ModAAR: American Front, a CSA v USA WIP mod

[The Land]

Hi FOARP! Just wondering - do you have any top map-modding tips based on this experience? I saw what you said about coastlines and using cities as 'anchors'...

BTW Alikchi, if you're interested I can post a bit about the diplomacy events I'm doing for the 1911 mod in that thread?

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 19 - Labrador

Hello all. Just a quick post for Labrador - I'm really not going to spend much time on this (though fiddling with this area still took 1-2 hours of my time, most of it spent on coastlines/lakes...) as it's basically uninhabited at this time (Labrador City, Happy Valley, Goose Bay, Mary's Bay - all founded in the 1930s and later). At some point I'll come back and do a proper job of the terrain.

[FOARP]

ORIGINAL: The Land

Hi FOARP! Just wondering - do you have any top map-modding tips based on this experience? I saw what you said about coastlines and using cities as 'anchors'...

BTW Alikchi, if you're interested I can post a bit about the diplomacy events I'm doing for the 1911 mod in that thread?

Mostly just starting from the coast and working your way inward, sense-checking locations as you go, being aware of map projection distortion if you're working from a real-world map, and keeping in mind the need for "battleground areas" on the maps that need to be easily accessible and other areas that you may want to restrict access to using water-features, depressions and so-forth.

[Hairog]

Monumental task FOARP. I can't even contemplate doing maps. Boggles my mind how you guys can get those tiles to do their thing.

[FOARP]

ORIGINAL: Hairog

Monumental task FOARP. I can't even contemplate doing maps. Boggles my mind how you guys can get those tiles to do their thing.

It really is not an intuitively designed editor, but I'm slowly making progress. Being in lock-down has kind of helped TBH, though on the flip side I recently discovered Battle Brothers which is really an addictive game....

Currently working over on the other coast with the Alaskan panhandle and Northern British Columbia, trying to get the Pacific Trunk railway in the right place. Hopefully more this week. Long term plan is to finish all the coasts and then work my way inland. Some parts of the map are obviously not going to get much detail (e.g., the Canadian wilderness, the various deserts).

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 19 - The Alaskan Panhandle

A small update today on progress on the map. The small extension of Russian territory (in this timeline, the Seward purchase never took place to Alaska is still ruled by the Tsar) is now done. My greatest problem here is simply fitting in the islands in a way that even vaguely corresponds to what you would see on the map, and I can't say I'm greatly pleased with the result but it will have to do for the moment.

I have left the border between Alaska and Canada as it was decided historically. Although the British claimed the Alaskan pandhandle up to the inlets to the Pacific, I have assumed that they settled with the Russians in the same way they did with the US historically - the books give no guidance on this.

The books are very clear that Russia had not done much to develop "Russian America" (as the territory is known), so I have refrained from adding any settlements that were not historically founded in this area before 1867. This actually leaves only three that I've been able to find - the capital at Sitka (known as Novo Archangelsk under Russian rule) and the two trading posts at Wrangel (known as Redoubt San Dionisio, or Svyatogo Dionisiya in Russian) and Fort Durham (also known as Fort Taku - I have gone with this name as it sounds less like English). Even though Prince Of Wales Island had (and has) significant amounts of gold mining historically, I could find nothing about Russian settlement of that territory. If anyone knows of other Russian-era settlements in the southern Alaskan panhandle, let me know and I'll see about adding them.

In-game, this territory will be significant for two reasons. Firstly, Russian divisions will be deployed here by event that can then be sent by rail to fight the Yanks. Secondly, this will be the landing-ground for a convoy from Vladivostok, probably worth 10 MPP.

Also shown is the Canadian port of Prince Rupert, terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, historically completed 7 April, 1914, with the final spike driven at Fort Fraser. I plan for this to be the landing-ground for a trading convoy from an Asian country (maybe China, since a larger convoy from Japan will land at Vancouver) worth possibly 5 MPP. A small, ahistorical extension of the railway links Prince Rupert to Alaska to facilitate the movement of Russian troops.

[FOARP]

ORIGINAL: FOARP

ORIGINAL: The Land

Hi FOARP! Just wondering - do you have any top map-modding tips based on this experience? I saw what you said about coastlines and using cities as 'anchors'...

BTW Alikchi, if you're interested I can post a bit about the diplomacy events I'm doing for the 1911 mod in that thread?

Mostly just starting from the coast and working your way inward, sense-checking locations as you go, being aware of map projection distortion if you're working from a real-world map, and keeping in mind the need for "battleground areas" on the maps that need to be easily accessible and other areas that you may want to restrict access to using water-features, depressions and so-forth.

