Unit Footprint and map scaling

[garyknowz]

I don’t have any specific concerns, but playing the big Gettysburg map piqued my curiosity.

How did the NSD team determine and set the unit footprint/scale as it relates to the map?

[Jim]

The unit frontage was set to balance the appearance of the units in line with the actual historical frontage that the unit would have covered. There is an additional factor of the size of the sprites that interacts here as well. The result is a balance among these factors to have units that look reasonably dense, are as small as feasible, and cover as much frontage as well. The balance point comes out to soldier sprites that are about 12 ft tall and where the units cover around 90% of their historical coverage.

This was a balancing act and five people would come up with five different value sets all reasonably defendable.

The map distances are as historically accurate as possible, with errors of under 1%. The buildings, fences etc are set to scale correctly with the soldier sprites. Otherwise the soldiers would be looking into the 2nd story windows. This would look a bit odd.


-Jim