In this section...
Nation selectionPlacing unitsAdding sighted areasAdding introductionsTesting scenariosSubmitting scenariosCreating new mapsIn this section... |
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Nation selectionPlacing unitsAdding sighted areasAdding introductionsTesting scenariosSubmitting scenariosCreating new maps |
Fortunes of War allows you to create new scenarios and maps rather easily.
First, you'll need a map. For instruction purposes, we'll assume you're using an existing map. Creation of new maps will be covered later in this section.
When you first boot Fortunes it is in scenario design mode. It will stay in this mode until you load a game. While in design mode, go to the Scenario menu at the top of the screen and select map/open. Go to the \Maps directory in your Fortunes installation and select any of the existing maps.
Once the map is loaded you may edit and resave the map if you wish. But for now, we'll keep the map the way it is and proceed to the next phase, selection of nations.
Now that you have a map you're happy with, go to the scenario menu and select New scenario. Alternatively, you may select Game/new off the scenario menu as well. It's the same thing.
Now you must decide how many players you want for your scenario and which nation types you wish to use. Once you've decided, return to the scenarios menu and select properties.
The properties dialogue has a number of tabs, each of which has several fields which contain scenario information. The default tab is Scenario and that's where you must begin.
Enter a title for your scenario. This will be used for the scenario's filenames. Put in your persona name under Author. Use your persona name rather than your real name since this field is used to link your scenarios back to your persona page.
At the bottom of the screen, you will see a list box which allows you to add or delete nation types to your scenario. Add the types you want and delete the nations you don't want. You may have multiple nations of the same type if you wish.
Next, you must edit each nation that you've included in the game. Click on each tab and fill in all fields. Note that you can enter up to six ruler titles which are selected randomly for use in the reports files. I'd like you to use all six since it makes the reports slightly less monotonous. You also select the nation's colour from this tab. Try to make sure that all player's colours are as distinct as possible.
At the bottom of the page several statistics are listed for the selected nation which gauge the nation's current strength. It's a good idea to return to this screen and check it periodically when you're placing units.
You will also notice a small button on each nation's tab which says edit nation. Don't mess with this for now. You can use this to change the stats for various units, but it won't help you in combat and might screw up your combat animations.
Once you're happy with all the nation text strings, hit Ok to return to the main map. Don't bother with the string table for now, save that for the final stage of creating the scenario.
Note: Due to a current display bug, you should save the scenario now and then reload it. If you don't, the list of current nations in the list control may not display properly.
Click on the top list box in the list control. This should give you a list of the currently active nations. Select the nation for which you wish to place units. Click the second list box and select glossary. This will allow you to place armies, leaders, and cities.
You can choose units from any nation by using the left and right arrow button on the list control. Thus, you could have Roman berserkers, or Parthian legions, for example. You may also place cities from any nation. Cities which are not of the player's nation type are treated as conquered cities. See the manual for details on conquered cities.
To place a unit, select it from the list and then select the hex on the main map where you want it to start. If you click and drag on a unit, it will move it to a new location. Once it's placed, you may right-click on the army to give it a name, if you wish.
Leaders are placed the same way, but you can not rename them. Leaders are accessed through the legends list.
Each nation must have one and only one ruler before the program will allow a game to begin. There are four types of rulers on the legends list. Pick the one you want for a given nation and place it. It's best to put a ruler in the capital unless you have something especially clever in mind. You can destroy a scenario very easily if you place the ruler in too dangerous an initial position. A player could well be eliminated in a turn or two.
Cities are placed in the same manner. You must right-click on a city after you've placed it to select it's caste - town, city, or capital -- or edit it's properties. Each nation may only have one capital.
Selecting the city's properties will allow you to edit the cities name and population. Population is usually best left alone, unless you have something specific in mind, but you must give all cities unique names for the reports to make any sense.
Continue this process until you have cities, armies, leaders, and a ruler placed for all the current nations. Remember to check the game properties when you're done to view statistics on each nation. This will help you see if your scenario is balanced. Save the game at this point.
