Middle Earth 256x256 FOR MODDERS NOT PLAYERS

[Erebras]

Hello, Civ III community. This is my first posting, and my first submission. With this project, I superimposed a square grid onto Tolkein's map of Middle Earth and created this map in CivEdit, square by square. The result is an extremely accurate and detailed map from Arnor to Harad to the lands of the Easterlings, Variags, and Wainriders. Very few liberties were taken. No cities have been placed, but where a settlement has been named, a fortress was placed there (to mark the spot); where a non-settlement site was noted (such as Morannon or Tharbad), ruins were placed there (to mark the spot); and where an outpost is on the map, it marks the site of a famous battle or was used as a reference point during map creation. Where liberties have been taken is on the far edges. The desert of Far Harad gives way to jungle (whence elephantine mumakil come), the northern clime consists of taiga (forest) rather than tundra (snowfield), and I used landmark terrain as a matter of aesthetics: landmark desert is more tan, so is more appropriate for The Brown Lands and Harad, whereas the default desert terrain is more whitish and ashy, perfect for the lands of Mordor. In the preview, you'll see that I used Pounder's Bayou Genre Marshes for the Dead Marshes.

A mod-creator could use this map pretty quickly for designing a scenario set in the Third or Fourth Age, and by me keeping it simple (not adding tribes, units, or other tweaks) the modder knows exactly what needs to be done to make it the Middle-Earth envisioned.

 

[Erebras]

Here is a preview of Gondor and Mordor.

 

[Erebras]

[Previews have been deleted from this post.]

 

[Erebras]

Poor resolution, I know, but it does show the extent of the map. Notice the orientation of the map: rather than a simple north-south oriented map, CivEdit's grid is more of a northeast-southwest, which can be a bit confusing or disorienting, I understand.

Post #6 below has a more detailed preview of the entire map.

 

[Mithadan]

Cool! Too bad the dev team from Lord of the Mods isn't active any more, but I'm sure it would be fairly easy to import this map into the mod and have a lot of fun with it!

By the way, I think you may have accidentally swapped the "Edoras" and "Helms Deep" labels there.

 

[Erebras]

And here is a full view of the area covered by this BIQ.

 

[Lord Malbeth]

This is really nifty. If I ever have enough time, I might change it up a bit and import my "Return of the Shadow" scenario over the top of it! I feel it has too much plains for my taste right now, but that's not a biggie.

I really like the unique "angle" you've created it from.

 

[Erebras]

Lord Malbeth, I've long considered doing a 4th Age mod. It seems very do-able. I made this map -- and I know it's gigantic -- just to get the spatial relationships right. From a game mechanics point of view, because there is a lot of flatland, I considered having the only terrain on which to build a settlement would be Hills. If you notice in LotR, nearly every city is built on a hill of some sort (Minas Tirith, Dol Amroth, Caras Galadhon, Michel Delving), so it would limit expansion and sprawl in this way. You could even place a hill in the Easterlings' and Variags' homelands at regular intervals so they could only build in certain locations. It seems like an acceptable workaround when so much of the map isn't ocean. Another option would be to just put up impassible landmark terrain and use only a portion of the map.

 

[timerover51]

I like the idea of using only Hills for cities, and that does go nicely with the whole LoTR series. I am not sure how you would handle the Underground cities of the Dwarves and Orcs, but those could be pre-positioned based on the books.

 

[Erebras]

Well, timerover, you're correct about preplacing the orcs and dwarves, of course, and if you want these settlements to look like mountain-towns on the map, simply rename a mountain terrain file (I recommend mountains-snow) as LM Hills and place the landmark hills on the map. It will look like mountains (which, unless you're trying to confuse a human player, is why you would use a snow-capped mountain graphic or one from, say, Winter Terrain) but the game will treat it as hills as far as the AI is concerned.

You can use this same technique to make mountain passes (someone else already did this elsewhere on this site in a mod), and I used it on this map to create the Dead Marshes (in the editor it comes up as landmark forest, but in-game it looks like dank and dark pools of water).

 

[timerover51]

Pounder has some good marsh terrain that could be used for the Dead Marshes as well.

 

[r16]

so ı go to Maps , the link leads here but nothing to see . Where do ı find the map , or Erebras took it down ?

 

[Balthasar]

Sorry r16, it looks like Ebrebras took everything with him...

 

[r16]

bad , he had cool stuff ı could have used , only if ı could start . Thanks for the reply .