Slitherine

This may be of interest to some who like to use original maps for campaigns but find endless reams of paper and coloured pens a drag and their imagination and artistry overtaxed easily jaded.

WARNNG If you are not a CIV III user most of this will be gobbledygook to you so read no further!

If you are a CIV III Conquest user and use the CIV III Edit programme (even if you can’t get the game itself to work on Windows 10 the Civ Edit does!) you can create ,and print off an original map. Using the “generate map” function get it to create a map– size etc does not matter too much but” huge” and “continents” gives you lots of choice. Have a practice first before really doing it and forget how the various icons etc work in the game itself .

When you have done that find the land mass/area that is most interesting to you and start editing ( if it’s boring have another go). Click on the mouse to get a pull down menu to overlay a grid and zoom down to the largest scale.

Using the various edit functions in the pull down menus I delete most of the strategic and other resource icons keeping any pertinent to an ancient world campaign , scrolling down and across systematically to find them . So no saltpeter, rubber oil, aluminium, coal , uranium, tobacco, sugar. The rest you can keep, delete or re locate, depending on whether you want an economic element to the campaign. So iron, Ivory(elephants)and horses may be useful and I keep and cluster some wheat, cattle and game (in forests eg for Celts and Germans)and some gold and gems. Add rivers hills forests etc where you think it helps and delete any terrain that is unhelpful. I don’t bother with deserts or jungle - I have no 28mm far eastern armies and a desert is a hole in the world that might as well be water... It is your design so match it to your campaign design and concept. The CIV III terrain types pretty much dovetail with FOG(AM) terrain types which is really handy when you get a battle in a square- you already know what it is and if there is a river or coast for example.

Then I insert what are called in CIV III “ goody huts”- I use them to represent towns and distributed evenly around the map I place enough “ fortress” icons to match the number of states I want . This icon looks like a medieval tower and does for a capital city. I then join up cities and towns with roads . So a state for me has typically one city and three towns joined by roads. The triggers for war?

Civ III also has a barbarian tribe icon that looks like a hut. You can leave some for smallish barbarian types like Italian Hill tribes, Galatians, or anything you may not have a lot of but want to have around and you can have rules that trigger them as active.

This is the clever (sic)part!

On my lap top keyboard there is a key marked PrtSc = Print screen. (Other keyboards and PCs etc may do it differently) So in that largest scale I move the cursor over the map on screen (in the Civ III Edit mode it is a rectangle) and slowly ( and carefully ) rectangle by rectangle go down and then across and up with plenty of overlap pressing that key for each rectangle and then doing a paste into “ Word” ( already loaded up in “ landscape”). And click “page break” before doing the next one.

So I end up progressively with umpteen A4 landscape sized pics of the map saved in a single Word file. How many depends on how big it is and how much overlap you have.

Then I print them all off. And literally cut and paste.

Each page has game icons and margins printed along the bottom etc so they need snipping off . Once you have them all , assembling the map is a work of art to get the grid aligned etc but you end up with what a friend called a really "cool” map. A good printer with decent colour makes a difference of course and having a decent sized table to assemble it on! My map is about 4x4 feet and is on a cork office notice board ( for map pins) and needed about 40 A4 sheets in all. I don't bother about the sea squares so the map does not have to form an exact rectangle and sea squares do not need to align.

One tip is to also print off a zoomed out smaller scale version of the map to make it easier to plan and check how the full sized sheets all fit together.

I haven’t figured out yet how to print text onto the original on-screen map rather than using a fine point pen on the printed sheets.
There may be more clever ways to capture the CIV III screen “dumps” that can do that.

In my first full campaign I worked out how many 28mm or 15mm armies I had that could generate a 1200 point army ( my maximum size in any one square.) And which figure scale could support a more contemporaneous and geographically consistent mix. So I have 16 states from Mid rep Rome and its Italian enemies and Classical Greece and on through to the Principate and their foes and friends and states in between . There are three “ Romes” all separated by distance early Rep, Late Rep and Imperial. Two Persian Early and Late Aechmaenid . I group states rather like leagues so you don’t get the Palmyrans or Sassanids fighting the Carthaginians for example.

Hope someone finds this useful!

For adding text - Insert Shape - Add text to the shape.
Group your shapes so they don't move around without each other

Also right click on your screen dumps and select crop so you can get rid of the colaterall from the dump, window borders etc.

Ta very much!!

I still play Civ3 on Windows10! It can be done.

I know but its a long story. Despite great expert help from a friend who is former IT professional I cannot get it to work ( or the old Total War series) on my W10 laptop or my previous W7 laptop. Something Microsoft di

But my previous - previous Vista based laptop still runs them all fine now I have fixed a power problem

all games mentioned work on windows 10 fine, just need to add the pre requisites for the day and add in some of the missing bits which come with windows 10 which aren't loaded by default

Thanks for the advice . So do you mean by "for the day" each time /day I want to use any of these games I have to do this sequence ? And undo it? Or does it do the latter when I switch off?

direct play is a one off.

game bar isn't used in almost any game, so again it's a one off.

adding windows media player is a one off, as if a given older game needs it, doesn't matter if its the default one or not, as long as it's installed it's enabled and the correct codec's are then loaded.

so is the same true for default apps, a one off.

and i show what redistributes are installed, as i plays loads of different older games, and each one users a certain version, so as long as there installed in the order of 32bit first and 64bit second, it doesn't matter which one you install, as there's no order in preference to which ones goes first or last, as they are all separate programs in there own rights, so again a one off, and you only need to install, the ones your games need, so if a given one isn't used on your system eg you don't have a game that needs it, you won't install it, it's that simple,...

Many thanks for that . I will give it a go!

glad to hear it, and if you get or have any issues, let me know, and i'll try and offer some more advice.

mostly it's a DirectX type issue with older games, with most thinking i have DirectX 12 on my pc pre installed with windows 10, i don't need DirectX 9.0c, which would be wrong, what ever the game needs, it needs pre installing with it, and most won't work at all without the correct ones, on all 3 forums here regarding games, if the game needs it, it comes with it, so it's simple to work out what is needed and what version etc, as it's already supplied, older games aren't all like this, so some digging around can be needed, to find out what it does need to get it to work correctly.

but so far, my list is only 2 games don't work, or i can't get to work correctly as yet in windows 10, not matter what i try and do, so most work the same as any other older version of windows, meaning if it's slow and buggy in windows 7, windows 10 won't improve it or make it more stable, if it's a poor game, in one o/s moving it to another won't make it more stable or better, just sometimes faster.

but if it works well in vista, or windows 7 or 8, 99% of the time it should work in windows 10 just fine, as long as you have the hardware and software and correct pre requisites installed and mostly one or more of the above added or disabled.