Areas

Areas are used to define specific spots on the map that holds special significance in your scenario. They can be used to specify scenario objectives or trigger points or positions and places units should start or move to. You can bring up the area painter panel by choosing the "Tools" menu then picking the "Area Placement" option. You can see this in the picture below:

You can create either rectangular or circular areas. The last freeform area option however does not actually work. So just ignore that. It was originally meant to create an area with an arbitrary shape but it proved fairly useless and was not worth implementing into the final version of the game. After you've defined an area, a panel appears which lets to give the area a name, which you can use to refer to in a scenario script. However, areas are of limited value at the moment since it requires scripting in order to take advantage of the area painter.

Starting Positions

The starting position tool is used to specify the starting locations for city center placements. These starting positions determine the priority at which territories (or spots witin each territory) is selected by the AI in placing City Centers. Initially when you generate a new map, starting positions are already randomly selected. You can use the "Starting Positions" panel, which you can invoke from the option of the same name in the Tools menu to add, remove or change the priority of the starting position's posts. You can see the starting position panel in the picture below:

Territories

Empire Earth 2 is about taking territories, and in this regard the scenario editor has provided a tool for you to stake out your claim so to speak. When you first generate a map, territories are automatically generated for you, roughly divided into equal areas. However, for your particular scenario you may wish to divide it up in other ways.

From the "Tools" Menu, you can select the "Territories" option to bring up the Territory editor panel, which you can see below left. If you have your mini-map view turned on, you can also turn on the territories view in the mini-map by selecting the "Minimap Territories" option from the View menu, shown below right:

As you can see, you can choose to turn territories on or off from this panel. But usually we will want to turn territories on. But turning them off is a good way to quickly erase all existing territories if you wanted to start over. Now the next thing you can do in this panel is to select the territory bush shape and size. You can have rectangular, Circular, or Diamond shape bushes from 1 to 15 tiles sizes. The territory painter is pretty straight forward and works just like a typical paint bush. The section below in the Territory panel allows you to pick the territory bush color. This is merely used to separate the territories from each other into distinct provinces. These colors have nothing to do with who owns the territory. In order to assign the owners you need to click on the territory itself to bring up the territory properties panel.

The territory property panel, allows you to set a number of territory attributes. Most important is the "Owner". This will allow you to pre-assign the territory owner for your scenario. The "Name Category" drop down menu allows you to choose how to name the territory by selecting which civilization the territory name should be drawn from. Once you have selected the civilization category, you can then assign a specific territory name from a list that will now be available in the "Name" drop down menu just below the category. You can choose to also use the random territory namer do this for you.

The box below that allows you to specify a name for the territory which you can use to refer within a scenario script. Note that scripting is currently not available for the current version of the game. The entry box at the bottom of the panel is used to specify the city name that will be given to the City Center that is built in that territory.

One interesting thing is that the Name Category can be assigned to "Custom". This allows you to create your own territory names by assigning the category to a key, which you've defined by adding a new Custom territory name by modding a game's text database file. So by adding a new text file with the UTF8 extension under your games \db\Text\ folder. You can create arbitary names for your territories.

For example if you want to make a territory called "The Land of Oz". You would put an entry in a UTF8 file like this:

txt_my_Oz_scenario_terr1,"""The Land of Oz"""

The txt_my_Oz_scenario_terr1 is completely arbitrary, so you can use whatever key you like as long as it is unique to your scenario. As some may have noticed, if you played around with this, that it doesn't matter what file you put these keys in, that the game looks at all of the files under the \db\text\ folder. This is why the keys have to be unique. But it also lets you easily put all custom strings for unit names, territory names, scenario names etc for your scenarios in one compact file with a file name specific to your scenario so they can be easily separated and distributed with your scenario.

Some things which you should also be aware of for territories is that lakes, oceans, rivers and mountains will break up territories. So you can not have say two islands that are designated as one territory.