Improved Mesoamerican Conquest

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

That Moche unit I am eagerly awaiting with ancipation Shiro. He'll find a welcome place in the Improved Mesoamerican Conquest. Thankyou.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

Shiro heres that pallette you needed:

 

[DJ Bonebraker]

Its too bad I can't convert AoE III units.... They have a great Zapotec Lightning warrior, Maya Holcans, plus, with the Warchiefs expansion, they have a whole SLEW of aztec units.... I COULD possibly get some ss of the Maya (minor tribe) villages and Aztec towns and do some C&P work to make them Civ III compliant.... I'm telling you, even though AoE III is totally 3d like Civ IV, they did a beautiful job with the modelling and textureing... Which, considering that AoeIII can have battles involving up to about 1600 units (not to mention fully animated terrain features and water) and still run realatively smooth, it makes me even more ticked off at Firaxis for doing such a horrible job with a turn-based game that doesn't have near as many units active at one time.....

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

I'd appreciate some Aztec buildings if possible HT, that would be great. Yeah in Civ4 I've yet to see a large amount of units on field at once, have the game, play it occasionally, but I will never like it like I like Civ3.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

Its too bad I can't convert AoE III units.... They have a great Zapotec Lightning warrior, Maya Holcans, plus, with the Warchiefs expansion, they have a whole SLEW of aztec units.... I COULD possibly get some ss of the Maya (minor tribe) villages and Aztec towns and do some C&P work to make them Civ III compliant.... I'm telling you, even though AoE III is totally 3d like Civ IV, they did a beautiful job with the modelling and textureing... Which, considering that AoeIII can have battles involving up to about 1600 units (not to mention fully animated terrain features and water) and still run realatively smooth, it makes me even more ticked off at Firaxis for doing such a horrible job with a turn-based game that doesn't have near as many units active at one time.....

Diffinitely be interested in some Aztec buildings if its not to stressful for you.

 

[Blue Monkey]

SoG, here's an Incan-related tech, and probably a wonder for you. You can probably adapt one of the images from the article for Icon purposes.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

Thankyou Blue Monkey interesting website...

 

[Blue Monkey]

The map is a little delayed. A friend was mugged and then in the hospital for a subsequent operation. I've been spending time with him. But I'm still working on it.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

I understand. There are evil people in this world. I would know, i've seen it first hand. Hope your friend gets better.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Well, this took far longer than I anticipated, or promised. Here is a map for your approval. This is the (1) crop of Singer's map, (2) filtered through MapTweaker to get a screenshot with a workable palette, (3) to clean up in a paint program, edit color table and depth, rescale and then (4) shoot through BMPtoBIC and finally (5) clean up in the civ editor. I thought I could save time this way, but it's almost more trouble than it's worth. I'd rather build a map from scratch as I did for Rise of Asia.

It's still minus rivers, and there's a lot of tweaking to do to mix terrain types more realistically. Before I get into the next layer of detail I want to hear that it's ok as to size, extent, and proportion.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/61142/MesoAm1.biq

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

I'd say make mexico bigger, but take out the rest of N. America, minus where N.Mexico and Texas states are(I'll explain that later). But otherwise a very terrific job and I think its almost there Blue. Almost.

 

[Blue Monkey]

I'd say make mexico bigger, but take out the rest of N. America, minus where N.Mexico and Texas states are(I'll explain that later). But otherwise a very terrific job and I think its almost there Blue. Almost.

I've got bitmaps with the proper palette now, so I can easily trim and resize. Alternatively, I can cut and paste, in the process resizing one part. The overall image is limited to a max. of 256x256 (and must be square) in order to work in BMPtoBIC.

The labelled images illustrate what I can do easily at this point. Ignore the speckled look of the oceans; that gets cleaned up before I get to the finished map.

A is the raw bitmap that was processed in BMPtoBIC. E is a bitmap approximation of what you’ve got in-game now as a result. The distortion between the two is a result of going from square pixels to the shape of tiles in-game.

B shows the horizontal red line that is about where I think you want the cut. The vertical red is some excess ocean your cut would let us trim on the left edge of the map.

C shows two more cuts I would propose: trimming some of the right edge of South America (mostly Amazonian jungle) and a bit (mostly hills) from the bottom.

