Harvest, an UHR terrainset

[VonBeerhofen 63]

A few pictures of this mixed set which was randomly contructed from some 400 terraintiles. UHR stands for Ultra High Resolution and consists of 512 x 512 tiles as opposed to hires which are 256 x 256 and lores which are 128 x 128. In this set 4 hires tiles are combined into a single UHR tile giving the game the equivalent of 256 tiles instead of 64 and puts the terrain in a more appropiate pespective and scale.

This new set made many hardly used tiles in EAW redundant by using them instead as field, grass, forrest, city, river, coast or mountain tiles. For instance, the BNROAD tiles only appear some 700 times in a 204.800 tiles terrain. This is hardly economic use and besides that the field tiles in this new set already have roads drawn on them resulting in a much more elaborate road system then the stock game.

The result is a much more diverse terrain which are essentially all field tiles, except for the river and coastal tiles (when in use). Even City tiles have field transitions and each city tile therefore lends itself to construct an entire city which can also use village tiles or can be used as individual village tiles too. It's number of used tiles is variable depending on the need, allowing for 10, 20 or any number of tiles to be used to construct cities.

This again has a great influence on the diversity of cities, but with a limited number of 64 tiles available in total also limits the field set somewhat. The same was done with forrest and mountain tiles, which can be constructed into large areas or just sit individually in between the fields, again greatly enhancing their use.

One could call this set the neverending terrain. New tiles are being created constantly and can be grouped in coloration, nature type or shape and as a group can replace other tiles to create inserts in the terrain which have a specific purpose, Industrial, Rural, Agricultural or Urban areas can be constructed at will. The approach even allows incorporating other tilesets with very little work, and conversions are fun to do.

Tile borders will fit ANY terrain, swamps, lakes, islands have already been created and await importing and like every terrain tile's creation can be further enhanced or changed depending on one's imagination. Stick bits and pieces on from other tiles or use cutouts from satelite photos, once you get going it's hard to stop, when bored or don't like it, just replace a few tiles and change the view!

VonBeerhofen

[rwatson 26]

Looks sharp VB !!

[MarkEAW 62]

Its as detailed as those old  Microsoft WWII Close Combat games I use to play. I can see the men now marching along a row of bushes....

Looks good and hi-rezzy. :)

[VonBeerhofen 63]

Naaah, unless you're talking about an earlier version then the one I have. I've thought about using those screens but they're too detailed for EAW. I'd say their graphics level is about 10 times higher then EAW's. Nice compliment though, and in a way it was those screens which got me into creating these.

VBH

[VonBeerhofen 63]

Here's a few more screenshots of the set, which I think gives a better view of the diversity of the 400+ tiles which are available to it.

VBH

[VonBeerhofen 63]

These tiles started out as a new approach to EAW map tiling and the first experiments in devellopment in 2010 culminated in a hires set I named BENELUX. It's primarily goal was to get rid of the annoying tileseams visible in most other sets and a lot of work went into develloping a method to get matching borders on all sides of the tiles. In the following 10 years I worked on improving the basic design of each tile and finding a better way in creating tilemaps which made better use of the low number of tiles stock EAW and EAWPRO can use. As I wrote previously, these tiles don't really need the BNROAD set, each tile has it's own design of main roads and secundary paths. The same is true for the BNALCTY set, as each city/village tile was made into a standalone tile which can function as a village or city component. This allows much more freedom in building cities and villages as there are no border tiles anymore, each tile can function as a border or perhaps better each city is just a collection of village tiles. Borders have been hampering map design and by doing away with them it's become much easier to create new theatres from scratch. Besides that, each tile has at least a few farms or small farming communities on them, simmilar to the stock EAW village tiles. Many of these farms now sit on various corners or sides of the tile and small villages appear where the sides or corners meet. City and village tiles can be used to further diversify the tilemap, simmilar as was done with the bridges, roads, mountain and forrest tiles. They can appear 100'ds of times more often in any combination with the other tiles which results in a much more natural looking terrain. When groups of mountain tiles are placed in a specific area you still get a predominantly mountainous terrain but you can also use each of those tiles in other areas which are not meant to look predominantly mountainous. Ofcourse the same goes for forrest tiles too.

To show this improvement better here's a few pictures of my latest creations in the BENELUX set, i.e. these tiles are stock EAW format, 8 bit and just 256 x 256 pixels and all have a mix of roads, village, forrest, field and mountain in them. Ofcourse mountain tiles have more mountain drawings and forrest tiles have more forrest drawings on them, but there's total freedom in choosing how much of each nature is used. EAW is just not a unified collection of a single approach to theatre building, if you stick to old fashioned methods you just can not get the best out of each theatre which is so very different from stock EAW. What's the use of river tiles in a desert terrain or why have fields in a predominantly jungle terrain and uninhabited islands?

VBH

[MarkEAW 62]

I'm sure its a lot of work, and tedious. If you enjoy it, why not right?

If the road and other riles are not used, will they not have properties if they are just part of a tile?

Or do roads not have different properties than the grass around them?

[VonBeerhofen 63]

The road tiles are used as well but in a more generic way, in a way nearly every tile is a road tile and can be used as such. The road tiles don't appear very often in stock EAW and are essentially a waste of precious resources. I use them as standalone tiles besides road tiles, so they appear much more often. The only properties in EAW are water or land, roads don't have a special property but they're normally used to have interdiction convoys driving on them. The convoys can be placed on any land tile though but I haven't stepped away from the game's normal use of convoys other then that they can be larger and have a more interesting mix of vehicles. The extra placement of standalone roadtiles can also spawn way more convoys then the stock game, so the chances of running into one is way higher in all mission types. It's the same with trains if you create more rails in the game.

VBH