Oh, and one other thing - the editor has been pretty stable so far and I haven't had any problems, but just for sanity's sake make sure you make a back-up save regularly.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 20 - Northern British Columbia

Hello again, this week I've been working on adding the Canadian province of British Columbia to the map.

First comment on this: wow! BC is HUGE (EDIT: as large as modern-day Germany and France combined, apparently)! And has loads of lakes! As such, in order not to end up spending weeks on this part of the map, I've concentrated mainly on adding detail along the lines of the railways and road, and unpopulated areas have been treated with a broad brush.

The main focus here is on creating, in as much as is possible whilst remaining true to reality and the scenario of the books, easily defensible terrain for the Canadians to hold against the Yanks, with multiple east-west lines of communication. As already discussed above the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway follows its historical course across British Columbia to the Pacific port of Prince Rupert, but additionally the Pacific Great Eastern Railway was, in this scenario, finished in its entirety before the 1914 start-date of the game, and connects Prince George directly to Squamish on the Pacific coast. I'm assuming that transportation routes such as these would have received more government support than they did historically given the need for them in case of an invasion.

Any criticism/corrections to the map are welcome - this is very much a first draft. Also, apologies for the poor quality of the image - the 200kb file size limit on this forum means I had to drop the quality down to 24% to post this.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 21 - southern British Columbia

Hi. This week I've been working on finishing British Columbia.

The southern part of British Columbia includes the major city and port of Vancouver, where convoys from Japan will arrive, and the naval base of Victoria on Vancouver Island. Further east are the important towns of Kamloops and Kelowna, and then finally the three major passes over the Canadian Rockies at Crowsnest, Kicking Horse, and Yellowhead - he who holds the passes controls east-west transport within Canada!

In terms of design-choices, there were three important ones to be made this time out:

1) To include post-1914 reservoirs or not? Given the lack of accessible maps of how things looked before these reservoirs filled, I didn't really have a choice about this.

2) Metalled roads or dirt? I could only find historical information about one major highway in BC, and that was that the Crowsnest Highway along the US border was finished (and tarmacked) in 1928 - given that construction of it started earlier, and that it was connecting up pre-existing metalled roads, I've assumed that this is a metalled road whilst the rest of the roads in BC were not.

3) Historically some of the railways in BC weren't yet finished, but I've assumed that in TL-191 there would have been more investment in getting them built.

See the map below for more details. Again, apologies about the poor resolution of the map, which is caused by the 200kb limit.

As usual, any and all criticism and questions are welcome.

Next stop: Washington State.

[eightroomofelixir]

An interesting observation about Vancouver in the American Front trilogy: It seems like the city was never taken by USA forces.

In American Front, Carsten mentioned that the Royal Navy (and later Imperial Japanese Navy) used Vancouver (as well as Victoria) as a major naval base in Pacific, to the point which the Seattle/North Pacific Squadron of USA Navy basically cannot sail out of Puget Sound. I assume this strong presence of Royal Navy kept USA from launching a direct assault towards Vancouver; or, as the situation in Utah suggests, the USA War Department simply did not relocate enough land forces to Seattle.
The following two books do not mention Seattle or Vancouver ever again, but we can assume that Vancouver still remained in Canadian hands: USA's main campaign in western Canada was about taking the the passes of the Canadian Rockies, rather than attack Vancouver or cut railway between Vancouver and the passes.

Maybe add one more major port to Vancouver for holding ships, and put a chunk of British land forces here later.

[eightroomofelixir]

In terms of reservoirs and roads:

For reservoirs, some inference will be enough. Most of the reservoirs will follow the course of the river, result in a long and narrow shape; the original course of the river should reflected in the current shape of the reservoirs. If the lake existed before the reservoir, due to the canyon-rich geography of BC, they should also follow the course of the rivers.

For roads, I think game mechanism can be taken into consideration. For instance, USA should have no problem reaching Crowsnest Pass, but will be bogged down near Kicking Horse Pass. If Canadians do not have enough forces near Kicking Horse Pass initially, the road/supply situation on USA's direction of advancing can be set to worse, in order to slow them down.

[FOARP]

ORIGINAL: eightroomofelixir

An interesting observation about Vancouver in the American Front trilogy: It seems like the city was never taken by USA forces.

In American Front, Carsten mentioned that the Royal Navy (and later Imperial Japanese Navy) used Vancouver (as well as Victoria) as a major naval base in Pacific, to the point which the Seattle/North Pacific Squadron of USA Navy basically cannot sail out of Puget Sound. I assume this strong presence of Royal Navy kept USA from launching a direct assault towards Vancouver; or, as the situation in Utah suggests, the USA War Department simply did not relocate enough land forces to Seattle.
The following two books do not mention Seattle or Vancouver ever again, but we can assume that Vancouver still remained in Canadian hands: USA's main campaign in western Canada was about taking the the passes of the Canadian Rockies, rather than attack Vancouver or cut railway between Vancouver and the passes.

