New Map - Arabia

[TMILLER]

Attached is a new 15x15 map of the Arabian Peninsula. The time frame is 1930 to 2012 beginning with the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia. The map includes new buildings, goods, and industries including pipe, dates, import goods, pilgrims, palaces, and holy shrines. I have re-skinned cars and locomotives to look more like those on the Saudi Railway Org. Event notices include photos of some of the most modern buildings in the world, especially in Mecca and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, UAE. Mysterious Arabic music has been added to give the game a local mood. Credits go to many others from whom I have borrowed game components including Jancsika, Karsten, Lowell, Slider38, and especially Bobby Rodea. I have used ports, buildings, cars, and locomotives from Rodea’s Borneo and West Sumatera maps. The regional economy is based on oil exports. In the game, oil production is increased by delivery of pipe to oil wells. Oil exports produce gold; gold delivered to a palace yields currency, currency can be delivered to yield pipe and import goods. Late in the game, pilgrims are to be transported from all over the region to Mecca and Medina. The game is intended for experienced players and with AI. I have played the game and met all victory conditions without crashes. I hope someone will give it a try and provide comments and criticism so I can improve the game. Thanks, TMiller.

[karsten]

Just back from China and I start the Arabia map, such a welcome and interesting addition to our regional coverage!
The music gives the right mood background, the newspapers are super and the whole thing hangs together very nicely. Great opening screen! I have posted a few screenshots, to highlight the innovative and attractive landscaping, buildings, train cars and engines.

So far, I have little to comment. What might be improved is the filestructure. Each file could be prefaced by "Arabia", eg "ArabiaAssets2", so one does not lose track of those folders later. And I do wonder whether it is not possible to post all five folders in one post, or at least in five posts in one thread. Just a thought.

Since for most people, this will be a welcome geographical learning experience, you could add black country borders on the white map square to delineate Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and so on. These borders then shine through. It is even possible to print the country names there.

Not sure why the TGV engine is included. The Haramain High Speed Rail project is not mentioned, I think, and it cannot transport pilgrims, so ...?

As soon as I have a bit more time, I will rerun the map to completion. Fine contribution, congratulations!

[TMILLER]

Karsten, I am glad you like the Arabia map. The opening screen idea I got from the really nice beach-side photo you used on your Uganda map. You are right about the TGV being out-of-place. I originally intended to use it to move pilgrims, but just changing the "passengersandmailonly" command in the Trains.xml file from 1 to 0 did not work. I think if I change the szcars input from _tgv to _v2 it will allow the TGV pull pilgrim cars. I can add the Haramain High Speed Rail Project, connecting Jeddah, Mecca and Medina to the Victory Objectives and let players have the option of using the TGV, if I can get it to haul pilgrims. I could also add a political boudary map of the region to one of the newspaper announcements in the Confirmatory Goals to show the locations of each country. Of course, the Cities finding tool in the SMR game is still the quickest way to find a city. In posting new maps I have consistently been prevented from posting more than 7 Mb per post. I have not tried multiple posts within a thread. I will give that a try. Thanks again for the encouraging words. I am curious to see what you think of the details of the oil based economy and the Victory Objectives. Best Regards.

[karsten]

I managed to complete the map (not a single crash, and no slowdown at the end), and quite a challenge it is, too! Gold delivery was difficult, and the pilgrims at the end needed some quick action to develop neglected villages!

Lovely map, fun to play and challenging. How did you do the elevation levels, looks really nice, and smooth to build through.

The oil-based economy development adds elements of a real story and certainly increases the interest of the scenario.

Here are some additional screenshots. Just as an experiment, I provide a (crude) example of the map annotation function.

[TMILLER]

Karsten, Thanks for your review and I am glad you liked the Arabia map. Based on your route map, your layout was different than mine and worked well. Gold delivery was intended to be one of the hardest objectives to accomplish. The way I set up the oil economy, with oil being delivered to the ship terminal, the game could not count oil deliveries, so I used gold as a surrogate. Since my last post I have experimented with the TGV loco and now know how to allow it to transport the pilgrims, so I will add that to the final version.

Your screen shots look great. You seem to be able to get views of the horizon that I cannot get. How do you do it?

Regarding your question of how I got the map terrain to look the way it does, I started with the attached relief map from Map.com that shows the elevations in 6 color bands. I cleaned it up, cut and pasted the portion I wanted to use into a blank SMR 15x15 map (see second attached map of cleaned up version). Then using Gimp2.6 (like photoshop) I reassigned (painted) each color band with a shade of gray. The gray scales I used were 0 for water surfaces, 60 for the coastline, then 95, 130, 160, 190, and 220 for successively higher elevations. This gave me a basic map of the region with only 7 fixed elevations. I then cleaned up the edges of each elevation level in the terrain editor of SMR and added other features I wanted to highlight.
Sorry I did not get back to you sooner. I have been working on a map of western Canada that I will post in a week or two.
Thanks again and best regards,
TMiller

[karsten]

That's a pretty cool approach to getting an good interesting map. I must definitely try it next time I use a DEM map basis.

I assume you know how to initiate free-fly camera (Pause, then Ctrl+F). After that, its a matter of navigating up, down etc with the arrow keys and the mouse. Don't include too much horizon in the screen too quickly, it will easily crash the whole thing!

I think your map is fine as it is. Great fun and so many special touches, atmospheric backgrounds. Way to go!