Is there any way to do this faster?

[Cranberry]

I'm trying to make some open wasteland for my custom mission. But it's taking forever to make the bland 'sand' tiles look diverse. Is there a random terrain generator or anything else that'd make this a matter of hours instead of days?

[Max-Violence]

Go to your Sand floor tiles. Select one tile. Hold shift, and select additional tiles. When you have the ones you want, start placing them, either one at a time or "fill" the area with them. Either way, if you select enough tiles, chances are, there won't be a particular tile that has a twin brother/sister near it

Then, you can go back over the thing and do a lil' touch-up at your discretion/convenience. Much much quicker than, "Place tile, select a different one, place that tile, select a different one..." over and over.

BTW, to "fill" an area (a square/rectangular area, that is) with tiles, simply hold the right mouse button down and drag the area you want to fill, then release. If stuff overlaps, use Ctrl+Arrow keys to adjust the fill.

Hope that helps!

[Cranberry]

Thankyou, kind sir. *bows*

[Jimmyjay86]

Another possibility is instead of starting from scratch, use Microforte's work! Just open up a random encounter mission - tiles only and start building from that. This makes more sense in some of their encounters that have cliffs which are very difficult to build correctly.

[Red]

What's so hard about cliffs?

[Jimmyjay86]

They have specific tiles that look appropriate only when adjacent to another specific tile. If you just pick random walls, it looks funny.

[OnTheBounce]

They have specific tiles that look appropriate only when adjacent to another specific tile. If you just pick random walls, it looks funny.

That's a polite way of putting it. I'd say that it looks like shit.

Here's how I build mountain walls: I select a bunch of tiles w/o a recognizable pattern. I then build the wall using randomly selected tiles and the good ol' right-click, drag and place method. After that I go and put in the recognizable tiles when I'm dressing up the maps. It saves a lot of time doing it that way. This is also the method I use for building floors.

OTB

[Red]

Yeah, there's a bunch of "dirrent types" of walls, but they're easy to tell, and they're organized in a good manner.

Basically, the cliff walls are just like floors: there's two types: rock and granite, and you have the whole selection of "rock to granite" in all directions... Of course if you use granites with rock, or just random granite to rock it'll be all screwed up, smae way floors would be.

[Forty-six & Two]

Hmm... The map im working on right now has cliffs..... I gave up on making them look pretty after a few hours, now it looks like... well shit... but hey! Its a night map . Just dont look at it.... ok....

[Flamescreen]

Don't forget if you're "retouching" MicroForte's maps to pay attention and modify stuff like the exit grids.