Editing 'Items' on the Campaign Map (not resources)

[Seasoned Alcoholic]

Does anyone know of any quick ways of editing 'items' on the campaign map? By items, I'm referring to the various areas on the map, EG woodland, plains, sea cliffs etc.

I'm looking to remove various woodland areas from the campaign map in order for roads (when they're automatically generated per region) to be laid. At present, roads don't cut through woodland, but instead attempt to 'meander around' woodland instead, looking for a way through. This is a bit of a pain, especially if you're trying to link a road to a settlement's port! The road obviously won't be created if it can't find a way through.

I'm also trying to remove sea cliffs (IE the terrain similar to the north Spanish coasts, Cyrenaica, parts of Sardinia etc). These annoying bits of terrain are good at preventing enemies from landing, but also mean that you can't build ports or anything else on or near to these parts of terrain.

I've read some search results which point to editing map_heights.hgt, but are there any shortcuts that can be taken without editing this file? Thanks!

[EDIT:]W'hey, wrong forum! Shows my mind is not on things at the minute... Mods, please feel free to move this to Modding Questions, thanks.

[Tittils]

The easiest thing to do, would be to edit the map_ground_types.tga for the woodlands, and map_features.tga for the cliffs. To add ports you just add a white dot by the sea in map_regions.tga. All these files are found in data/world/maps/base.

I hope this helps.

[Seasoned Alcoholic]

Many thanks for this, I've been relocating vanilla settlements to roughly their historical locations. It seems that in vanilla most of these settlements are out-of-place by default, and looks as though they've been positioned for greatest accessibility purposes more than anything else.