Editor Oddity: Downsizing large maps

[LongLeftFlank]

My epic historical Battles for Ramadi (Iraq, 2004-2006) project is moving along in fits and starts. I have now all but completed the painstakingly researched and gigantic 750m x 1500m master map of the city center. This Mother of All MOUT Maps contains literally thousands of varied buildings, compound walls and flavour objects). While this map runs surprisingly well on a 6 year old Pentium 4 (while densely populated, the map is also largely pooltable flat, as is the real Ramadi, which helps a lot), navigating is quite "sludgy" when I am "sailing into" the hi-rise city core. I either have to look sideways or down at the ground.

So as I move onto scenario design, I am basically carving out smaller sections of the map (it's infantry MOUT in a densely built up area -- engagement ranges are largely short). As I do so, I've noticed that if I simply use the dimension keys to crop the map down, the smaller map continues to sludge along slowly as though all the deleted stuff was still there.

To solve this problem, I have had to manually erase everything in the deleted areas prior to deleting the actual squares. The large "multisquare eraser" feature works very well for clearing ground, vegetation and craters, but you need to use the small "one square" eraser for walls and roads, and click individually to remove each building. The doodads are the most time-consuming of all -- you must go into preview mode and CTRL+click on every one of them individually. The entire process took me a couple of hours. The resulting ~400x400m map, while still dense with buildings of 1-4 stories, is a great deal more fluid to navigate.

I figured I'd offer this experience up to any other Brobdignagian map builders who may still be out there.

[Dietrich]

Thanks very much for the insight. My own attempts at scenario design have hardly gone beyond alpha (mostly because of the daunting-ness of making larger-than-small maps), but I'll gladly file this info in the ol' gray matter for future reference. And I look forward to your Ramadi scenarios. =)

[Pinetree]

So as I move onto scenario design, I am basically carving out smaller sections of the map (it's infantry MOUT in a densely built up area -- engagement ranges are largely short). As I do so, I've noticed that if I simply use the dimension keys to crop the map down, the smaller map continues to sludge along slowly as though all the deleted stuff was still there.

Did you try saving the new map, closing and then re-opening?

[snake_eye]

Thanks LONGLEFTFLANK,

You just answered to a problem I had before trying to reduce a map and not succeeding. I finally let down the matter and made another map. That was more paintaking than to erase the unwanted area, besides the fact that it takes time.

Cheers