Map making

[De Savage]

Congrats BF!!! New overlay function & drawing roads in map editor is totally awesome. Earlier it took me hours to do realistic copy of real map. Now I used two overlay images, one with countour lines and second with terrain map. Adding countour lines took about 10 minutes and adding major roads and other terrain maybe 20 minutes. I'm absolutely thrilled.

With new tools I think map making is 50-70% faster. 800x600m map is done in few hours instead of whole week 40h. Added that saving hours maps cool much more realistic and extra time can me used to add flavor objects and cosmetic tweaking.

Thank you BF!

[Pak40]

Has anyone tested the "copy AI plan" feature yet? I think this will save a ton of time also.

[Sergei]

Has anyone tested the "copy AI plan" feature yet? I think this will save a ton of time also.

Yep, it works as advertised.

Now, of course you first need at least one good enough plan, first but once you get past that hurdle it isn't too difficult to make variations of it. Moreover the 16 AI groups mean that fewer compromises are needed with regards to AI scripting. With 8 groups it was always a little difficult to do anything more tricky because you had to make do with large groups.

[Cpl Steiner]

I think with the extra AI groups it should now be easy to do things like have a bunch of halftracks drive to different positions on the map, dismount all their infantry, and then move somewhere else to provide supporting fire with their MGs whist the dismounted infantry advance on the objective. This was always difficult to do with only 8 AI groups as each halftrack and dismount pair required 2 AI groups.

[MikeyD]

Don't forget reinforcements. I always hated having a mixed company of reinforcements all being shoe-horned into Groups 7-8. The chance of being 'clever' with your AI reinforcements has gone up.