How to create good looking maps

@Lompestein Awesome work! Big thanks for including the .xcf’s and brushes as well, that should help others get a leg-up on their own projects.

Not much to say just sharing a map I made. As you can see it is heavily inspired by the War Room map, “hand drawn” and set to correspond to the original AA50 map 1:1.
This map is 100 cm in diameter or about 39 and a half inches.

You can see how it fits the units in the “images” section on BGG!

Good luck and have fun!

https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/237973/new-round-map-ana-50ae-fixed

1.png

And as a bonus the round map for AA - 1941: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/237931/new-round-map-ana-1941

Lompestein, thanks for the complements, pretty much everybody else was underwhelmed. I mounted a 5 ft version on press board I cut into a circle and mounted on a lazy susan so you could spin it. Played twice on it but the guys I played with were interested in the regular maps.

I made this after injuring my leg at work and was immobile for a while. It took a long time, about a couple of months of daily tinkering. I enjoyed it, kept me busy.

What I had to do was cut the map into about 16 to 20 horizontal strips. I didn’t keep the original files they died with an old computer I used. I used the polar function in gimp under distorts to spin the map into a circle.

I would then individually stretch vertically the strips to account for distortions at the outer and inner extremes. Spin unspin adjust, spin unspin adjust.

All the graphics had to be erased before doing this.

Repair all the borders. I also had to tweak individual land masses and continents by cutting them out and pasting them on new clear layers stretch and pull trial and error.

I believe the xcf file still has the graphics on a transparent layer over the map.

Feel free to do whatever you want to it and send me a pic of your results.

My motivation was the Gleason New Standard Map of 1892
https://www.amazon.com/Flat-Earth-Map-Gleasons-Rowbotham/dp/B01GQUW6PO?th=1

There was also a similar map used in WW 2 for people to track the progress of the war at home.

@Panther ah! daylight at last! thanks!!!

I thought about this as well, my 65" is not big enough for the OOB size…… after I saw that, I lol’d

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.

In the Amerika board game, there are a few rules when attacking city territories. The first is that artillery fires first in the opening round of combat and casualties are removed before continuing. The second is each city has it’s own Anti-aircraft guns which fire before combat begins and casualties are removed. This is not like the AA guns on factories, these are for ground assault. Lastly, the attacker can only use one round of combat to simulate the difficulty and length of time it takes to capture a city. I don’t know if this would transfer well to A&A though because there is also a stacking limit in Amerka. You would never be able to capture a capital in A&A if you stacked 20-30 units on it. You could make a limit of 2 or 3 rounds or something like that though.

@LHoffman:

Personally, I like the idea of having that area all around the board for all players to use. The good thing about not having made a table yet is that you can steal the best ideas from everyone else and incorporate them into your own.

Yes, that’s the nice thing about having a discussion forum where people share the result of their customization projects: it not only motivates people to try projects of their own, it also provides lots of ideas on which to drawn (sometimes including hard-won knowledge derived from failed experiments).

I have some pictures of my table in this thread:

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=32700.0

The photos which best show the side wings are titled 1 Left Table.jpg and 4 Right Table.jpg.