There's an additional hassle to placing towns which we haven't quite solved.
Towns begin as one hex. However, they eventually grow into 3 hexes. A game can crash if you place a town in an area where it doesn't have sufficient strength to grow. For the moment, place all towns such that the two hexes on the right are on land. If you really want to place a town on the coast, you may have to edit the coastline to make this possible.
After you're finished your scenario, please make a second check to be sure that all your towns are in legal positions.
We've got a fix coming shortly. You will be able to designate the direction of a town's growth. If you right click on the town and view it's properties you'll see some graphics which imply this function is already added. It isn't, but it will be soon. Hopefully with the next update.
Sighting is initially given only to the areas around your cities, armies, and leaders. You can't even see your own empire, if you didn't have armies in a particular area, which gives rise to a frustrating period of having to scout out your own lands in a game. You get around this by painting in a sighted area for each player.
Pressing the control key and left-clicking with the mouse on any hex will toggle its seen/unseen state. You may drag the mouse and it will quickly paint large areas, particularly if you work in the lowest level of zoom. The mini-map isn't automatically refreshing as you do this, so once you're done, you'll have to select the nation again with the list control in order to view your changes.
I recommend allowing a player to see all of his initial territory, and a bit beyond. You may wish to experiment with using seen areas as a game balance tool. For example, in the Cataclysm scenario, Atlantis begins with extensive knowledge of the Atlantic coast, even for lands far beyond his empire, and has already mapped out the entrance into the Mediterranean. Carthage, on the other hand, was handicapped by the fact that one of her prime cities, Syracuse, was added to the spotted areas of three other players.
Do not have the ludicrous situation where cities within the same empire do not have a path of spotted hexes between them. If the path is unknown, how was the city ever founded in the first place?
There are three options in the scenario menu to help you paint the spotted areas.
This toggles whether the map shows the sighted area of the nation selected or whether it displays the whole map, without sighting information. Generally you want to hide the sighting grid for most scenario work, and only show it when painting the sighted area for each player.
This marks the whole map as unseen for all players, except for those hexes within the spotting range of currently placed cities and units. By the way, sighted means a hex that has been seen at some point in the game (that is, you know its terrain type). Spotted refers to hexes that are currently within the spotting range of a city or unit. (that is, you can see any units within it). In regular game play, if a hex is sighted but not spotted, it could contain a unit but you won't be able to see it. These hexes are shaded.
This paints the entire map as seen for all players. You might want to do this for scenarios where you judge an exploration phase to be inappropriate. For example, the Shogun scenario has all hexes sighted because it's silly to suppose that the Japanese warlords weren't familiar with the geography of Japan.
Once you're happy with the sighted areas for all players, save the scenario.
Go back to the scenario properties from the scenario menu. Go to the string table tab, which, you'll remember, we ignored when we filled in the other tabs. Now that your scenario is complete, it's time to write the introductions for each player.
The abstract should be one sentence, as short as you can make it, which describes the basic design concept behind the scenario. I want to add this field to the Join a game table shortly. Please do not use any HTML here, just plain text.
This is the string that all players see on the first turn. They'll get the introduction, then they'll get the advice tailored to their specific nation following the introduction.
For those of you who don't know any HTML, all I ask is that you place a <P> tag at the beginning of each paragraph.
Those of you who do know HTML may use other tags, but be very sure of what you're doing and don't do anything fancy. Please restrain yourself to italics, bold, lists, and tables. I don't want any font size changes or colours. No images allowed, either.
These are the strings that appear under Advice in each player's first turn report. The same HTML rules apply as for the introduction field.
Once the string table is filled out, save your scenario. The scenario is now complete.
Hit the Games button and select the scenario tab. Load the scenario you wish to use. If you've just created a scenario, it should be listed here.
Go to the Scenario menu and select Create test game.
Hit the Games button again. Go to the test games tab. The most recent listing, that is, the file with the highest number, should represent the test game you just created. You may load it, and then play all nations' turns by selecting them from the list control.
