Forests

If the terrain modifier is the dough and icing of the Scenario editor, then the Forest Painter and Object Placement tools are the decorations on the cake. The Forest Painter is accessed through the Tools Menu->Forest Painter. This brings up a panel, which you can see in the picture below that allows you to add forests into your landscape.

You can set the brush shape and size that you want to use to paint your forest patches with. You can choose between circle, square or diamond shaped patches, from 1 to 16 tiles in size. There is also an option to choose between painting the forest floor texture over the existing ground versus keeping the ground as is. This is useful for creating more natural transitions between your forests areas and its surrounding.

The Forest type drop down allows you to choose between different percentage of each type of tree that will make up a forest patch, the percentage of each type of tree is shown in the bottom window in the panel. The types of choices that you get is determined by the climate type you set for your map when you first generate it. These again are temperate, arid and tropical. Temperature settings will generate a mix of pine and deciduous trees. Arid, a mix of desert palms. Tropical, a mix of tropical palms and ferns. If for some reason you dont like your work and want to get rid of all of your forests, this panel also allows you to delete all of your forests with one button click. Also note that, resizing and generating a new map will also delete all of your forests.

Units and Buildings

Trees are great and good for the environment, but what makes a scenario interesting are the objects you place on the map to create a situation rather just a map. This is where the Object placement tool come in. You access this tool by choosing the Object Placement option in the Tools Menu. A panel, which you can see in the picture below-left, will come up with two tabs, player and world, then a list of folders, and within these folders a list of objects available. They are organized just like your file directories in your computer.

In the player tab, you choose from a list of units and buildings which are assigned to the various civilizations available in each epoch within the game. There is an option to toggle the list between showing only civilization specific objects and all available civilization related units and buildings in the game. You set the epoch and civilization for each player slot from within your mission properties panel from the Edit Menu as mentioned earlier.

World Objects

The World tab lets you choose from a list of objects that are assigned to the non-civilization related entity commonly refered to as the Gaia player, which commonly is used to place ambience objects like animals, trees and rocks into the game. One thing to note is, why do you need a forest painter and then also have single tree objects. Indeed these are handled differently by the game engine. Forests with a bunch of trees are treated as one object, while using ambient tree objects means each solitary tree is handled as an independent object. You can see a picture of the variety of animals, and ambience objects in the pictures below. At the bottom of each of the tabs is a window which shows the object stats, such as unit type, hitpoints, attack damage etc.

Object Properties

If you double click on any of the objects, you will bring up an Object Properties panel. This panel, which you can see in the picture below, allows you to change a number of things for the object. This is the same panel which you can bring up from the Edit Menu->Object Properties, once you have selected an object on the map. Once the Object property panel is visible, you can left click on other objects to update the panel with its object stats.

The first two entry boxes on the panel include its display name and script name. For example you may wish to rename Pikemen to Mercenaries in your scenarios. There is also a type in box to enter a name for the object within a scenario script. For the moment these doesn't have any uses until the script compiler is released by the developers. Below these two boxes, is a box which shows the player name which owns that unit. The next thing is a drop down box which list all the available unit Groups you have created in your scenario using the "Create/Assign Group" option under the Edit Menu. You can use the drop down to assign each of your units and buildings into these groups for easier reference and organization.

Next are a pair of type in boxes which allows you to set the units hitpoints and power (for use with units that possess special abilities like spies, priests, and leader units etc) at the start of the scenario. These two stats are the only values which are currently alterable from within the scenario editor. So for the time being modding is the only way to change the names and in fact the majority of the stats for a unit. Finally the window at the bottom shows the normal object stats once again.

You can change the direction an object is facing by selecting a unit and then pressing the CTRL key then left clicking your mouse around the unit to have the unit face the place you're clicking at. This method only works for player units (land, sea or air) and animal world objects. For Buildings, you have to do something a little different. After selecting a building, and you get the "ghost" image of the building on your cursor. However, you can only set it to one of four directions. So before you set the building down on a spot, hit the CTRL key as many times you need to have it face the right direction. Hitting the CTRL key twice would make the building face the opposite direction from normal, four times would spin it all the way back around again.

Animal Herds

Before we conclude this section on objects, one thing to note about animals you place on the map is that they spawn baby animals that grows up to spawn more animals, as the game progresses.

So if you want to have a heard of animals to start, you will need to group them as a herd, else each animal you place will be treated as a separate herd object and you will end up with a lot of animals running around the map. Probably something you don't want to do. The picture on the right shows the panel that brings up the animal herding tool. You can either group animals into a heard to control their growth, or break them up again to have each animal act as a separate heard or to delete individual animals.

As you can see there are a lot of objects in the game, and the amount and quality of campaign only units and buildings in the game is impressive. There is plenty of eye-candy for people to adorn their scenarios with.