Maybe add one more major port to Vancouver for holding ships, and put a chunk of British land forces here later.

I'm assuming that this is covered by the (historical) major naval base at Esquimalt outside Victoria on Vancouver island (just off the bottom of the map provided above), but yes, the idea is that Vancouver BC should be well fortified so as to explain why US forces didn't just take Vancourver city and cut off the flow of goods from the Pacific there. Of course, this is one of the harder aspects of the war as formulated by Turtledove - it is the equivalent of the Germans advancing all the way to Moscow whilst leaving Odessa in Russian hands.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 22 - Washington State

Hi All. Now we're back south of the border in the USA. First stop of the Pacific coast of the USA - Washington State. The main population centre of this state is along the east shore of Puget sound, with the city of Seattle and the towns of Tacoma and the state capital of Olympia. Whilst this was historically in 1914 not yet the major centre of industry it became during WW2, it is still an important centre for ship-building and as a naval base (I'm thinking of a light cruiser and a pre-dreadnought being based here). Outside the Puget sound area Spokane is the only town of great consequence, with the Ruby Mining District the main centre for resource production in the state.

Generally the state has a wet climate in the west and, east of the Cascade mountains, becomes more arid - I did experiment with desert terrain but this looked out of place, so I've just gone for plains with scrub here.

Oregon is next up. As always, any and all comments are welcome.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 23 - Oregon

Hello again. I've now reached the great state of Oregon, the 20th (and largest) US state that I've done thus far. Happily in terms of detail this can be covered with a broad brush. There are two main railway networks in the region - the Central Oregon and Pacific Railroad that connects Portland to Yreka across the border in California, as well as having a branch-line extending down the coast to Coos Bay, and the section of the Union Pacific Railroad that extends across the north-western corner of the state from Boise, Idaho up to Kennewick in Washington State.

The state has only one city of consequence, Portland, but in terms of mining the gold mines of the region are well known, and the the name "Whiskey Gulch" was irresistible.

The high desert of the western US begins here as well. Whilst I'm aware that high desert is not the same as the Saharan kind depicted in the in-game graphics, there is limited graphics with which to cover it.

[eightroomofelixir]

Oregon looks massive (it is massive though, larger than the size of the United Kingdom), although it is very likely that it will not see any actions. Many western USA states are not likely to see actions as well, besides southwest states and Utah. Don't know how it will affect the layout of cities and roads, what will be your design strategy for these regions?

[FOARP]

The strategy is pretty much just add in enough so that it doesn’t look empty, and so that there’s enough infrastructure there to have a decent fight with if the Limeys/Canucks/Rebs ever make it that far. This is also supposed to be a map that can be used for other North America scenarios (e.g., an Axis invasion of the US) so I’m keeping an eye towards that as well.

For places like Nevada it’s difficult, however - the total population of Nevada in 1910 was about 80,000 and the largest city was Reno with just over 10,000. Even the state capital at Carson City only had a few thousand people living there. In this scenario, with the US Civil War finishing in 1862, it is questionable whether Nevada would even be a state yet at this point. So I guess Nevada might just be a few settlements (MAYBE either Carson City or Reno as a town just to signify that they are the biggest town/the state capital), some desert, and whatever there was in the way of roads/railway crossing the state? And a lake or two I guess.

I had considered just not doing anything in the western states to save me the weeks it will take to put them in, but there’s simply no realistic way of doing this. Leaving them blank would look bad, and I’m pretty sure people will expect to see them there. They are more or less surrounded by terrain where fighting will take place so there’s no way of simply cropping them out. Ultimately this map isn’t only supposed to be for TL-191 but for general use as well, and even just for TL-191 I’m sure there’s some CSA players who would like to try out a “Western Strategy”, so I’ve opted for putting them in but not with the same level of detail necessarily as the East coast.

As you say, Utah will be a focus point - plan is to put in whatever realistic choke-points that might have been defensible there, and to see to what extent Salt Lake City, Provo, and other Utah cities can be made into garrisoned fortresses by event.

Long term I’d like to add some North American-style desert terrain to the game, as the Saharan-type dune fields that the base game has really don’t look right - something with Cactuses and so-forth.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 24 - Northern California

Hi. This time we're visiting the state that, in the immortal words of Dr. Dre and 2Pac, "knows how to party".

The books don't provide that much detail on what California is like during this period, but it is clear that - just like in our time line - California is one of the richer states of the US and a place experiencing rapid economic expansion. For all that certain important pieces of infrastructure, most notably the bridges across Sand Francisco bay including the famous Golden Gate, are still yet to be built. Cities that now are home to hundreds of thousands of people (e.g., Sacramento) were merely largish-towns in the 1910's, and even the major naval base of San Francisco, currently recovering from the devastating earthquake of 1906, is still yet to top 500,000 people.

