An image of the Battlefield!

[ulfn]

Hi all!

I have tried to make a total view of the battlefield. In this particular picture two invasion armies from the Latins (my troops) are initiating a besiege of Cordoba in Andalucia (Papacy).

http://hem.bredband.net/ulfn/Battlefield.jpg

Enjoy! :)

[Elvain]

Hey! :hello: That's amazing! :cheers:

how did you do that?

[ulfn]

Thanks!

How to make this image:

1) Start up KoH in Windowmode (KoH.in2, Full Screen = 0) and MS Paint.
2) Go into battleview when starting a battle.
3) Press Alt+PrintScreen, and paste the image into MS Paint. Give the names of the image files as in a matrice (11.bmp - 68.bmp i.e. 48 different images).
4) Move in a zick-zack pattern, starting from the lower left corner, using the arrow keys (i.e. 15 steps right, between each image, then after 6 images, 6 steps up. Continue doing the same to the left).
5) When all images have been dumped and saved, you have to cut off the visible user interface from the images.
6) As each image is 1024 pels wide, they must be reduced in size. I chose 211 pels (that makes 1266 pels in total) and kept the aspect ratio.
7) All files are pasted as images onto a sufficiently big blank image and then it is like laying a puzzle. But this puzzle is very easy :bday: , as you have the matrice indeces.
8. Cut the whole picture so it is rectangular.
9) Finally, save as a .jpg-image.

That's it!

[The Mighty Sultan]

Interesting. Not many houses in that city are there? Still, images like this underline how ambitious this game is.

[Frujin]

There is a hot key to do that. Ctrl+Shift+Q. you must have "C:\temp" folder already created.

Warning: This thing takes very long time and generates huuuuuuuge files.

[lt1956]

Things like this show that its possible to have a zoomed out view of the battle. For me I always felt the battle map is too close, its nice to be close when you want to but I think a more arial view would be better, with option to zoom closer. 2 stage 1 view far out sorta like the picture here, maybe closer, and the other choice close in like is now.

Small things can ruin gameplay. ;(

[The Mighty Sultan]

American Conquest features a very good 'zoom out', as does Celtic Kings/Punic Wars. In the latter game/s, it's essential to conduct the game in 'Macro' view AND 'Micro view'.

It seems pretty clear to me that the designers see the 'zoomed in' stuff as a bonus to the main game, and in many ways actions taken in the zoomed state are much less effective than those in World View(battles create far more casualties than World view ones). As this game must be played with a considerable investmant of time and effort, it quickly becomes impracticle to fight battles and conduct sieges in 'Micro' view, simply due to time constraints more than anything else. Exactly the same situation develops in the Total War games too. Clearly those games have superb battle simulators imbedded in them, but after an hour and a half of empire building, almost all events take place in world view.

[OSDSET]

Things like this show that its possible to have a zoomed out view of the battle. For me I always felt the battle map is too close, its nice to be close when you want to but I think a more arial view would be better, with option to zoom closer. 2 stage 1 view far out sorta like the picture here, maybe closer, and the other choice close in like is now.

Small things can ruin gameplay. ;(

but that could lead to the game slowing down and lagging and bugs (and that will be very nice for the gameplay *wink...wink*) I think the minimap is good enough for a far out view but thats just my opinion. (soz if this seems offencive ;( )