Modules for ABattlemap

The units do fit, Tim.  I believe Atari’s idea was a way to move fleets around the board without having to move 7 different stacks of units each time. (Fighters, Carriers, Battleships, Cruisers, Destroyers, Submarines, Transports and maybe even more if you have Infantry, Artillery, Armor and AA Guns as well!)

In that regard, I can understand it.  Heck, we used to do that in Classic IRL with Face to Face games.  We’d use an American Battleship with a Control Marker under it to represent a fleet (which was usually in one of the blow up boxes) or a Japanese Battleship or whatever nation it was.

This would just be the Battlemap Equivalent….though, it might be nice to have a purty picture instead of F1 or something. Wonder if it would be possible to get something like a BB/AC/Fig all on one token?  I know they’re really small…actually, been wonderin if it would be possible to get some prettier icons all together…they’re bitmaps so they are limited, but common, there has to be a way!

I am a rookie AA50 player, and just recently found this forum, and consequently the ABattlemap for use in the forum based games.  I am sure all of you who know what you are doing love it and do not need to change a thing, but I found a couple difficulties as a new player.
1.  Cross referencing all the territory abbreviations and names is a real pain when trying to transcribe a move log.  I doubt those of you who have it memorized care, but I absolutely love the modification that P@ther made to it.  Kudos.

2.  Running at 1920x1200 resolution, my poor eyes cannot make out the subtle difference in the pieces, especially with the ships.  Consequently, I modified the big pieces.bmp to use letter coded abrevs for all ships but the Carrier and Batleship (easy enough to tell them apart).  For the life of me I cannot figure out how CA comes from Cruiser, or DD comes from destroyer, but I picked up on it and used those codes, along with S for sub and T for Transport.

If you a poor little rookie like me and are having problems with the naval pieces like I did, I am attaching the modified BigPieces.bmp file for anybody that wants it.  Just drop it into your A50 folder after renaming the extension back to .bmp.  The majority of you can ignore it, but in case you have bad eyes like I do, feel free to use it.

Holkann, I’m sorry, but my red-green color-blind eyes just can’t distinguish between the 2 greens - UK and US.

I’m using the updated module, but I’m still using the older pieces, even though I still have a slight problem distinguishing between the yellow Japs and the yellow-green Americans.  At least their ships look different.  That helps me a lot.

@HolKann:

I’m redoing the color scheme, and after a lot of trying, I’ve got the scheme as attached to the post. What do you guys think of it? I’m not finished yet with the map, so I’m not updating yet.

Also, if someone could provide me with a “layered” image file with in one layer the AA50 map, and in an other layer the territory names, I would be very much obliged :)

Here it is:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ghjynmootyy

Use the file with paint.net. See www.getpaint.net
In case you don’t know it.

Hth :-)

I really see no need for all these constant changes that lead to compatibility issues as far as changing territories around and such on the map.

I agree with Tim as far as adding fleet cards and such. It is too easy to overlook what is where. It is not like we are trying to cram physical playing pieces into a territory or move the same about the map and having to worry about pieces falling off of a stack of chips.

big pieces, with a new color scheme

how are the fleet marker’s used ?

@d142:

how are the fleet marker’s used ?

A fleet marker represents a fleet in a seazone. So you do not have to move lots of ships from one sz to the other but only the fleet marker.
There will be a place on the board (for example a neutral territory or special fields) where the “real fleet” will be stored.

I learnt from this thread
http://www.harrisgamedesign.com/bb2/viewtopic.php?t=1702&sid=9283f45b3a668d14b6f3077ac48c4027
that in former versions of AA there were so-called “Marshaling Circles and Cards” which had the function above-mentioned.

Of course this is not limited to fleets but can be used for all groups of units.

@d142:

how are the fleet marker’s used ?

they are used just like the marshaling circles from AA Revised.  You put the actual fleet/army in whatever unused space you want (neutral territory/ AA logo on bottom-left).

Great work, thank you, HolKann.

I just want to offer my mod of BigPieces.bmp
The bomber is slightly different (the way it “throws” bombs), I “enlarged” and partly “redesigned” the ships a little bit.
Using the same color scheme I saved them as 8bpp-bmp instead of 24bpp. So the file size is even smaller.
Personally, I cannot view a difference between 8bpp and 24bpp on my screen.

Download from
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?wymm2zmj3zn
if you like (3.34 KB - 7z-format).

:-)

No offense, but I like my Italian colors better, possibly because I am used to that shade of blue.  /shrug.