For California at least there is some useful information about when and where the first real system of highways (represented as metalled roads) was built, but it does not yet cover the whole state.

One question I've had here is to what extent the various alkali lakes and basins of this area are similar to the Qattara Depression (i.e., the area of Egypt south of El Alamein that was thought impenetrable to tanks). Theoretically the large parts of the south-western US, including almost the entire state of Nevada, could be modelled as "depression" terrain as it is an Endorheic basin just like Qattara, but I don't think this would be realistic. Instead I'm opting for making these areas desert except for those area that seem likely to be simply deadly to operate in, such as Death Valley.

I've already got SoCal more or less finished, but I thought I'd post Northern California separately to avoid having to drop the image quality too low. Any criticism or comments anyone may have are very much welcome.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 25 - Southern California

....and after some finishing touches (adding in the oil fields at Pico Canyon and tinkering with the course of the Colorado River), here's Southern California. I've tried to make California in general relatively "dense" in terms of settlements and things worth fighting for. This is more with an eye to a possible WW2 Axis invasion scenario than for TL-191 as I don't expect much fighting to occur here - you can imagine the Japanese landing around San Francisco and LA and then advancing along the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River valleys.

In terms of over-all progress, this is how things look:

US States: 22/50
Canadian on-map provinces & territories: 5/10
Mexican states: 30/32 (I haven't shown you these yet)
Caribbean on-map countries/territories: 14/14

So we're now probably at or over the half-way point on this map-build. To be honest it has taken a lot longer than I thought it would take to get this map laid down, but it's the complexity of the system, and the level of detail that needs to be added, that makes progress so slow.

[eightroomofelixir]

On Northern CA:
I think Fort Bragg, CA wasn't really a military fort anymore around 1914.
Seems like the port east of San Francisco is being landlocked (I know it's hard to change coastlines so you can visit that later, or to use the SF in WWII map as a reference)
The area west of Susanville is very mountainous IRL rather than a wide mountain pass. If I recall correctly there are many dead volcanos and a snow covered peak (Lassen Peak) in that part of the Sierra Nevada.

On Southern CA:
Bakersfield has an important oilfield named Kern River Oilfield. The area between Bakersfield and LA are also pretty mountainous.
San Diego can have more than one port to present its importance as a major naval base.
Inland Empire are surrounded by mountains, and Joshua Tree is basically mountains. Some desert mountain hexes may help?

CA in general:
I think a large portion of mountain ridge of Sierra Nevada is worth high mountain (with snow) hexes. The ridge between Lake Tahoe and Ridgecrest is generally snow covered when viewing from the San Joaquin Valley.

[FOARP]

I think Fort Bragg, CA wasn't really a military fort anymore around 1914.

Good catch. Also, the US having a fort named after Braxton Bragg seems a bit off in this timeline, but it got its name pre-1860 so maybe it kept it?

Seems like the port east of San Francisco is being landlocked (I know it's hard to change coastlines so you can visit that later, or to use the SF in WWII map as a reference)

Fixed. Really wish there was a more elegant way of handling this kind of issue but the only solution to shoe-horn a land/sea hex in there, and land/sea hexes can't have resources on them so I've got to move San Raphael northwards a bit.

The area west of Susanville is very mountainous IRL rather than a wide mountain pass. If I recall correctly there are many dead volcanos and a snow covered peak (Lassen Peak) in that part of the Sierra Nevada.

Fixed and added in Lassen peak.

Bakersfield has an important oilfield named Kern River Oilfield. The area between Bakersfield and LA are also pretty mountainous.

Added in Kern River and the mountains.

San Diego can have more than one port to present its importance as a major naval base.

Can't be done with the restrictions on port placement so I replaced the minor port with a major. Either San Diego or LA will be the landing point for a convoy from South America that is routed past Baja California to give you a reason for wanting to get rid of the CSA subs operating out of there.

Inland Empire are surrounded by mountains, and Joshua Tree is basically mountains. Some desert mountain hexes may help?

I'm trying to work out how to make "desert mountains". There is no specific terrain-type called that, there is only the bare mountains that I am already using - but these appear green. I can definitely see mountains that appear desert-type in the base game scenarios, but these are the same bare mountain terrain-type. I guess the easiest thing is just to ask Bill in the main forum.

I think a large portion of mountain ridge of Sierra Nevada is worth high mountain (with snow) hexes. The ridge between Lake Tahoe and Ridgecrest is generally snow covered when viewing from the San Joaquin Valley.

Made the ridge-line there high mountain.