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Island Nations, a 40 years old game.

Started by Bear789, February 28, 2013, 11:05:16 AM

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Bear789

I'm playing this map. Since the original thread seems dead, I'm opening a new one to show my progress.

Let's start with the complete map of the current network and some data:



The map is a little bit more than 40 game years old.  The game started in March 1827 (if I remember well) and we are now in September 1867.
Trains are the big protagonists, of course; we are in the golden age of steam, after all. Road vehicles in this time are too slow and have too little capacity to be used outside special situations; ships are slow too and can't compete with trains, so I use them only to connect the three landmasses and other islands that can't be easily reached by railways. Planes, of course, do not exist, yet.
The original savegame provided three companies, I used all of them as intended (that is, one company per landmass) for both passengers and freight services. They are all making a lot of money; the richest one is BR, with roughly 9.5 billions, followed by SNCF with 2.2 B and CIE with 1.9 B. Number of trips per company: BR 12.845.734; SNCF 3.764.816; CIE 2.864.401.

I'd like to give you a tour of the map, starting with the London area. I started playing from here, so it's the most developed region of the entire map. Actually, It's growth is much more than I anticipated.
Overhead map:

Panoramic of the center of the metropolitan area:


As you can see, the underground network is already well developed. I don't care for historical realism (nor does Standard :P), so I chose to develop the lines as needed, but I forced myself to follow a rule: all stations for steam trains must be either above ground or at least in an open cut, so there are large parts of the outskirts of the metropolis that are not yet served because the existing tracks are already at full capacity and I can't add more tracks in the city center without either going deep underground or destroying a lot of buildings to free space for the trench. I'll have to wait for the tube to become available, but that means that I have to wait another twenty game years. I'll show the underground in another update, for now I'd like to focus on intercity railways and mainline terminals.
London - Grangemouth was the first intercity rail line of the whole map, opened in 1830 to support the overcrowded river ferry that followed the same route. The original terminal was at the docks of London, used for both passengers and freight.
This pic of central London is from 1832; I mistakenly overwrote the 1830 save file, so there are more tracks and lines in place than the original layout. You can see a stub of the underground network that didn't exist in 1830. You can also see that I later renamed most of the stations and some of the towns, either because they were duplicates, or because they were stupid (like Southend-On-Sea being north of the urban area and nowhere near a body of water). Anyway, it's good enough to show you how the first terminal looked like.



By the 1840s I had to split the freight and passengers services because of overcrowding, so I moved the passenger terminal to the current Eastgate Terminal (originally London East Station, served by metropolitan trains and freight services from the north) and the dock station became freight only. Now, for passengers, it is served by three underground lines that connect the docks to all three mainline terminals, but no intercity lines stop here anymore.


By the 1860s I had to cover the western part of the docks and use the new land for another freight rail hub. Now the eastern tracks are used by freight to the east and south, and the western tracks are reserved for west and north freight trains.

Next update (probably in the evening): London Eastgate Terminal and it's intercity lines.


greenling

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Isaac_Clarke

It's a very nice map! :) I have the same philosophy of game as you and your city of London makes me think of my city of Paris. How much citizens does your London has?
Did you start your map with a randomly repartition of the cities?

Bear789

#4
Thank you all!

@ Isaac_Clarke: I'm using the savegame provided in the topic I linked in the OP; it comes with rivers, cities and some industries already in place. By the look of it, most if not all towns seems placed by hand. I added a couple myself in places I felt were empty, but just a few, the map is huge and already has hundreds of cities. I try to use everything the map and the game give me, but when things are put in the wrong place (like rivers that you can't cross because they are diagonal, or farms too close to a city), or when industry connections are weird (because the game doesn't seem to care if a consumer and a producer are on the opposite corners of a 2768 x 2768 map), I use the public player to replace them.
The city of London itself has 68000 citizen; the "Greater London" (I consider being part of it only towns with adjoining or overlapping borders) is made of 24 towns of various sizes and currently has a total of exactly 461.851 citizens. There are also eight towns that are close enough to become part of it in the near future.
This is much more than I expected, the cities looked more far apart at the beginning. I thought I would have in the modern times a metropolis made by a dozen or so towns, yet I'm barely in the second half of the XIX century and there's already this huge beast. I wonder how big it will become if I manage to keep playing till the year 2000 or so.
By the way, there is a Paris in this map too. It's the urban area in the southeast corner. It didn't have experienced the explosive growth of London, however.
Since you talked about Paris, are you french? (doesn't seems so, judging by the nickname, but who knows). I want to use french names for the stops and stations in the frech-named area of the map, but I only know that the french for station is "gare", and that's all; I need a few names. I also have no idea of what's french for freight yard, or how can I call a bus stop. Can you help?

