Tutorial 2

Tutorial 2


In this tutorial we shall do some simple terrain editing, where we'll place some forests, lakes, villages and a city onto a map that was initialised with clear grass lands. This tutorial can be found in the tutorial folder as the file "tutorial2.map".

The first few steps will be familar from the previous tutorial, so I'll not cover them in any detail here. Instead I'll give a quick run-through: first, I selected the New ... menu item from the File menu; secondly, in the new map dialog I used the default climate of Europe1 as well as changing the map dimensions to 10 by 10.

Once I've gone through the above steps, I then select the hexes that I want to be turned into light forests by shift-clicking on the hex map. The result of this appears in the following image:

Because this is a new map, the toolbar is already set on Edit Terrain Image, which is what I want. I also want to turn my selected hexes into light forests so I move the cursor into the toolbar and over the down arrowpad that is to the left of the row of terrain images, as you can see in the following image:

I click in the down arrow once, and the next row of terrain images comes into view. Since this row happens to be the light forest hexes that I want, I don't click any more. I then move the cursor over the light forest image that I want (in this case it is the very first one), as you can see in the following image:

Clicking on the first image of a light forest causes all the hexes that I selected earlier to be filled with that image.

The next step is to place some heavy forests in the upper right corner of the hex map. Again you start by shift-clicking the hexes that you want, as you can see in the following picture:

I again move the cursor to the toolbar. The terrain images are still set to light forest from the last time the cursor was in the toolbar, so I go to the same down button as before, which you can see in the following image:

Clicking on the down button once brings up the next terrain image row, which happens to be the heavy forests that I want. I'm going to select the first heavy forest terrain image so I move the cursor over it as in the following image:

Clicking on the heavy forest terrain image in the toolbar causes all of the hexes that I've selected earlier having the heavy forest image appear within them. Notice how I've changed some of the light forests that I had set before into heavy forest - I'm merely showing that you don't have to get the terrain images perfect from the very begining, and you can go back and make changes easily enough latter.

After the forests, I want to place some villages onto the map. I want 2 villages so I click once on the first hex that want changed, and shift-chick to get the second hex that I want changed, as you can see in the following picture:

Since the toolbar still has the terrain image row set to heavy forest I need to move the cursor to the buttons to the left of it, as you can see in the following image:

Clicking once brings up the row of light village terrain images, which is what I want. I then move over the first light village terrain image as you can see in the following image:

Clicking on the light village terrain image in the toolbar will set the two hexes that I selected before into two light villages.

I next want to place a single city terrain image roughly half way between the two light villages, so I first click the cursor over the hex in order to select that hex, which you can see in the following picture:

In the toolbar, the terrain image row is still set to light village so I again move the cursor to the down button to the left of this row, as you can see in the following image:

Clicking once brings up the heavy village row of images, which is not what I want. Clicking a second time brings up the city row of images, which is what I want. I then move the cursor over the first city terrain image, as you can see in the following image:

Clicking on the first city image in the toolbar causes the selected hex to be turned into that city image.

The final terrain type that I intend to add to the hex map is a small arc of water to the lower left of the map. Again I select the hexes that I want by shift-clicking them, as you can see in the following image:

Since the toolbar still has the terrain image row set to lakes, I first move the cursor over the down button that is to the left of the terrain image row in the toolbar.

To get to the lake terrain row, I need to click 4 times, passing over other terrain images, until I reach the water terrain row that I want. I then move the cursor over the first lake image, as you can see in the following image:

I click once to cause lakes to appear in the hexes that I had selected before.

Instead of shift-clicking hexes and setting them all to one terrain type as I've done all through the above examples, I could have chosen individual hexes and set then singularily to one of the six possible terrain types that are available. But shift-clicking and setting a large group of hexes to one type is quicker, and instead of leaving the hexes in the present bland configuration, I moved the cursor and clicked once in the Random All button, which resulted in the following randomised image:


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