Re: (TFT) TFT Mapping

["maou_tsaou1@netzero.net" <maou_tsaou1@netzero.net>]

David;

I promised you specs for the "army in a pocket", "castle in a packet", etc. stuff.
You know, the armies on decks of cards.

I was gonna send you a bunch of "how Jay does it" junk, then I got to thinking about it.
Rather than tell you your business, I figure it'd be better to explain my scale system.

Okay, I draw everything on quarter inch graph-paper. 
The pocket army stuff started on the same scale as Squad Leader where each hex was 40m from one side to the opposite side.
As it's 4 squares across for the square hexes I draw, this would make all terrain come in at 1/4":10m, with 10m ~33feet, which is basically 7.5 hexes across on the Melee BattleMap scale.
The average separation between trees on earth is a bit over 4 feet, or in other words around 1 hex per tree.
Using this and basic reference information for trees you could actually do somewhat scaled forests for example.
But at a quarter inch per 10m and a 6 foot tall Figure coming in at under 2m (1.8) you'd have to get down to 1/16th of an inch for the people.
WAY too small for pretty artwork.

At 1/4inch each square is basically 2 hexes (10m / 4 = 2.5m, 1 TFT hex = 1.3m * 2 = 2.6m) and I can get 8 by 8 BattleMaps on a single page.
At 75m a douglas fir forest would stand between 6 to 8 inches tall.
Live Oaks at about 15m stand about an inch an a half but have spread.
Need dried dear moss? Guess where I live? I can collect bushels, and have a dehydrator.
Now if I double troop size your gonna have a REAL terrain problem owing to literal scale.
Let's call 3 pages length-wise by 4 pages width-wise a kinda practical limit for map size on a tabletop.
At the quarter inch height for troops I can fit one "athletic field" per page (this isn't exact but quite close and a good conceptual tie in.)
If I give another quarter inch to 1/2inch troop height, the pictures get prettier, but I go from 12 athletic fields down to 4.
This starts to get very restrictive, ah-la the original Melee BattleMap.

The Scale thing also cuts the other way.
At 1.5inches by 0.5inches per Figure silhouette, there's a quarter inch of thickness to a human Figure.
A giant (assuming simple double size, i.e. reverse halfling) would be 3inches by an inch silhouette and a half inch thick.
Make the hexes much bigger...
Anyway, being the lazy bastard that I am, I figured using the BattleMap Figures scaled down from an inch and a half to quarter inch.
Try to get "double duty" so to speak.

Anyway, back to terrain.

We use turning keys and card lengths for measurement and a half inch would screw with the system, the key mainly...
Do you think you could do stuff that'd reduce down to quarter inch all prutty like?

I've just been cutting and pasting google earth.
Literally.

I've got some stuff for cutting the contour angles for hills and such.
You know, x height by y distance equals z angle.

Wanna do historic battlefields in BattleMap sized map-segments, all 3-d like?




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