Age of Mythology Guide for Scenario Design, by Nick The Hun
In this guide I will tell you
Chapter 1 Creating a village
Chapter 2 Landscape
2.1 Settings up a landscape
2.2 Wood
2.3 Water
2.4 Mountains
When making a village you start with making a centre point.
Why should I make a ‘centre’? You should make one, because it would turn out in chaos if you start with the walls or with a group of houses. A city or village always has a middle and mostly there are the main buildings, so to make it realistic I always start with a city-centre.
Lets start by placing a temple horizontal and add some road terrain in something like a circle to the south of it.
We will start by making it in a village, so start adding houses to it like this.
Where are the houses looking at? The middle, but not all of them are to make it look better!
And so you wont have a meeting of houses around the road place so I rotated some looking at other places, the closest ones to the temple are watching different places.
Now I will go a step further by adding other buildings and a wall around the village.
As you can see I added an armory, Longhouse and walls.
The armory also proves there is a centre, so does the longhouse and the new houses.
And now you can see how nicely you can make a round wall around the village.
You can see, we now advanced to the Classical age. We go to the heroic age now.
Also at the Market in the west you can see that I’m using a
This is how it will look like in the Mythic Age
You could place the 2 towers at the entrance at the back of the walls and upgrade them so it will look better but I just feel like this one. Also added a Healing Spring in the middle. For a close up it looks great, and add other stuff like flowers and trees in the village.
I like it more when it was in Heroic Age.
When I’m going to make a map with nature I mostly just start somewhere.
Out of the place where I started I build up in a circle, adding newer places near the point and more and more until I got another centre place. Mostly the start and other centre places are cities, player settlements, rivers or a sea.
I will give some regular tips typical about specific things.
Wood, placement of trees and forests.
Mountains, and hills.
Water, making rivers
When you are about to make masses of nature always first think what kind of place will it be, what climate, what colour of rocks do they have (for mountains), will there be open fields?, is it close to a sea or has it a river, does the place lay high on a mountain? Than what trees will I use because of height, any players with settlements?, nature units?, anything else?
Now you’ve thought about how the place will look like, you also know what trees you will use. Take for example: The place will have 5 mountains surrounding, mix of oak and pine trees, a river, a few open grass spots.
Now you think, where shall I start? Lets start with making a small forest.
Start with..
Open Forest Tool
Brush settings, make this setting: as small as possible.
Than press
Now start with putting a few trees in a middle area and put a few trees in wide distances.
Now we are going to have a medium area as forest.
Now I will show you the distance between the trees. Also try to put them randomly and not too closely together or to far.
Don’t put the trees
As you can see the forest is less thick of trees, also when you put trees in a small distance put them very close. And never put them carelessly with many at a small place, because that will turn out bad.
Now I will add a few Pine Forest, not to much because I already made pretty much Oak Trees. Also after that start putting a few rocks.
Also enlarge some of the trees, especially the Pine Trees because they are with less.
Now terrain painting, use different grass types and add a few Greek Rock near the rock/stones we added.
I think we still miss some nice things that spring out of the picture: flowers, height ground, animals, resources (goldmine, berry bush).
Now I did everything except the flowers, I will add some flowers, grass and plants.
Now you have your own
My first rule when making a map is, make the seas first than rivers and than everything else!
Later you can add a small lake or another (small) river but always first start with doing the water.
Now I will add a river next to our lovely forest.
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2
Make the rivers look like they are made by nature!
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4
Never make rivers straight, always let the rivers have some O’s or a 90 degree turned B like the third picture. At picture one where the river splits didn’t became that great but in a game like this you can’t really make that realistic. Always remember when making water, Never make it as straight as this:
Also when you make a beach think about the same things.
Now I will add a few hills and mountains near the rivers.
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2
3
Always keep a small distance when you put a mountain near a river, the distance of 2 or 3 trees near each other or you might end up like this.
Other tip, when making mountains near a river always click twice because than the mountains is higher but also it will look better and not like the picture above, because the above picture shows how ugly and undetailed the mountains are when they are on their standard height level near a river!
Now I will show you Inland Mountains.
If you ever played my game Punnic War, I was experimenting with making mountains on a small area but they needed to be high. They aren’t detailed but they are just basic mountains and the shape isn’t that bad. (I’m talking about the Italian inland mountains). Later I did the Alps in the game and those we’re way better.
Italian Inland Mountains:
These aren’t that bad, but the trees placement aren’t great. Also the mountains needed more height detailing.
Italian Alps Mountains, also from Punnic War
I even didn’t try to paint the mountains. I wasn’t far enough for that, I was experimenting about their construction and shapes.
These are screenshots from my game Mesopotamia Wars (2).
The shape is almost perfect, and I started painting the mountains to.
These mountains on this picture above, their left side looks like silver, they are painted with a cliff rock named Cliff A, this Cliff A isn’t used in any supremacy game that are standard in the AoM game.
This is a mountain passage between Babylon and the Akkadian town.
The shape this time really is nice, the mountain roof is painted, trees are placed well.
Thanks for reading, watching my guide. It was made on request for Dimir_Guildmage.
I posted it here for
Made by Nick_The_Hun
Thanks goes to the aom.heavengames.com Forum!
[This message has been edited by Nick The Hun (edited 02-10-2009 @ 02:38 PM).]