[DRG]

Bill, if you want to get a feel for what the random map generator is capable of and see how the maps change over a "year" Try this. It'll take maybe fifteen minutes tops. Run it from the battle generator, it ensures you see correct changes to the maps for the various seasons

Set the map to 40x80 in preferences . This is just a convient size to see the how the MapGen produces a map. If you try this on larger or smaller sized maps the features tend to become wider spaced on really large maps and compressed on really small ones. I knew about this when I started working on the code to build the maps and left it alone becasue in means a wider variety of maps

Set P1 to Germany and P2 to Russia.

Set the month to January. The year does not matter nor does the battle type

Press continue to go to the purchase menu. Once there press "View map"

Once you are in the View map screen press the upper top right button and set the map ID to 119. Once a map appears press the middle top button a few times to generate different versions of that map in January

Now repeat the process for March. ( you can skip Febuary as it gives much the same map as January ). With March I recommend you press the middle top button a couple dozen times. March is a transition month. Sometimes you'll get "winter" sometimes "winter with some thawing" sometimes a "spring with snow patches" map.

Repeat the process with map 119 through April ( spring like maps with some dead winter grass still showing )
May ( full spring with everything green ) through the summer where late august starts to show dry grass from the summer heat with different coloured fields. October gives fall colours on the trees, November gives bare trees and occasional snow patchs

The point to all this is that some of these terrain features ONLY show up in the map editor by season so seeing how the game handles this by itself demonstrates the kind of terrain available. For example, yellowed grass only appears as an option as "Base terrain" in Novemeber - March IF you are set to summer. If you are set to winter you'll get snow but if you are set to summer and the month is April - October your base terrain grass will be green. When building maps you may find it necesary to switch from one month to the other to add variety to your maps

Once you've done that press the lower middle button and play with the actual map generator a bit. Maps can be saved at any point in this process for use later.

One last thing to keep in mind. The maps were built for a variety of locations with two specific nation in mind. When they are generated with two opponents that a widely different than the orginal you sometimes get "odd" things occuring but that is only becasue the map generator is giving you want you asked for . If you had Saudi Arabia vs Iraq set in January as the two opponents in the battle generator and press map 119 your map will be entirly different than the one you saw with Germany vs Russia in January. Try SA vs Iraq in July with Map 119 and it will generally look the same as the German/Russian one but you will see more "dry" areas with bare earth showing if you generate enough maps

Don