Slitherine

I had a quick question for you guys that have made such quality scenarios, when it comes to actual design of a map, what kind of references do you use if any when making your maps? I wanted to make a brand new alternative ending to the Rising Sun expansion, where instead of focusing on the Invasion of Australia, I'd wanted to have a three or four part Invasion of Hawaii, ending with a storming of Pearl Harbor. When making the map for these scenarios, should I reference whatever maps from the period are available, or use real world images?

The easiest solution is to use an existing map from another game, board- or PC.
You can stitch map parts using the excellent and free Microsoft Image Composite Editor. I have used this a lot for my own maps, even stitching 18+ parts into a coherent whole.
Matching a hex-map template to OOB is a little bit of work, but you can fairly easy get a perfect hex match.
The tricks is to cut the template so that it matches the hexagons in the NW and SE corners.

If you need to use 'real-world' maps, here's a really nice free source with lots of historical military maps.

https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/

thanks for the tip! hopefully I'll be able to balance authenticity and challenge for these maps

If this helps, [In any way]

From Erik:

Erik2 wrote: ↑Fri Nov 15, 2019 9:45 am Lets say you have a template with 800 x 500 pixel resolution.
You would like to create a large map (max 120 hexes horizontally).

800/120 = 6.67
500/6.67 = 74.96

So this template would work fine in a 120 x 75 hex map.

(This is for getting the HxH perfectly)

BUT, for references i'd go with Erik's response. If you want a more real-world type of scenario of design, make sure you find a terrain based map along with it, as it enriches the feel/scenery of the map.

Me on the other hand, I mainly make alternate maps, so I cannot supply you with more information on how to get the map design perfect for real-world scenarios.
[But the only real-world map I made was of Papua New Guinea.]

I'd love to teach people how to map design!

Scale is the difficult thing. We've discussed that issue in several places here. You can search on scale and get a lot of info here.

Once you decide on scale (no easy thing) you can select a Google earth map and superimpose battle maps from historical sources on it. I use Visio to paste and move scenario maps to match the towns on the google earth. Very cumbersome process. Snip app is critical to cut out the parts of interest on the battle maps so you can paste over the google map.

The Center for Military History has a massive index of stuff you can research but it's mostly corps and army level stuff. Great background info for campaigns and some od the maps are perfect for OoB use. No idea though about other nation military info.

Re-reading your post, since historical troop dispositions and movements aren't of interest, just decide on scale, grab a Google map screen shot, and that should work as a template. When I use google screen shots, I pin the main items of interest so they show up well in the template. I have found no way to get google maps to help with rivers in a template except for tracing the riverbed with a high contrast color so it shows up on the template.

conboy

Ps Michelin has a lot of free zoomable maps you can use to get contours.