Vassal Map Hack

As I am mired into inaction by my indecision over color schemes for Res Publica, my mind has turned to campaign ideas, for both Venus and WWI in Italy. The latter is the concern of this post.

There are two articles in the current issue of Lone Warrior (#222) that are in part responsible for this diversion, as well.

Although I very much want to use a map, for WWI,  hexes force me into a state of worrying about area, unit frontages, etc. Which is fine, but I'm trying to be a little more "toy soldiers"  and flexible about that sort of thing - units for example, are probably going to be two companies per battalion, two battalions per regiment, two regiments per brigade, etc.

But, like I said, I really want to use a map. 

Inspired by the articles in the aforementioned issue of Lone Warrior, I decided to create a point to point map

I didn't just want to randomly draw some points on paper, I wanted it to reflect actual places in Italy that were fought over.

One of the few remaining boardgames in my collection is Burning Mountains 1916, which covers that very topic. It has a lovely map and would make a good basis for a campaign. However, I have no intention of marking up the map.

Somewhere, and I cannot recall where (BoardgameGeek maybe?), I learned that if you rename a Vassal module to a .zip extension, you can treat it like any other compressed folder and you can extract the contents, including the map.

There is a module for Burning Mountains 1916, so I grabbed the file and pulled out the map. I then uploaded into Google Draw to add the nodes, which would be towns and forts, with connectors being the roads.

Here is the map with all towns circled and rectangles around the forts. 

The roads aren't so much drawn to follow the path as to cover the spirit of the connection, that's it. I also traced the rivers, because the next step would be get rid of the underlay.

Triangles are reinforcement entry points. Except for the black ones, which are mountains. That is the only entry point not connected to a road, so I added an overland route and wanted to make sure I remembered that it's a difficult route.

 Stripping away the underlying map results in this:

I changed the triangles to crosses, because I didn't like that I had used triangles for mountains, too. I will add labels for all of the forts eventually.

When I was done, I was quite pleased with the result. Except, my goodness, that's a lot of nodes. I decided it would be better to take a small section to use for working out campaign rules. 

Below is a segment of the map (from the left edge):

I took some license here with the lower right - just a single fort and a spawn point rather than the exact copy of the full map. I did this to allow for more at the campaign-level game, without getting too crazy.

The gray town and forts are starting positions for the Austrians. The green are the Italians. The latter have two entry points for reinforcements, again to add some interest to the campaign-level game.

I don't know when I'll get around to actually play testing my ideas - my plan was to start work on this much later in the year. It may have moved up a bit on the timetable though.