Mapping software?

Anybody tried making their own maps? I've toyed around with Wonderdraft, Inkarnate, and the like but it seems like the scale of map we want for kriegsspiel is kind of lost in the shuffle. Like you can make an amazingly detailed skirmish map for individual characters about the size of a farm or hamlet, or a continental or regional map that covers an area dozens or hundreds of miles across. But it seems very hard to find anything that does an area a few miles wide very well. The other problem is finding graphical assets. Lots of appropriate buildings or trees, but good hills are simply nonexistent. It seems like any existing hill graphics are isometric. Top-down hills might as well be photographic evidence of unicorns.

Hi Damon.  I'm not aware of any mapping software that hits your sweet spot, and would be interested if anyone else is.

An alternative is to find appropriate historical maps, and there we are better-served.  You can find links to various archived staff maps in our Maps section here

https://kriegsspiel.forumotion.net/f13-maps

The following is an example of a map of the Baden area of SW Germany.  Alone or in combination with others in the series, you could easily run a larger scale game.  Key terrain features, such as towns, rivers, streams, roads, marshes, woods, hills and mountains are all there.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Charte_von_Schwaben_Tafel_11_Baden.jpg?uselang=en-gb

That one's in b&w but there are other maps in the section which are somewhat later, perhaps clearer, and in colour.  They might be more to a modern taste.

Not exactly what you were asking for, but I'm hoping it's of some assistance.

Martin J

Yeah, historical maps are where I usually start, but sometimes I find that I can't find a great map of a particular battlefield I'm looking for, or worse, I find an amazing map but it's only available online as a crappy low res jpg!

Some of us in the IKS are interested in potentially gaming the Mexican-American War but there is just an absolute dearth of good maps for it

Don't know if it will help in this case, but you might consider searching in a different language. I do that a lot when researching European wars, as frequently English sources are so limited.

If you are using Google, you an set the primary search language - in this case Spanish. You can even use a version of Spanish used in Latin America. Having made that selection, I use Spanish words for my search criteria.

Just a thought.

Martin J

I some times use QGis to make maps from older ones, its also possible to add own features etc. Its a bit of a learning curve but many youtube videos about how to use it. As it is a "real" GIS its perhaps not as nice layouts etc as Inkarnate etc.

Best regards

M.