Highlighting the map borders

Starting where I left off with AA50, here are The North Sea Route and the White Sea-Baltic Canal. For the WSC on the G40 map I also added Lake Ladoga and moved Leningrad to where it belongs on the coast of the Gulf of Finland/Baltic Sea. I’m going to experiment with a 2/3 smaller font for map features like this, let me know what you think.

Provisional Rules would be the same as AA50:

White Sea Canal
If the USSR controls Leningrad and neither Sea Zone is hostile, then during the non-combat movement phase the Soviet player may choose to have up to one naval unit with IPC cost <9 in either Sea Zone 127 or 115 take the “White Sea Canal” between these two Sea Zones. Taking this route uses the entire movement allowance of the moving ship.

North Sea Route
If the USSR controls both Nenetsia and the Soviet Far East and neither Sea Zone is hostile, then during the non-combat movement phase the Soviet player may choose to have up to one naval unit in either Sea Zone 127 or 3 take the “North Sea Route” between these two Sea Zones. Taking this route uses the entire movement allowance of the moving ship.

Unless they are being transported by the transiting naval units, all land and air units completely ignore the presence of the White Sea Canal and the North Sea Route.

Previews:

Screenshot 2026-01-23 104845.png

Screenshot 2026-01-23 104830.png

Overlays:

NSR_40_1.png

NSR_40_2.png

WSC_40.png

Sorry only just saw this

So step one would be finding the right image editing program for what you’re trying to achieve. TripleA uses raster graphics images (basically png) and is not suitable for printing. Upscaling the largest relief I’ve made in tripleA and trying to print it at 600 dpi the filesize gets quite beefy. Basically an image that’s like 50mb for use in tripleA is going to climb way up by orders of magnitude into the many gigabytes. It will also tax the RAM pretty hard if you’re trying to edit an image that large (in actual dimensions) like trying to use multiple layers at once. I have a pretty high end gaming laptop and I topped out around 8000p before GIMP started giving me headaches and slowing to a crawl.

What you probably want is an image that you can manipulate as SVG rather than PNG. A vector so you can upscale the image to any dimensions that way (basically the same way font works.) I would try Inkscape or Adobe, and try to get a pull of the image as a vector graphic.

You can start the same as you would in tripleA by creating a baseline image of the basic world map, the continent contours or world warp you want and the territory or sea zone divisions, showing just the basic borderlines in 100% black at 1px width at the desired dimensions for the digital thing.

A physical print would be much larger, so imagine that on your screen you got 72p per inch, on paper that needs to be 600 dpi. You can go lower say 300 dots per inch if it’s very graphic, but a photo quality print is basically like 600p, which is pretty hefty. In a program like inkscape or illustrator etc you can translate a raster image into something that works for stuff like signage, you know, so like making a giant banner image to put on the side of a truck or hang outside a building - same sorta deal here for the scale of the image you’d want to make. Probably the size of a 6 or 8 foot banquet table, possibly larger depending, on what you’re trying to pull off.

If you have the map drawn out at scale, you can scan in sections at A3 or A4 size with a flat scanner and then reassemble the image, to pull it at the highest resolution you can before bringing that image into inkscape to create a vector of it.

ps. here are some youtube tutorial videos on inkscape just to see what sort of stuff I mean. You can probably find more just pulling at those threads. Once you have a map design you can put in tripleA to playtest it by creating a baseline from your svg, exporting the image as a bitmap or png where the borderlines are just solid black ideally at 1px width for those lines, or as close as you can get. For a map image something that’s like 2000-4000p tall and about twice as wide or larger works well for digital sculpts which are png images at 48-54px tall up to 125% currently in tripleA. The map size in tripleA is sorta limited by the unit graphics sizes and the windows in the UI. In inkscape you can make it larger, like for whatever makes sense to have the print look decent. Anyhow, just a quick example you can skip around to see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ns028ihACs&list=PL_NagE_y_IhIBNAzw3nFBiF01OKnaltmJ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnqtnSTe6qM

https://youtu.be/kS2nrXuR128?t=2611

for tripleA you can use GIMP to make the relief images in png. Here’s an example of similar videos in that program

https://youtu.be/HLmOpEETjEo?t=646

@General-6-Stars ill find it for you and send the values

Well he did get map free. Just paid shipping costs. If he gives to you at just shipping costs probably be around 45 - 50 bucks.

Thnx IL!

This looks like the 1942 board judging from the border of the territories. Although the sea has been painted differently and the map shows anniversary.

Unfortunately the resolution is a bit small for a nice large print.

Try placing them in the northern Canadian territories, Alaska, and the northern Soviet Union. These are large territories that see little action in the game, so it’s justifiable to create blowup boxes in them, probably 8 or more.

I can see wizards of the coast having a blanket statement rejecting all requests to modify material, after all… they probaly deal with it alot with their D&D department than with Avilon Hill products.

From now on can we split Spain in half.
Even though its hardly relevant, its weird seeing a territory touch FIVE sea zones.