Anyway, the white lettering kind of clashes, don’t you think?  Maybe it’s just my girlishness but wouldn’t it be better if the Sea Zones were numbered with a lighter or darker shade of blue (something that contrasts, but does not clash) and the territories with lighter/darker shades of themselves?

Maybe the Italian color for Sea Zone numbers, Japanese colors for Germany, German Colors for Japan, etc?

@Cmdr:

No offense, but I like my Italian colors better, possibly because I am used to that shade of blue.  /shrug.

Anyway, the white lettering kind of clashes, don’t you think?  Maybe it’s just my girlishness but wouldn’t it be better if the Sea Zones were numbered with a lighter or darker shade of blue (something that contrasts, but does not clash) and the territories with lighter/darker shades of themselves?

Maybe the Italian color for Sea Zone numbers, Japanese colors for Germany, German Colors for Japan, etc?

You may probably want to try my mod of the map.bmp.

Download (451 KB)from
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?raquvyy1jyw

What I did is to recolour the seazone-numbers and the territory-names nation by nation. So my map.bmp will be an example. As everyone probably likes different colours I included a layered file. With the map as background there is a layer for the seazones and a layer for each nation. So it is easy to recolour the territory names nation by nation or only the seazone-names. There is a layer with every territory-name in white, too.

Just colour everything the way you like it. You will need paint.net to work with the layered file (.pdn-format). See www.getpaint.net

:-)

I will try it later today.

Honestly, I am trying to copy paste IL’s map into Battlemap.  His is really, REALLY pretty, but I don’t know if I can do it or not.  Problem is, I have to kinda squeeze his territories into the Battlemap territories so that no coding has to change, only graphics change.

Howdy all.

I found the latest incarnation of the AA50 map was not my favorite.  The colors were unpleasant (everything was too brown), and the labels made the map look very cluttered and they just stood out too much for my tastes. Sorry guys, but the word “garish” came to mind. So I set about to create a newer, more “stylish” version of the map.

The first thing to note is that I have only changed the coloring of the map, not the size or shape of any territories.  This map was based on the March 9, 2009 “compatibility” map, so as long as you are playing someone using that map, it should continue to be compatible with the map your opponents are using.

I want to offer credit and thanks to several people.  First and foremost to HolKann for putting together the AA50 maps and putting so much hard work into these modules.  Without his work I wouldn’t have had a map to work from.  Second I’d like to thank P@nther for putting the map into Paint.NET format and starting to add the layers.  I had been toying with that idea for some time, but it wasn’t until he started with it that I decided to get in to the file he started and really work with the image the way I wanted to.  Finally I want to credit cominges for his Art Deco Map as a sort of inspiration for this map.  I know this is nowhere near the style and artistic quality of his map, but his use of light colors and color shading gave me the inspiration for applying a lighter, shaded style to the map and making it look a little more like an “old fashioned” map.

Because the map is so much lighter than the standard, I had to recolor the toolpieces as well.  I’ve included a toolpieces for both 41 and 42.   I also changed some of the tokens to be more to my liking (HolKann prefers all roundels, I think some of the roundels are just difficult to draw that small and so some of the tokens look better as full flags)

In addition to the Map.bmp, I’ve also incuded the .pdn file (aa50_AlternateMap.pdn) so if you have Paint.NET (www.getpaint.net - it’s free!!!) and want to get in and customize it you can.  All the labels are in their own layers and therefore can be turned on and off.    If you’d like some explanation of all the layers, send me a PM.  Hopefully most of it would be self-explanatory if you are familiar with PDN.

I’ve been using the map in several games for the past few weeks to make sure it doesn’t have any compatibility or usability issues and I think it’s good to go, but send me a PM if you have any problems.  The files are pretty large and I didn’t bother to compress them.  Sorry if that is an issue for anyone trying to download them.

I’d appreciate hearing what you all think about this.

Tim’s alternate map file folder

Note, I’ve inlcuded a smaller, jpeg version of the map (click on attachment thumbnail below to expand) so you can get an idea what it looks like without downloading the full bmp.  Just don’t try to use that file with the game.  You have to go to the mediafire link above to get the real map.bmp and toolpieces.bmp’s

I like the look, but I have one concern.

There several variations of this map floating around. Does everyone have to be using the same map to pass moves back and forth? What if one person I’m playing with has the old map, and another has the new one? Can Abattlemap handle both at the same time?

The bmp file is just an overlay - other files tell the software where the various territories actually reside.  (HolKann can probably explain this a lot better than I can.)  But I’m pretty sure that as long as they’re based on the same set of other files (the sek files, etc.) it seems to work fine.  I’ve used this map, or earlier incarnations of it, for about a month now with no problems as long as everyone is using the march 9 set of files.