Creating Better Hills?

[76mm]

Strange question here: I've got a home-grown campaign and generate lots of 3km x 3km maps. Usually I start with the autogenerated map and extensively modify it so that it looks more realistic. This works great for most types of maps (ok, other than cities and villages), but I am unsatisfied with the "hill" maps, because they always result in too many small hills, with very broken lines of sight.

I don't want to have to track down historical maps (for a fictional campaign), but does anyone have any tips for creating random hilly maps, which occasionally create dominant terrain features--long ridges, dominating heights, etc.? Wish the "hill" algorithm had a slider bar...

[JasonC]

On a map that size, "gentle slopes" with normal contours (2.5 m height levels) will create the features you describe.

Actually what the auto generator is worst at actually creating in the large blocks of uniform terrain that really occur. Real life terrain is *terrain*, this rather than that, not "terrain soup". Woods come in blocks hundreds of meters wide, if not full km's only broken by ribbons of other stuff. Fields are hundreds of meters to 1-2 km wide, uniform wheat or open or brush. Marshes are large, spotted with islands or brush or scattered trees and occasional full water, but certainly not tiny dots here and there.

Linear terrain forms are also poor, especially walls and hedges and fences in farmland terrain. It knows enough to make roads but for some reason plops down disjointed sections of this stuff.

Compared to all of the above, the uniform ridges created by "gentle slopes", on larger maps, and the scattered buildings of village or farmland, are much more believable.

[JasonC]

Here is a positive recommendation for dealing with such limitations, given a need to make many large maps quickly, as in campaign settings.

First make a small map of the desired terrain type. Copy it - I screenshot and open in "paint" typically.

Now make blocks on 100m grids corresponding to the individual tiles on the original. You can rough up their edges and do some connecting tissue work later, but to a first approximation, one tile of brush becomes a brushy field 100mx100m.

So the original "pilot" map should be 1/5 the scale you intend for the full one.

Of course it is more work, but you will get much more realistic terrain.