Help: adding crossable rivers in RTW battle editor?

[Stumble2]

Hi there,

I cannot find a way to make a river crossable. I have tried raising the height of the river bed, and even putting a road across the river, but there still seems to be an obstacle for my troops, about half way across. (A hidden wall maybe?)

I have tried extending an existing river by lowering the land nearby, but the river does not have a proper rippling surface (which makes it look terrible in-game), and the units will not cross the water, with or without a road, unless I built an above-water land bridge (which doesn't look like a ford at all!)

I know it can be done, NinjaCool's historic battle Camulodunum has a working river crossing.

Can someone suggest how I can achieve this, or point me in the right direction please?

Thanks!

[Seasoned Alcoholic]

I've never used the battlemap editor, but perhaps you could place a ford in the battlefield tile you working on. One way you could do this would be to start up an imperial campaign, and remove the fog of war (open the RomeShell console and type toggle_fow).

Now browse to the area of the battlemap you are working on. Once you locate the tile (or a nearest match), position your cursor over the relevant tile (it will obviously be a river tile), open the RomeShell console again and type in show_cursorstat.

This will display the X, Y coordinates of the tile, and I'm sure you can use these to specify a tile location when using the battle editor. Make a note of the coordinates, then exit RTW.

Now, you need an image editing tool for a quick update to one of the TGA map files. Browse to this directory location:

C:\Program Files\Activision\Rome - Total War\Data\world\maps\base

In this base folder, you'll see a TGA map file called map_features.tga. Create a backup of this file before modifying it. Now, using the image software of your choice, browse to the same directory location and open map_features.tga.

What you should see is a small map, primarily black with yellow, blue, light blue and red 'features'. I'd recommend zooming in about 6 times (x6) so you can see what you're doing. A quick summary of the different coloured lines / spots:

• Red = volcano
• Yellow = sea cliff
• Blue = rivers
• Light Blue = crossing points / fords
• White = river source

So as you can see from this summary list, we simply need to place a light blue (or aqua, turquoise etc) square into the relevant campaign map tile, in order for the ford to appear correctly on the battlefield.

First of all, change the settings of the pencil tool so that its pixel output is 1x1. Now, select the dropper tool, and click on a square which contains the light blue crossing point. This gives us the correct colour without having to adjust RGB colour settings manually.

Now, we need to work out which tile we should place the ne crossing point in. The X co-ordinate written down earlier will be exactly the same as the coordinates displayed in the image editor. However, you need to reverse the Y coordinate because image editors' Y coordinates start from the top left corner, whereas the Y coordinates in RTW start from the bottom left corner. All you need to do is subtract the Y value written down from 155 (the max Y value), and simply use the new Y coordinate (with the X coordinateto pinpoint your tile.

Select the pencil tool again, and apply the light blue crossing point to the appropriate tile. That should be it, so save your changes and close the TGA file.

Check out the tile using the battlemap editor and see if you have a ready-made ford in place before you start editing.

[EDIT:]You'll need to delete map.rwm from C:\Program Files\Activision\Rome - Total War\Data\world\maps\base in order for the game to regenerate the campaign map with the applied changes.

[Stumble2]

Wow!

Nice reply, thanks! I managed to get a fordable river by following your instructions, and it works like a charm (I would never have guessed that, myself!

It's a bit annoying that it creates the ford in the middle of the map, and for straight sections of river there are two fords, but hey, no sense in my being picky, at least I have a solution I can work with. Thanx!!

[Epistolary Richard]

And he's never even used the battle editor