

If i count good you have only 15 terittory.

correct, i count 15 as well.

[Qwert]

What is point of these map,people want to enjoy when play,and dont want to start and finish same day.

[Mr_Adams]

What is point of these map,people want to enjoy when play,and dont want to start and finish same day.

ever heard of rt?

and the white space is for the bonus chart and title, ect.

yes Arizona does have 15 countys

[RjBeals]

Interesting territory shapes - good color scheme. Keep working on it.

[Mr_Adams]

Interesting territory shapes - good color scheme. Keep working on it.

The shapes are the actual countys in Arizona (I live in Mohave)

[edbeard]

Well honestly you're going to have to do TONS of work to get this thing going in the right direction. All of this is just my opinion, but a few things that I think almost everyone would agree are needed.

1. Borders. They're very inconsistent. They need to be uniform all around.

2. Labels. For the territories they're pretty much different in each bonus region. Again. Needs to be uniform.


Here are some things that can be debated and thought about

1. graphics. something needs to pop here. I'm not sure what, but something this plain and simple just doesn't work. It needs something to say ARIZONA.

2. Gameplay. I know you say you want another Doodle Earth type, but honestly that will be very tough for you to do. Doodle Earth's development took months and this one will be no different.

Furthermore, I'm not sure if 15 territories will work as Doodle has 18. I don't see why this is a good candidate for such a minimap. Even something with 35 territories or so would be a huge improvement.

My ideas for improved gameplay.

1. Since there are so few counties here, leaving them could work. But, you will need other areas to serve as territories.

a. cities
b. major highways
c. stadiums and/or major landmarks

I think some type of combination could work where counties can attack cities and highways serve as direct routes from city to city. you could have bonuses for holding a certain number of cities or something.



what I think is important for you to do now

1. go back and redraw what you have. better to do it now while things are still simple. (I hope you're using Photoshop or GIMP and not Paint (it looks like paint to me))

2. figure out what else (in terms of territories you will add to the map). If you go by the city idea, take a look at the Battle for Iraq! thread and see how that developed.

3. Try out some of the tutorials in the main forum for map making. Mibi had a thread somewhere where he drew an island and all sorts of stuff (he hosted a video on youtube or something). That could be a good source of learning how to use the program (though I don't know if he ever added an audio file to it)

edit: I guess you said you were going to add artistic stuff later so maybe you are using a good program and do know what you're doing. But, I think the gameplay changes are needed.

[Mr_Adams]

Well honestly you're going to have to do TONS of work to get this thing going in the right direction. All of this is just my opinion, but a few things that I think almost everyone would agree are needed.

1. Borders. They're very inconsistent. They need to be uniform all around.

2. Labels. For the territories they're pretty much different in each bonus region. Again. Needs to be uniform.


Here are some things that can be debated and thought about

1. graphics. something needs to pop here. I'm not sure what, but something this plain and simple just doesn't work. It needs something to say ARIZONA.

2. Gameplay. I know you say you want another Doodle Earth type, but honestly that will be very tough for you to do. Doodle Earth's development took months and this one will be no different.

Furthermore, I'm not sure if 15 territories will work as Doodle has 18. I don't see why this is a good candidate for such a minimap. Even something with 35 territories or so would be a huge improvement.

My ideas for improved gameplay.

1. Since there are so few counties here, leaving them could work. But, you will need other areas to serve as territories.

a. cities
b. major highways
c. stadiums and/or major landmarks

I think some type of combination could work where counties can attack cities and highways serve as direct routes from city to city. you could have bonuses for holding a certain number of cities or something.



what I think is important for you to do now

1. go back and redraw what you have. better to do it now while things are still simple. (I hope you're using Photoshop or GIMP and not Paint (it looks like paint to me))

2. figure out what else (in terms of territories you will add to the map). If you go by the city idea, take a look at the Battle for Iraq! thread and see how that developed.

3. Try out some of the tutorials in the main forum for map making. Mibi had a thread somewhere where he drew an island and all sorts of stuff (he hosted a video on youtube or something). That could be a good source of learning how to use the program (though I don't know if he ever added an audio file to it)

edit: I guess you said you were going to add artistic stuff later so maybe you are using a good program and do know what you're doing. But, I think the gameplay changes are needed.

Wow, thanks for taking your time to help a map Newbie to such extents!!

As for the progrm I'm using, it's called Photo Forge, but I'm looking into photshop to replace it. I like the cities and highways ideas, but as for stadiums, the B.O.B. (Bank One BallPark, or as they call it now "Chase field" although the TRUE fans still call it Bob, but thats all off topic) and "Jobing.com Arena" (what a gay name!!) are in the capital city Phoenix, and would be completely pointless, to close to be seperate terrs.
I will post my next map update tomorow, but the only additions are a background color and a terr. name I forgot to put on here.(oops)

[oaktown]

you are going to have trouble getting support for this map. I've seen probably a dozen attempts at US state maps and they generally die a quick death for the following reasons:
1. just because a region has borders and a name doesn't make it a good play area, and
2. very few people care about such maps them beyond folks who actually live in that state.

I have family in Tempe so I spend plenty of time in AZ, yet the idea of such a map doesn't excite me. Meanwhile New York and California both have far more inhabitants than Arizona, yet both maps keep crashing and burning because they can't get support.

