EUROPEAN MAP MAKER for MapEdit		VERSION 1.0

								by Harlan Thompson

Making accurate maps for Civ2 has always been a difficult process.  The file included here (grtreuro.bmp) is a map of Europe and surrounding areas ready to be converted into Civ2 map format using MAPEDIT.  Except that it is much, much larger than any Civ2 map, if you count each individual pixel as a tile in Civ2.  So you can select one portion of the map, change it how you like, size it down, and then run it through MAPEDIT.  In this way, you can create accurate maps of any part of the world included here, at just about any scale.

THE TIME PROBLEM
Over the centuries, the Hills and Mountains of the world haven't changed, but the vegetation certainly has.  The included map uses vegetation and population information from the WW2 era, since I had lots of good data and familiarity with that time. If you want to make a map for a very different time period, you can still use this map.  Of course the cities shown are likely to be very different, and there will be major terrain changes the further away in time you go.  Basically, the further in time you go back, the more forest, and in the present day there are much fewer forests than on this map.  In ancient times, the Meditteranean world was also much more fertile and green.  I may make an ancient version of this map in the future, to help scenario makers working in that time period.

MAP DETAILS
This map shows the following colors (have a look at the MAPEDIT readme for more details on the MAPEDIT palette):

PALETTE      TERRAIN
INDEX        TYPE
   0          Desert
   1          Plains
   2          Grassland
   3          Forest
   4          Hills
   5          Mountains
   6          Tundra
   7          Urban (Glacier)
   8          Swamp
   9          Evergreen (Jungle)
  10          Ocean
 129          River through Plains
 130          River through Grassland
 131          River through Forest
 132          River through Hills
 134          River through Tundra
 136          River through Swamp
 137          River through Evergreen

Note that there are two differences from the usual Civ2 terrains.  9 is Evergreen, and not Jungle (and 137 is River through Evergreen, not River through Jungle).  This is because there is no natural Jungle terrain anywhere on this map, so the spot is better used for something else.  Evergreen is a very important distinction from regular Forest.  It is much less productive (nearly as bad as Desert), much harder to travel through.  Its special resources would probably be Honey, Timber or Furs.

The second important difference is that 7 is Urban, and not Glacier.  Glacier doesn't exist anywhere on the map either, except in remote Greenland.  Since the source map I used showed city sizes and locations, I thought it would be more useful to keep that information rather than have some Glacier squares in Greenland.  Presumably, when you make your map these will help you place your cities.

The size of the city spots also can tell you the city populations, around 1941.  If the city spot is two pixels wide and high, it is a city of less than 100,000 people.  I didn't include too many of these, but I put some if there were no larger towns nearby and if I thought it was a strategically important city.  If the city spot is three pixels wide and high, the city size is between 100,000 to 500,000.  If the city spot is four pixels, the city size is between 500,000 and 1 million.  Cities greater than 1 million are shown with pixels five wide and high.  Its up to you to figure out what city names match with what spots.

Obviously there's no way you could show all of these cities if you made on huge map of the whole area-- there are many more than the 255 maximum Civ2 allows.  But if your map is only of one part, for instance France, they may not be enough.  Depending on the scale you use, you may want to merge some of the nearby cities together.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR MAP- STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS
First, pick what part of the world you want to make a map of.  The more land you want to include, the rougher the final map is gonna look.  For instance, if you choose to make a map of all of Europe, you'll have to do a lot of touching up to get the rivers and such right (but it will still be much better than if you start from scratch).  If you make a map of a smaller area, for instance only Italy, all the important features should come through, and the touching up should be much easier.

ROTATING
Once you select your area, you next should decide if you want to rotate the map.  That can help you include more of what you want and cut out useless areas.  For instance, look at Iberia (Spain and Portugal).  It is roughly square in shape, but it tilts.  If you were to rotate the map 20 degrees counterclockwise, you would be better off, for a map just of Iberia.