Here is Paris:
Region

City center closeup


______________________________________________________________________

"France", however, is for another update. Now, it's time for London's Eastgate Terminal.


It opened in 1841, when the London and Exeter Line started its service (in the picture, the tracks going south), and the old docks terminal became too small for the amount of trains calling there. The new terminal required a lot of preparatory works: to start, the metro tracks and station had to be put on a lower level, in a trench. While I was working at it, I also thought I could put in a tunnel the few tiles between the metro stations, so that the city had a chance to expand beyond the tracks. Then I had to reroute some intercity roads in the area.

This is the current layout:

Other than the platform length, in recent years I had to add an additional track.
It's the busiest station in the Greater London, with around 90.000 passengers and 500 convoys served yearly; it has seven platforms on the higher level and nine on the lower level, six platforms for the metropolitan railways, one for the city freight and two for suburban mainline services.

The lines:

(grey dots mark stations skipped by fast/express services)

From north to south, these are the mainline services in this station:
Platform 1 - London and Carmarthen Line; Carmarthen is a fairly large urban area in the north, big industrial center. The line was very popular in the past, because at Carmarthen Central passengers could change for trains to the northern regions. Now that other options are available, a lot of passengers (mainly people from the west and southwest regions of the island) choose other routes. Despite this, the line is still well patronized, just not enough to justify the old direct express service. Now there's only the local version of the line that calls at all stations except Kendlesfield, still in the Greater London area.
Platform 2 - London and Galashiels Line and London and Wimbledon Line. Galashiles is an important port town to the east, one of the places where passengers can take a ship to "Ireland", so L&GL is quite an important line. L&WL, however, never caught among the public. It skips all stations in the section where it shares tracks with the L&GL, on account of it being the longest line, but it doesn't work. I'll probably cut some trains and make the line call at all stations; I don't want to close it because it serves a couple of towns that have no other rail connection.
Platform 3/4 - London and Grangemouth Local and Express. As I said in the previous post, It was the very first intercity passenger service opened in 1830. At that time, Grangemouth Harbor was London's door to the rest of the world, with ships to most major east coast cities and direct ferries to Dublin in "Ireland". Now that other options are available, the line is kinda run down and operates as a suburban service. The condition of Grangemouth's station, which has short platforms and is completely surrounded by the city, forces the use of shorter trains than other mainline services, that's why trains run frequently and there's still an express version. The Express isn't really a fast service: since over the time I built multiple stations per each city, following the suburban line logic, the express just stops only once per town skipping the stations outside each city center, and is rerouted through Kirkaldy before reaching Grangemouth. It'll work until 1875, then the vehicle I'm using for the two lines will become obsolete and I'll have to rethink the whole thing before updating them.
Platform 5/6 - London and Colchester local and express. Colchester is the busiest station in all "UK". When the east coast ferries from Grangemouth were discontinued, Colchester was the place where you could take trains to Southport and there take the international ferries to "France" and southern "Ireland", so giving it a direct link to London was a natural choice. Currently, The Capital Express runs directly from Southport to London's Albert Square Terminal (I'll talk about it in another update), so the usage on the L&C line went down. I'm going to cut the express service sooner or later, which will free a platform for a new service, probably to the south.
Platform 7 - London and Exeter Line. Exeter is the second biggest urban area of the island, big industrial center and interchange point for the trains to the southern regions. Maybe I'll use the platform freed by the L&C Express for a southern express or something like that, we'll see.
The mainline lower level platforms are used by the Trainlink, a service originally used to transport mail between Eastgate and Victoria Terminals, later used for passengers too, as a support to the overcrowded metro lines that connected the two terminals. Currently, it serves the southern suburbs of London in a kind of half orbital service. I plan to turn it into something like the Overground in the distant future (currently there is no room for tracks and stations in the north part of the city, which means that the only way to extend the Trainlink is underground, and that's against my no-underground-stations-for-steam rule).

Next: Victoria and Albert Terminals. (by the way, would you like to see pictures of the destinations? I didn't put them here because I feared that the post would have too many images).

Isaac_Clarke

@ Bear789:
Yes i'm french :)
For the train station as you said I use the word "Gare". For example: "Paris Gare du Nord" with a proper noun but I don't use the word Gare for the subway stations (Cf. bus stop)
For the freight yard I use the simple word "Fret"(example: Aéroport Lyon St-Exupéry Fret). Like that it's more easy to differentiate the stations between passengers and goods ones.
For the bus stop, I use the name of the city and a proper noun inspired for reality. For example "Paris Châtelet", I use the same convention for the subway station's name.