Those four cuts would give us D. I’d add some dark blue like in A to make it square: ready for BMPtoBIC. The in-game result would look like F which is shown at the same scale as E: giving you a much larger Mexico without distorting the relative size of the rest of the map. If you do want Mexico outsized, I can cut, resize and paste.

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Edit: The Lesser Antilles can be reinserted (CnP) on the right map edge; a slight distortion of location, but preserving the sea route through the Caribbean, if you want it.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

Yes mexico should be oversized you have the right idea, E and F are the winners mon(sorry I couldn't help but insert a jamaican accent here). Thanks for your work Blue. I really appreciate it.

 

[Blue Monkey]

I guess I wasn't completely clear. E is the map/BIQ you've already got now. I can give you

(1) straight F (fastest to do since I've already got the BMP), or
(2) Some variation of Mexico F grafted onto South America E; realistically, only about an hour's more work than the first choice, since it's just an extra step of CnP using two BMPs who's palettes already match.

Just let me know which choice you want me to churn out next.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

F but with an even bigger Mexico would work I think.

 

[Keroro]

With F it looks like you could push Mexico out into the Pacific a little, to provide a bit more space before you begin the task of cleaning up. It would be better (IMO) to do this than to stretch the map any further or expand it into the Carribean Sea, since that area already looks a little cramped.

The basic proportions of the map look great though.

 

[Blue Monkey]

F but with an even bigger Mexico would work I think.

With F it looks like you could push Mexico out into the Pacific a little, to provide a bit more space before you begin the task of cleaning up. It would be better (IMO) to do this than to stretch the map any further or expand it into the Carribean Sea, since that area already looks a little cramped.

The basic proportions of the map look great though.

With this technique (BMPtoBIC) I'm limited to maps 256 tiles across. I'll see later tonight if there's a way to cut and paste in Map Tweaker to get something even bigger.

Sword, I wish I had a clear sense of how much of South America and the Caribbean I can cut away to enlarge Mexico without distorting the proportions. Already in F we're only seeing half of the Incan Empire.

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For example, if I lopped these pieces off and enlarged to the 256 max to give you a bigger Mexico, is that what you want? Remember that in these images a single pixel is a map tile. Also I can repaste smaller version of Cuba, Hispaniola, and the other Caribbean Islands so they would still be included.
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If you only want a really token South America, Mexico can get really big.

Here's an image for you. Scribble some big fat red lines to show roughly what we can lose, and repost it. If we stick with this BMPtoBIC / Map Tweaker technique I can produce newly resized / cropped maps fairly quickly (hours rather than days). But I have to work within the 256 tile limit.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/61142/MapToCut.jpg

I'm bugging you with so many questions up front because If I know what you want by late tonight I can have a new and hopefully satisfactory map/BIQ for you by tomorrow night.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Here's a very rough cut and paste I did this morning in about an hour. The image on the left is the max 256x256 allowed by BMPtoBIC; on the right is the equivalent in-game proportions.
Things to observe:
(1) Mexico is as big as it can get and stay in proportion to itself. A bit of the North edge was cropped off prior to enlargement.
(2) Southern part of the isthmus is about 150% of its size in F above; it's not enlarged as much as Mexico.
(3) Florida was kept much smaller than it should be relative to Mexico.
(4) South America lost some of the South and East (mostly more hills in the S and jungle in the E); it was slightly enlarged but kept small relative to Mexico.
(5) The islands both in the Caribbean and Pacific were only slightly changed in size. There placement was by hand, trying to match their original locations where possible, given the various distortions of the rest of the map.
(6) No attempt has been made yet to fill in ocean areas, or clean up the blocky look created by enlarging single pixels to bigger patches and doing the C'n'P. If you like the relative proportions and placement then I'll clean all that up before processing it through BMPtoBIC.

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[Sword_Of_Geddon]

The one on the left looks spot on I think. It should allow a number of civs in Mexico, and two in the andes, which is my goal.

I wonder where Shiro went....

 

[Blue Monkey]

The one on the left looks spot on I think. It should allow a number of civs in Mexico, and two in the andes, which is my goal.

Just saw your note. I probably can't get this done tonight, but certainly will tomorrow. I'll post something by late tomorrow night; probably a basic map/BIQ without rivers, like before, but at least you will be able to get a look at how it actually looks in game, instead of squinting at a tiny 256 dot bitmap.