Mapping Tips: Arizona

This is a (unfinished) collection of Arizona-tileset-specific tips and tricks that might help you to make beautiful desert maps.

For general map making tips, see Mapping Tips.

Brushes and cliffs

The main problem of Arizona tileset is that there's no terrain that supports transition to both water and cliffs. You can only paint cliffs on red, but you can only transition to water from sand or green. Thus, if you want to paint transitions perfectly, the tanks will always be able to pass between the cliff and the water. But in fact you shouldn't really try to be perfect, especially on this tileset; it's not too bad if red-to-sand transition near the cliff will be a little sharp, and you only need to have this on a couple of tiles at most; but this will require some manual work.

Red is obvious choice for default terrain. It is also the only terrain that supports concrete and roads (and tracks).

Also, there are no three-way transitions between red, sand and yellow, even though all pairwise transitions are good enough. Still, yellow and sand colors are very similar, and the eye doesn't notice a lack of a few transitional tiles between them, so in fact it's possible to mix them. The screenshot below is taken on a stock map, Startup; you can easily see cheap yellow-to-sand transitions here.

Also, don't forget about brown-to-sand and brown-to-yellow. They can look really great.

Transitioning sand-to-green-via-brown-near-water is also possible, but requires manual texturing.

Manual texturing

Craters

Arizona tileset has an excellent support for craters. They can be placed on red, yellow, brown and green (the yellow crater looks well both on yellow and sand), and double craters can be placed on yellow/sand and red. To make 2x2 crater painting easy, disable the "Randomize" checkbox; but don't forget to enable it when painting 1x1 craters, or all your craters will look identical. Of course, you can manually rotate them later. Rotating 2x2 craters can also be done by copy-paste'ing.

Diagonal cliff tile

Arizona tileset also offers a diagonal cliff tile (that is, tile No.18), that can be used for connecting three-way cliffs; even though the cliff brush doesn't use this tile, it should be used in quite a few places to make mountains look properly:

When painting cliffs, you should always try to make the stripes of the cliff texture parallel to the gradient of the heightmap. This is true for this diagonal cliff tile too.

Tile No.18 can also be used for painting the whole mountain with cliff texture; the latter is a bit non-canon (not used on stock maps) and doesn't look very well in FlaME, but looks nice and curious in-game:

Water-sand-green transitions

With tiles No.13 and No.30 you can make sand-to-green transitions at the coast.

Roads and tracks

Tile No.37 can help you in connecting roads and tracks, even though road and track painting tools are unaware of it; but even when you don't place tracks nearby, this tile can help you make your road look a bit dusty. Another nice way of making dusty roads is breaking them from time to time. You should also consider using tiles No.60 and No.61: they are usually painted near roads, parallel to them, making the road more bright and sunken. Here is an example of a well-painted road (from the Startup map again):

Abundance of tiles

Last but not least, the red sand itself can be made pretty varied. For example, tiles No.44 and No.74 are rather different from other red tiles. In fact, tile No.44 is widely used in old maps to paint the sand in the middle of the desert, far from cliffs and water. This may even be considered to be some sort of extra terrain color, which might be known as "the pink brush". The cliffs also allow some variation: compare tiles No.45/46 with No.71/75; the cliff brushes use only one pair.

Sand-and-brown technique

There is a non-canonical, but rather effective alternative use of the Arizona tileset. The idea is to use brown terrain for cliffs and mountains, and use sand as the default terrain. Brown tile type is reassigned to cliff, so those brown mountains on the screenshot below (taken from ​this map) are actually unpassable.

Features

Boulders. Throw a few boulders randomly on your map to make the dull desert a bit less dull. Be aware though, that boulders can't be moved through and can't be destroyed, so even though it may look nice to put the boulder at some place, be aware that the player might want to build a tower at this place for the same reason :)

Huts. There are five types of ruined scavenger huts and just one type of a normal hut.

Cars. A lot of broken cars and trucks to choose from. They can just lie randomly along the road, but they can also be used as barricades around a scavenger outpost.

Making maps for v3.0+

Usually old-style maps look well with v3.0+, and there were not many experiments of using the new renderer. ​Here is an attempt to use brown cliffs together with classic cliffs:

This isn't bad, but off-by-one troubles are obvious, and it would have taken quite some effort to get rid of them.

It is ​possible to create pretty beautiful and blossoming abandoned cities on Arizona using the green terrain combined with urban buildings and trees: