I have recently downloaded a freeware progam so I can start coloring in the Victory! map for a visual guide to my progress (and failures) on the map. My previous allies have done an awesome job of this and I am trying to teach myself how to do it.

I find the biggest obstacle is that the downloaded maps of Victory! from RTG don't appear to have solid enough boundry lines for the program to isolate which province I am filling in with color. I try to color one province and 7 more adjacent ones fill with color. I am having to tediously (and sloppily) draw over the boundry lines with a heaver line. Does anyone have a good map I can start from scratch with that eliminates this problem?

How do most of you choose to diffentiate between the owner of the province and the owner of the city? I am leaning towards a colored dot in the province to indicate if the city is owned by another counrty. Any other suggestions that would work better?

I am using paint.net I am not thrilled with it. Any suggestions on some other free downladed software that is better and easier?

I have not (do the same as you do). so if you get a solution please let me know.

Erik

Hello all,

I have been working on a map with FireWorks. At this moment I have a very clean map, which can be easily colored with Paint.

Some time ago, I mailed this map to Russ with the question of publishing it on the website...
There are still some typos on the map, so hopefully other players can assist in finding these...

Hope this helps,
Norbert

Send me a copy and I will help out.

raymond_whitson@yahoo.com

I use fireworks, its not free or cheap but does the job

I change borders by drawing lines acording to loss and gain

I underline citys name if i gain it

I also use the txt tool to show positions of armies ect with a x in front if its in a city

It works for me but is a little hard to explain in words without a picture, if someone can host the picture i think you may find it useful

OMG Im being nice and offering suggestions - Quick get me a doctor

When I signed up for my first game way back in like 1993 I bought the map set from RTG. I sent those maps to a company that laminates large items like maps and had them laminated in clear plastic. The large map is a nice addition to my office wall at home. I use re-markable pens (erasable markers) to draw border changes and different colors can show opponent or ally position changes. It works very well, is easy to troubleshoot, and power failures don't cause it to stop working. Sometimes the easiest solution also happens to be the best solution. This solution has worked 18 years now, well I took 12 years off, but it's still working.

I also use Photoshop CS to do planning maps at the beginning of a game. I found that coloring a province usually makes it very hard to read the name so I create layers and color them appropriately (like the old encyclopedias used to have) so I can see their information by turning the layer on and see the province detail by turning the layer off. Generally its enough to spray paint the approximate area inside the borders of a province without worrying too much about covering the area uniformly or completely. This isn't as satisfying to me though as the old big paper map on the wall.

Race

Race is right! There is such a thing as too much technology.

I,too, am returning to Vic after a long layoff. Fooling around wih Paint and other programs may have certain benefits when it comes to AIC's and other aspects that don't change to much between turns; but for the rapid changes when the fight starts, there's nothing quite like a plastic map & waterless markers. Why worry about colored lines & borders, when a swipe of a damp rag lets you start over?

The best combination I've found is a hard copy of your starting position, add an overlay of your changes to it, and a plastic overlay you can plan{doodle] on when planning your next moves.

Want to stay with the flavor of the game? Remember that most of the tactical planning in WW2 was done with grease pencils. That's why unit symbols are so deceptively simple.

Use this trick.

1) Open the whole Vic map in MS Picture Manager, crop out the area you want and Save it.
2) Open it in MS Paint and immediately SAVE it as 16 color BMP. (this clears alot of the non-white junk out of the white spaces and solidified the border lines)
3) then save it AGAIN as 24-bit BMP.
4) From then on you can open it in MS Paint and fill provinces cleanly with the bucket fill tool.
5) cntl-z (undo) is your friend on the occasion that two or more provs fill at once. just switch to pencil, connect the space where the leak went thru and switch back to bucket.

I find it works just fine and easy.

I have the full laminated map on the wall with markers AND each turn crop out a colored section of the BMP file to print and manually draw in troop movements, logistics, etc.