If you're going to continue with this, you really need to make it special: don't just give us a five-sided shape with some territories which are meaningless to most of us (which, I'm sorry to say, is what Arizona is); figure out what makes the state interesting. Give us some southwestern flavor - cacti, canyons, buttes, tribal somethings, etc.

[Mr_Adams]

what about if i added citys as more terrs. and then had cities conected by roads? roads wouldn't be terrs. they would be able to attack other cities though. ex: a city in Cochise could attack a city in Mohave, as long as there are are no cities on the road between them not owned by the attacker. This idea would allow you to attack a city from another city as long as you own all cities on the road between them. I'll show with a picture below, and see people's reactions



Note: Just an idea, not even saved on my computer.



So the city in Mohave can attack the city in Gila, because red owns the own city that stand in the way, but Gila cannot go through the city in Yavapia, because it is owned by Red.

Cities would be seperat terrs. from the counties, and there would be fewer roads if I were to complete it. I just kinda threw some random lines in to represent the roads

Edit: Only the the cities could attack this way.

[The Weird One]

that makes it look too busy

[The Weird One]

ok. . .two suggestions

1.) maybe use either something that isn't that thick or something lighter for the roads

2.) If you're trying to expand the # of territories, one way you could do this would be to put multiple cities in each county

[Mr_Adams]

this gives 30 terrs. each city is seperate from the county, cities can attack any other city that can be reached by road, and the county they are part of. once again, this is nothing close to what a finished product would look like, I'm thinking a D-back's logo on top right corner, Sun's logo on th bottom left corner, and Cyote's logo on the bottom right. Then a bonus chart in the top left corner. (these are all refering to the blank area on the right side.)

[Kaplowitz]

terit borders rae just circles for some of them. The army dots are inconsistent, the gfx are done in paint? those arent the CC army numbers, the font is not all the same, there are only three continents (each of them are hard to hold)

[Mr_Adams]

terit borders rae just circles for some of them. The army dots are inconsistent, the gfx are done in paint? those arent the CC army numbers, the font is not all the same, there are only three continents (each of them are hard to hold)

Doesn't ANYBODY read at least the first page of a post before critiquing?!? This is just an idea example!!! I'll start on the real deal when I get photo shop (which should be soon!!!) gosh!!!

[RjBeals]

calm down napoleon. If you're not familiar with the foundry, it can be a little harsh in here. People expect to see something decent for an idea. We've seen way too many ideas with bad graphics drop into the black hole. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but your map looks like it was done in about 5 minutes in mspaint. I know it's an idea, and you will work on graphics once you get some details worked out, but you need to expect (and prepare for) the negative posts.

Download the free trial of Photoshop good for 30 days.
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/inde ... =photoshop

Learn the basics..
1) Learn how to use layers. It's the very core foundation of map building.
2) Learn to use the brush with a 1, 2 or 3 pixel stroke. It will keep your borders smooth and not pixilated.
3) Keep a small, clean & crisp (and consistent) font for names.

That should take you a few days of playing around. Read the forum for some tips, but most of all use google for tutorials & play around yourself. If you need help, post here and you'll get help within a few minutes.

Good Luck

[RjBeals]

Also fix the 2 typo's in your thread title.

Arizona: My first atempt at a map, sugestions PLEASE!!!!!!!!

Arizona: My first attempt at a map, suggestions PLEASE!!!!!!

[HAWK79]

maybe you could go through and give each county to or three cities and give a bonus for accquiring all cities in a county also maybe add rivers or lakes as unpassibles

[Incandenza]

So there's something to this concept.

I rather like the idea of having cities inside the territories, and the added wrinkle of being able to attack two cities away, as long as you hold the city in the middle, could make for some interesting strategic situations. The layout of the freeways would have to be worked out (and worked out exhaustively).

Like oaktown cautioned, maps of smaller regions tend to be hard sells. However, there are a lot of excellent examples of smaller regions. More to the point, I would wager that of all the people on this site that have played on the Cairns Coral Coast map, the only one's that's actually ever been there is the bloke who made it. If you have a great design for the map, you can make any region work. A desert theme, with a lot of warm colors and a killer sand texture, would work nicely for arizona.

But yeah. Hone your graphics skills. And have a look at some other map threads, if only to give you some realistic expectations of how the foundry works.

[Mr_Adams]

So there's something to this concept.

Like oaktown cautioned, maps of smaller regions tend to be hard sells. However, there are a lot of excellent examples of smaller regions. More to the point, I would wager that of all the people on this site that have played on the Cairns Coral Coast map, the only one's that's actually ever been there is the bloke who made it. If you have a great design for the map, you can make any region work. A desert theme, with a lot of warm colors and a killer sand texture, would work nicely for arizona.

As for the sand texture background, that was one of my ideas from the start, the only problem is, I can't figure out how to make it... I use Inkscape, just got it to. If anybody knows how to make textures with this progrm, please tell me!!!

[edbeard]

I think you need to worry about redoing all the borders first.

Get that done because it's very important. It's the foundation for the rest of the map.

Also, you just drew lines around the map. Are these actual main highways? Maybe show us a map that you're using?

[Mr_Adams]

nonono, those lines were just examples, not actual highways, just random lines to represent the idea.

and I still need to find some kind of filler tool for inkscape, like paint can in ms paint.