Thanks again Ven for the good comments.
I prefer 80x80 for the map tiles because then you make them more detailed and screen resolutions have increased so much since Imp1... Also I thought about having more than one drawing for each map type (like 2 somewhat different mountains, 2 plains, ...) and then in the map editor you can specify which variant of a map tile is displayed at each position. That should increase the diversion in the main map, where people will spend much time.
Rivers: I also thought about the many tiles you need to draw in order to make it work and then I thought maybe you can teach an algorithm to draw rivers for me. Given some parameters (the tiles the river crosses, a random generator seed for unique look) the programme would then paint the rivers upon loading a scenario by itself. I am not sure it will work but I would like to try it. However priority is low for this.
The same goes for shorelines or map tile transitions. Maybe I could invent a programme that generates not too dumb looking transitions. Otherwise I have experience with incorporating drawn shorelines. I already once programmed them for another 2D strategy game. Its some tedious work but not difficult in principle.
Basic tile colors:
Actually at one time I had the idea that we have a uniform tile background color and everything else on a tile like plains, mountains, forests, hills, ... is just an overlay. However if anyway the plains overlay covers the whole tile than the concept of tile background color has not much meaning.
But from a programming point of view the logic would be strikingly simple:
- paint tile background color
- above this paint tile type overlay
- above this paint resource overlay
- above this paint infrastructure/city overlay
- above this paint units overlay
...
Overlays are simple to be implemented. It's like the natural choice for doing such things.
Battle Map:
The Imp1 battle map was connected to the battle mechanics. Also it didn't offer much diversion. I wanted to change the battle (actually this would be the biggest change to Imp1) and go more in direction of Panzer General, one of my all time favorites. There a hex map is standard. By using tiles also for the battle map you can easily create many unique maps with only little effort. So in principe the battle map should look like the real map, only zoomed in. This means we have more tiles (smaller 48x48 (or anything that we agree on) and hexagonal instead of square). This way we could have unique battle grounds for every province easily.
Alternative: One could paint maps fully instead of composing them from tiles. What do you prefer? Would you be willing to draw a Europe in the 19th century map with unique shorelines, forest that grow over tile borders, ...? Or like 20 battle maps (30x30 tiles with a city in the center).
From a programming point of view we can easily support both variants: tile based or fully drawn background..
I think it's important for us to talk about the non-watercolor artwork of Imp1: menus, GUI, buttons, sliders, the diplomacy and trade screens, and the animated factories on the industry screen. In Imp1 those were done in something like 3DMax and Photoshop. Do we want to repeat this? Would we like to take a shot at using watercolors for all of it? In any case, we should use placeholders for the GUI as my initial work is going to be on main screen terrain, resource, and unit tiles.
I agree with you. The UI artwork can wait or we can work with placeholders. I have no real opinion how it should look like. If the map, resources, unit tiles are present the game will be playable and that counts much.