"Anyone playing on google map print-offs?" Topic

A few months ago I met some Wings of War guys who were playing on a giant google maps sattelite print off. Theyd made a few alterations to it, to show trench lines, but otherwise it was a plain old print off. Theyd had it made out of the material a thin mouse pad would be made od, or maybe a table mat. It was waterproof, could be drawn on with erasable markers, and could show every single tree down to an incredible level of resolution.
The map was six foot by four and they said it cost around a hundred bucks.

I though it was pretty incredible, and it really got me thinking. For something like an ACW or Napoleonic game maps like that would give you a level of tactical detail at any scale far beyond anything you could realistically model on a table. I spent a few hundred bucks trying to make super-fine terrain for my 4mm ACW figs, but I feel like a printoff like this puts what I did to shame. I also think that with a little ingenuity, like scattering finely ground foliage around, you could give such a map a hybrid sattelite/3d effect that would look pretty sweet.

Has anyone else tried this method out for games? If so how did you do the printing, what material did you get it printed on and how much did it run you? I think that sattelite maps might open up a whole new way of playing wargames, and Im hoping to experimentin detail with the form over the next few months.
Thanks!

No. But great idea!

I've done it for role playing games but not wargames.

I think it would be cool for a board-game type feel played with counters, but for a true miniature game with minis I need the 3D scenery with roads, houses, trees, etc.

Back in the '80s, "The Companions" whom I did some work for created "Islandia" for an RPG campaign system. This was done by taking a topo map of the state of Maine and flooding everything by 100'. They simply found the elevation lines from 100' above sea level, and that became the new sea level. Made a nice map without having to recreate geography and geology. Everything flowed and ran where it was supposed to, etc.

Here's some pictures on the Pendraken forum of a person doing just this.

link

Glad to see there's some interest in this!
I'm need to call up the guy I met at the hobby shop (Imperial Outpost in Glendale, AZ) and ask him about how and where he got his large print-out made. He told me a 6' x 4' rubberized print was only about 120 bucks, but that doesn't jive with the prices I've seen online for poster or banner prinitng, so its possible he had an inside deal (I think he told me he knew the owner of a print shop, in fact).

If you go to Kinkos or most places like that a print off big enuogh to cover a table would run you about $100 USD bucks on paper.

Looking at your link DW, it looks like the person took a single Google maps image and zoomed it out, which made it a bit blurry and gray-ish. If I did it myself I'd use a program to paste a bunch of images together. That would leave you with a gigantic .tif file that you could take to a print shop. After sing the expenses involved I'm thinking that I may try a trial run first. I'm going to use some image capture software to print off high quality standard-sized shots of google maps and the Ferraris maps this week, then use sticky back (like when I was an intel analyst in the military) to put them together as flawlessly as possible. The end resault should be good enough for me to figure out if this is a practical way to play wargames. My goal is to use google earths ground scale indicator (and the Ferraris scale, which I found out is a little under 1:11,000) to scale the maps perfectly to the footprint of my units. To beign with I'm going to try to create bmaps where a 40mm frontage base would equal 300m, in order to play games at Corps level. If that works out I want to try getting in even closer, which will require larger maps to play on. I would also like to try something like this for a mega-project I'm going to start once Oddzial Osmy comes out with thier Napoleonics (soon?). I'd like to do Grande Armee style bases with them but on 4" bases, with 300+ troops per base. It's going to look awesome but I want a pretty portable terrain system to go along with them.

I don't know if I liked the plain map with figs on top of it look by itself, but I think that you could use the map as a backdrop to place key terrain features on. For instance you could add trees with loose clump foliage, or mark bridges, or villages. The only real trick I haven't figured out yet is the elevation thing. The Ferraris maps do show terrain, so that's a step in the right direction at least. It'll be very interesting to get a map up and going to try this out, because I think once I start there's going to be a lot of interesting questions awaiting me concerning deployments of troops across various types of terrain as well as making command and control a lot more important. It could definately get pretty complicated pretty fast!

My friends and I used to play moderns by pushing plastic army men around cheap city maps when we were too young to know that we needed rules and dice to do gaming properly. Sounds like an interesting idea.

