American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

I heard rumors of the master map on Campaign Shenandoah and managed to find it in the scenario editor. It's quite large and impressive. Has anyone designed a game based off the map or portions of it? Especially considering it has Harpers Ferry on it, it would be fun to see someone design a few scenarios based on that battle or enlarge the Antietam Campaign to include it.

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Gen Treuting

The only "master map" I can find is 'Latest Master Map.map' which is a very large map of blank hexes.

What is the name of the map you're referring to, and is there any special trick to opening it?

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Paul Swanson
Lieutenant-General
First Division
First Corps
Army of Northern Virginia

I asked Rich about this a year or two ago. Doug Strickler was working on it when he passed and it was unfinished. The map is large but it is missing lots of terrain features and has large unfinished areas. I don't think it's usable as a whole. WDS has no plans to finish the map as of now.

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Gen. Blake Strickler
Confederate General-in-Chief
El Presidente 2010 - 2012

How do I see/open it? What is it named?

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Paul Swanson
Lieutenant-General
First Division
First Corps
Army of Northern Virginia

Scratch that, I see it now. It was 'Latest Master Map.map'. Although there are a lot of blank hexes there is a lot of detail too.

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Paul Swanson
Lieutenant-General
First Division
First Corps
Army of Northern Virginia

Prime example of one that'd be good for when the map editor is released.

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General Scott Ludwig
Ludwig's Light Division
Isgro's Corps
Army of Northern Virginia (ANV)

At issue there - was the elevation levels ended up blowing up the graphics assignments. It was 0 at sea level, but many many levels higher in the mountains. I don't think an editor would fix that at all, unless you wanted take slices out of it - and then in most parts go and reassign all of the elevations levels.

Publisher knows exactly what the issue was, because it was reported to them - engine issue, engine doesn't handle the number of elevation levels added by the map designer when creating this. Not sure if you can re-do the PDT, to re-scale the elevation changes, but you only get (I think) 28 - or whatever the amount of rows that you get in the graphics for elevations. There's no point adding more, because they don't work -which you can take to mean I tried that already before dropping them a report. That was maybe a year ago.

Actually I think some of those blank hexes also actually do have other terrain in them as well (meaning coded that way). It wasn't as bare as it appeared.

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~Retired~

This is all very good to know Steve! Never knew, but thanks for sharing.

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General Scott Ludwig
Ludwig's Light Division
Isgro's Corps
Army of Northern Virginia (ANV)

The current limit seems to be at least 128 elevations, so it has apparently been updated.
I started a new scenario in the Editor, loaded the Latest Master Map.map, an oob and pdt file and glancing at the map with Elevations on I see a 115 hex at hex 272,1806 Slate Mountain.
This shows an elevation of 4224 in the Terrain Box which works out to 33 feet per elevation which matches the 33 ft shown in a level 1 hex.
Saved it and was able to open it in the game engine just to see if it loaded.

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Gen. Ken Miller



The McKeesport Union Guard

1/1/I
AotP

Oh it loads all right- it just is not able to show all of the terrain. And that is because the amount of terrain doesn't match the elevations. Simply adding more terrain graphics didn't ever change that. Check out hex 2083,296 as one example- but what it does is - it wasn't showing marsh terrain, and it just defaulted to never showing colour coded terrain elevation. My comment was more about it not being particularly useful in that state. Ceck that it has some changes in elevation colours but it is not loading the graphics files under the map folder.

I had taken to editing a new map -but that will be pointless if the publisher changes the engine code like it did in Panzer Battles or Musket and Pike recently - as that breaks the old JTS map editors. For what it's worth, I was doing what I was doing with the knowledge of the publisher, or at least Rich Hamilton there. But yeh - retired from gaming design maybe ... hell who knows, I mean I did sorta like the look of a motte and bailey mock up I did last week in testing if their new builds killed the JTS map editors (spoiler alert ... like a doornail). But that's life.

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~Retired~