Hitting End Turn will advance to the next turn. Play many turns of your scenario from each nations perspective. There's a lot of factors to balance in Fortunes of War and it will take you a while to get the hang of it.
A scenario has three files:
Zip these three files and mail the zip to vonrex@webwars.com.
A scenario is not complete without all three of these files.
For now, I'm vetting all scenarios. Before long I'm hoping to have some of you trained to help me with this. This process is necessary because a game of Fortunes of War can take a month or two to play and that's too significant a time investment to make on an unbalanced scenario. Please be sure your scenario is as balanced and tested as possible before you submit it.
While there are many maps included with Fortunes, eventually you'll want to make your own.
You may take any bitmap and convert it to a hex map. This will take each pixel and change it to a terrain type based on its colour and link its edges to adjoining hexes. This allows you to very quickly draw maps just by scribbling out a small bitmap in any graphics program. The catch, at the moment, is that the converter is very picky - you must have the exact RGB value in the correct palette position for the image to work.
To get around this we've included a palette file in your \ Maps \ Map tools directory. It's called map palette colours.pal and is in Microsoft palette format. You can apply this palette to any image using any good graphics program. If your graphics program doesn't accept Microsoft palette information, we've included a ready-to-convert bitmap called sample map image.bmp. You can always lift the palette from this and save it in whatever format you prefer.
If you don't want to screw around with palettes, you could just edit the sample map and work from that. Make sure you save an unedited copy somewhere else, though. We've also included an image that displays the colours associated with various terrain types. It's called terrain colour data.bmp.
The size of the image in pixels is the size of the finished map in hexes. Don't make a map too large, or there will be no chance for a player to traverse it in the course of a regular game. The map of Europe that we use is 100 x 150 pixels and we find it's about the maximum reasonable size. Even a 50 x 50 map is big enough for a game with 3-4 players.
It's best to start with an image that is completely sea. Draw in your continents and islands with the grass colour and fill them in. Then draw your forests, deserts, swamps, and mountains on top of your continents and islands.
Note that, by necessity, most of the slots in the palette are black. Black is not understood by the converter, so before you're finished, you must remove all the black pixels.
Once you have your bitmap ready save it with your graphics program. It must be a 256 colour .bmp file. If you load the palette, or if you're working from the sample image, you won't have to worry about this.
Return to Fortunes and go to the Scenario menu. Select Maps / Convert Bitmap and load the bitmap you've just created. It will convert into a hex map and display in the main window.
You'll probably want to save the hex map at this stage. Go to Maps / Save As.... You now have a Fortunes game map with a .wmp extension.
By now you'll have the major terrain types, but there's still a fair bit of work to do. You must examine the coastlines and other linked terrain types and fix any anomalies and you should also lay down hills and rivers, which currently aren't handled by the bitmap converter.
There are two ways to do this. The first is by selecting terrain hexes and laying them down, similar to placing units. This is a most tedious process and is only good for small anomalies, like one or two hexes which didn't link properly. The second method is to use the layout control, which makes things much easier.
To access the layout sprite, select any terrain type (using the list control) and right click on the map. Select the layout sprite. This will give you a green arrow just like a unit's movement vector in a regular game. Place this vector however you want it, either in a line or an enclosed polygon, and right click on the vector when you're done. Select a terrain type. The vector will convert to the given terrain.
If you click on the layout vector's arrowhead, you may reverse the direction of the arrow. This is useful when you need to designate which side of the vector is grass and which is the chosen terrain.
You may use this same process to edit pre-existing maps, or to make changes to a map in scenario design mode to fit a specific scenario's needs. The map is included in the scenario file.
Once you're done, use Scenario/Maps/Save As... to save it.
Note: when you work with maps, any game currently loaded is deleted from memory, so if you want to create a new scenario with a different map, you must load or create the map, using Scenario/Maps/Open from menus and then select Scenario/Game/New from the menu.
We would like to automate more of these functions in the future.
These functions aren't quite ready. We'll add them shortly.
For the curious:
Next section: Appendix IV -- FAQ