Billy Yank

Some warnings about Google maps and other current topo maps.

Over the last few hundred years there have been significant changes in the topography of everywhere.

Most "critical military areas" are places where roads cross rivers. Often these were a waterway surrounder by low-lying swampy areas, that were crossed by raised roads and causeways. Crossings are always high-value real estate, since they are travel choke-points. Filling these in to make solid ground for commerical or residental purposes is cost-effective. Over a few hundred years, these areas become build-up urbanized, above water level and the waterways are channelized and controlled.

Modern maps do not reflect what they were even 50 years ago, let alone 200 years ago.

Be careful.

1968Billsfan-

Tell me about it! If you go to Waterloo in the Ferraris maps its mostly woods. I'm not familiar enough with that battle to know if that was the case in 1815, but it was always my understanding that the terrain was much more open there than it appears on the map.

Ok, the real reason I'm posting is that I sat down at work today (when I probably should have been working) and did some screen captures, some printing, some numbers figuring and likewise. This all involved the Ferraris maps.

Ok, so, if you go to the Belgian website (google Ferraris maps if you're not alread in the know) you can click on one of the 250 or so maps and it'll come up in a window. Go to the zoom bar and click the + sign until you get to about 28%-30%. When you get to that zoom the map is scaled as such that a 30mm base will represent about 300m of frontage a la Grande Armee or Volley and Bayonet. From there you can figure out how much more zoom you'd need to play at the battalion level. As you'll see if you zoom below that window there is actually even more detail. The maps are .9 x 1.4 meters in size and at about 1:11,000 scale. This means that they represent roughly 11km x 16km of terrain. Thats a bit rough but it gives you an idea of what you're looking at.

I printed out a section of the map using powerpoint and screen capture. Even a normal sheet of printer paper contains an incredible amount of detail, roads, fields, villages and such at the detail level of the Ferraris maps. Way more, in fact, than any terrain board I have ever seen or could even imagine. It occured to me that playing on a Ferraris map, especially if you do it as a kriegspiel and factor in all the terrain at the battalion level, would give an absolutely unique wargames experience just due to the shear amount of terrain you'd have to deal with. I mean, between all the hedges, walls, roads, paths, groves, etc, it makes the average terrain board, including the ones I've slaved at while trying to force detail into, seem very rudimentary indeed. It would also present a lot of issues because the player would spend a lot of time looking for places to deploy his troops. It occured to me that this was probably one of the main activites of a Napoleonic commander- just finding a place where a quarter of a million men (or whatever) could set up in order to fight at all!

Looking at some of the terrain, it got me wondering how the troops fought in such restricted farm terrain, or if they fought there at all. ACW gaming involves all sorts of small, constricted fields that became their own compartmentalized battles. In fact, the main difference between ACW and Napoleonic games often seems to be the higher density of terrain features in ACW games. But a lot of the land in the Farraris maps at least is every bit as dense as terrain in the ACW. I wonder how that would effect a campaign game fought in Belgium. Did the armies simply avoid the agricultural areas in favor of the open fields? I actually got to thinking about Leipzig, although that isn't on the Ferrraris maps, it was fought outside and in a city and I'd imagine that the terrain aruond it was every bit as developed as the larger cities in Belgium.

Anyways, those are just some thoughts. I also found out another neat trick you can do if you want to try fighitng it out on the Ferraris maps. Belgium is pretty flat apparently, and the Farraris maps don't show much in the way of elevation lines. If you have Power Point though, you can place the maps at the scale you want on a page and then use the handy-dandy circle object to drop down contour lines. Then you can make these into any size or shape you want, put them at weight 1 so they aren't too thick and then place them somewhere. Then you copy that shape, shrink it a bit and place it inside the first circle, and keep doing that until you have it at the elevation you want. By doing this you can use the Ferraris maps to create a nearly endless series of different tactical situations. I have yet to actually print out enough to get a game in on, but from what I see it doesn't look like you'd need much more than 3 feet to get an incredibly detailed… maybe too detailed… game in.