Slitherine

The map of Crete in this game is absolutely atrocious!
Can this be fixed with a patch or some other way?

Hi,

I am asking about CEAW-GS v3.10.

Is it the terrain, or shape? The terrain was changed a little when CEAW-GS v2.00 was created. You can screen grab Greece from the game and suggest changes.

Just mark the map or you can give us the hex number and suggest changes and see what happens.

Are you from Greece?

It is actually the shape of the island. Btw, yes, I am Greek, residing many years now in the UK.
Crete is divided into four prefectures: from West to East - Chania, Rethymno, Heraklio and Lasithi

Chania is OK,
Rethymno is omitted: the map goes straight from Chania into the gulf of Messara - and not a very big gulf at that.
Heraklio has a bulge in its south and its north - it shouldn't have them!
Lasithi does not have a peninsula going north on its west side. The coast pretty much follows the coastline of Heraklio and then bends south, forming a gulf.

I created a BMP file with the comparisons but cannot attach it as it is too big.

Maps in wargames often have to be distorted to fit into hexes. I'm from Norway and I can tell that Norway is quite distorted in most games, even CEAW. Especially the layout of the Norwegian fjords. Since fjords will work as being impassable or river hex sides they have to follow the hex sides or the players won't know whether you can cross the hex side or not.

On maps we even have to tweak the layout of coastal hexes, especially multi hex islands, so there is no ambiguity whether the hex is a land hex or sea hex. Usually the absolute center of the hex determines the status of the hex. In CEAW we had quite a few ambiguous hexes where we had to tweak the coast line to make it easily visible to the players whether the hex was sea or land.

So Crete will never he completely accurate because it has to fit the 5 land hexes on the map. Each of these land hexes need more land than sea or they would have to be converted to a sea hex. So just there you have limitations to the shape of the island.

I leave it to Pk867 to determine if the map layout of Crete can be improved or not. It's he who can do the graphics changes. The Crete shape is the same as in the vanilla CEAW.

Crete is updated in GS v3.20 and now looks like this. Please notice that even after the change Crete will look slightly distorted. That is because it has to fit inside the hexes on the map and we need to ensure enough of each land hex is filled with so much terrain you know it's land and not sea. We also needed the Heraklion city circle to be placed on land and not partially at sea.

Real Crete is slightly slimmer than what is presented, but the current one fits the hexes nicely and you can now recognize the shape of Crete.

A big improvement!
Thanks to those who put the effort to correct the distortion!

Yiannis: We are working on some general map changes here and there on the GS map. How is the rest of Greece shown on the GS map. Anything you think is not OK (terrain, shape of the coast lines, location of cities etc.)?

The glaring mistake was the shape of Crete - and that's now fixed.

If you really want to polish up the map a bit, there are some minor corrections you could make:

1. The seaport just SW of Athens is properly spelled Piraeus (with an "a")
2. The island of Corfu in the NW of Greece, off its border with Albania, should be larger.
3. The island of Lemnos - which you have just off Canakkale - should be further West almost halfway between Canakkale and the Greek mainland.

Thanks. Info forwarded to Pk867, our map designer.

Made the changes you have requested.

We are trying to lock down any more changes.

Corfu and Lemnos look good!