TRANSFORMING
Depending on how familiar you are with graphics programs like PaintShopPro and PhotoShop, you can perform other tricks as well. I use PhotoShop, and it has a neat command called Transform that allows you to pull, push, strench or change an image or part of an image in just about any way you want.  So for instance, you might decide to cut the height of Scandanavia a bit to allow more details in other parts of your map, and a function like that will allow you to do it very easily.

CAUTION ON PASTING INTO NEW FILES
Some programs may have problems with the image format required for MAPEDIT.  Some programs may not be able to load the MAPEDIT palette (e.g. PhotoPaint).  So what you may need to do is rename the file, and simply chop off the parts of the file you don't need until you're left with exactly what you want (in PhotoShop, you can do this with the Image -> Canvas Size command).

REDUCING THE WIDTH
Eventually you end up with exactly the area you want.  Now, you are ready to start reducing its size.  One aspect of Civ2 is that their maps are twice as high as they are wide.  So you'll want to reduce the width by 50%.  Some people prefer 40% or so, it may look better that way since Civ2 tiles are wider than they are high.  After you reduce the width, it may look funny while you have the file open in the graphics program, but in the Civ2 Map Editor it will look fine.  I should note by the way, that its very important to do all your rotating and transforming BEFORE reducing the width, or else the shapes will be very strange.

REDUCING
At this point, find out how many pixels high and wide your map is.  In PhotoShop you can do this by selecting Image and then ImageSize.  Normally, Civ2 maps cannot be larger than 10,000 tiles (so roughly 100 by 100).  Imagine each pixel will be a tile, later.  So you're probably gonna need to shrink the map down.  As you reduce, the map will keep the same colors.  If there is an area that's 50% Grassland and 50% Plains for instance, when it gets shrunk down you may end up with a pixel of Grassland or Plains, there's no telling.

OVERSIZED AND GIGANTIC MAPS
As an aside, technically speaking maps can actually be bigger than the normal 10,000 squares.  All Civ2 versions up to 2.7.81 (Fantastic Worlds add-on) allow for maps to be as big as 10,922 tiles [oversized maps], or about 10% larger than the official maximum.  All Civ2 versions after that (Civ2 Multiplayer/MGE/UCC and Civ2:Test of Time) even have a maximum of 32,768 tiles [gigantic maps], more than 3 times the official maximum!  In contrast with the standard Civ2 map editor, MAPEDIT is able to create such oversized and gigantic maps.

CONVERTING
Once the map has been shrunk to the proper size, load the MAPEDIT palette (located in the MAPEDIT program directory) if necessary, and save the file in .BMP format.  If you're offered options, choose Windows file format, 8 bit depth, and no RLE compression.  Now open MAPEDIT, open the .BMP file you just created and save it as a Civ2 map file.

TWEAKING
Hopefully, you've been able to get the file into Civ2 format and can look at it through the map editor.  Chances are good you will now have to tweak the map before you're all done.  For instance, you may find some rivers are two tiles wide, or have gaps in them.  On maps of large areas, you may have no more than a hint of a river, with an occasional river square here and there.  Similarly, coastlines might have problems.  You might find Spain and Morocco are connected together, or Sicily looks all wrong, or whatever.  When you shrink something down ten times or more, obviously a lot of information is going to be lost, but tweaking should fix the problems fairly easily.

That's it!  It really not as complicated as all this text would make it appear- I just wanted the directions to be clear.  If you have any questions or comments, contact me at: harlant@earthlink.net.  I hope that others may make such files for other parts of the world.  I hope it results in many great new maps.

NOTE ON MAP INFORMATION
The data in this map isn't perfect, but I think is pretty good.  I took most of the terrain data from the Rand McNally Family World Atlas, New Census Edition.  Its got great vegetation info collected in the early 1960s, and I augmented that from other sources to determine how much more land was forested in 1941.  City size data is based on an Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1942.  Rivers have been artificially widened so its more likely they'll show up when the map is shrunk down.

