BA Map Scale Tool (BAMST)

[Old_Warrior]

I put together a simple Excel spreadsheet that has a coordinate scale along the sides and when an image of a map is added in you can use it to pinpoint real locations from the map for entry onto a map in the Editor.

The tool can be found here:

http://myweb.cableone.net/williampeters ... _Scale.zip

Included is a version of the BAMST in both .xls and .xlsx formts in case you do not have the latest version of Excel.

Just add in your map image and adjust it to fit the dimensions and you can then print it out to use while you build your BA map. I usually build a list of the coordinates of the villages along the margin of the map.

<NAME of VIllage> <COORDS>

Finding the exact location of hills and river bends and so on is thus easier.

I am using this and already it has made making maps much easier. An overlay feature in the Editor would be nice but probably not forthcoming soon so until then use the BAMST!

[Old_Warrior]

I felt that some images for the BAMST would help "sell" the tool so here are some sample BAMST screenshots using Carentan as the topic:

The Reference map:

[enric]

I think I read somewhere that a BA tile represents 100 x 100 meters, is this the scale you're showing?, seems bigger.

[junk2drive]

From the Manual Additions sticky

quote:

ORIGINAL: Iain McNeil

The scale is abstracted. 1 tile range is intended to represent 50-100m. 2 tiles about 200m, up to 8 tiles at about 2km. This may sounds strange but it allows us to get the more subtle differentiations at shorter range without having to make ranges so high you cant see what you're shooting at on screen. This makes it very hard to give you a real ground scale. Maps can be 64x64 tiles at present but there is not really a technical reason they can't be bigger as far as I know but we didn't want to make missions like that.

It is not possible with BA to make maps to scale.

[Old_Warrior]

Yes, as the scale is abstracted I picked a scale that seems to work. Also: the infantry to vehicle scale is a bit eschew - most of the time you see full sized squads but BA is more of a "Fire Team" size for infantry.

As the game is mainly meant for FUN and not for the PURIST the idea is to portray an action and if possible the entire action.

For example: while in my sample map of Carentan you could divide up the entire fighting for the town into several maps of mainly buildings I would tend to make the town one large village on the map with surrounding terrain. I would NOT do that for something like Stalingrad (which would not be one large group of buildings jammed next to each other but of course a series of large buildings separated by open spaces).

The main intent here is to allow for the use of historical locations and proper placement of the villages. If you wanted the units mainly to be armor you could make the map scale larger so that distances mean something. If you wanted the action to be primarily infantry vs. infantry then you could decrease the distances between the villages. It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Obviously the unit scale of 5 men to a unit would mean that if you had a company of infantry and a platoon of tanks you would have something like this:

Company of US infantry was 3 platoons with 9 squads per platoon or 27 squads. That would be 54 infantry units in BA.

A platoon of tanks on the other hand is anywhere from 4-5 tanks.

Thus the designer has to find a map scale that works for the mix of units he is using. If you go with an all armor battle then increase the distances between the villages to allow for the ebb and flow of rapid movement to not impact the battlefield. For infantry actions - decrease the distances to allow for more intense combat between points. Also allows multiple objectives to be taken during a mission.

[Old_Warrior]

Adding this in ...

Max effective range for Panther: 2000 meters

Max Range in BA: 8 tiles

250 meters/tile