More, greats screenshots. Especially the screenshot with the lines plan, how did you make it?
I'm glad to see one another player with the same concerns of realism of mine. Keep it up!

Bear789

#6
Thanks again!
Yes, realism within the boundaries of game functionality is an important thing to me. I won't go out of my way to build something that looks awesome but it's useless like for example a large eye candy rail depot /maintenance yard while 1 tile is more than enough for the game, or again something that looks realistic but it's a pain to make it work properly given some of the game quirks, and I'll never build something that's ugly or unrealistic but usefull, even if that means not using the optimal solution for the game logic.
I also like to keep old unused tracks, switches and platforms, if they are not in the way of new development or cause unwanted routing problems. They give the map a sense of history, company evolution, etc.

The line map is easy to do with GIMP or Photoshop or any other image editor: I take a screenshot in game of the map at the largest zoom that I can fit on my screen, crop the unwanted parts like the window bar, black background, etc, add a white semitransparent layer and then draw the lines diagram on top of it with the pencil tool using the image of the tracks below as a guide.

Sorry, no updates, yet. The first two were so close together because originally I planned them as a single post, then the OP came out long enough so I chose to split the update in two. I'll post something in the week end.

Bear789

#7
Sorry for the lack of updates: I had to perform some track surgery around London that I delayed for too long, and it took a while to have things back to normal. Also, winter came to the map in the meantime, so I had to wait for the snow to melt before I could take some decent pictures. As a result, the game is now in late February 1868.

Let's go back to the tour as planned. Victoria Terminal:



It's located in central Westminster, and it's the second mainline terminal build in the Greater London, in 1831, and the first for passenger services only. Originally it was called Westminster Abbey Terminal, since it's right next to the monument.



Again, this picture is from 1832, one year later the opening of the terminal. The differences with the original layouts are all related to the metropolitan line, which didn't exist back in 1831.

It's the smallest terminal in the Greater London; originally I meant it to be much bigger, but the city grew around it faster than I expected, so my expansion plans basically went down the toilet.
AS a result, there are very few services using the terminal, and I'm wary of extending the existing lines, because I fear that I won't be able to add enough platforms to match the traffic increase.



Services from north to south:
- Platform 1, London and St. Andrews Line. It's just a small suburban line, one of the few of the network that's still single track; it serves some medium sized towns northwest of London before rejoining the west side mainline at St. Andrews.
- Platform 2, London and Cambridge Line and The Universities Express. London and Cambridge serves both Cambridge and Oxford, and they both have some of the oldest universities on the map, kinda like their real life counterparts; that's why the express version (that calls only at Oxford, St.Andrews and Cambridge) is called "Universities Express". I have plans to expand both services to the west coast, but as I said I kinda hesitate to do that now; I'd like to wait for trains with bigger capacity to be safe.
- Platform 3, London and Sandmouth Line; the region of Sandmouth is an important agricultural area; back when it was first opened, this line was also the only connection between London and the West Coast lines, so it was quite popular among customers.
- Platform 4, Trainlink. I talked about this line in the previous update.

Albert Square Terminal:



Unlike the previous two terminals, this station wasn't planned at the beginning of the game. As I said, Victoria was surrounded by the towns much faster that I anticipated, so I had a hard time when I wanted to plan more services to the western regions, as I couldn't add more tracks to the existing lines and more platforms to the station.
Luckily, there was enough empty space near Battersea, quite close to the city center and the existing underground lines, so I decided to build a new terminal there. The result is Albert Square, opened in 1855.



I rerouted the metropolitan line in order to give the terminal a passenger connection to the other two terminals and to the city center. I also built Beeham Exchange, just outside the terminal, to provide an exchange with the Trainlink.
Originally Albert Square was used only by the London and Devizes line, both local and express. You can see in the 1855 picture two tracks going south: they were meant for a London and Exeter express line that never opened. They were only used ten years later by the Capital Express.
As I expanded the London and Devizes express thoward it's current terminus at Addingborough, I had the idea to turn Albert Square into London's long distance high speed express services terminal. It worked quite well and the future for the terminal looks bright, as there is a lot of room for platform and track expansions.

The usual lines diagram:



From west to east, the platforms and the services:
- Platform 1, London and Addingborough Express. The first long distance express departing from London (not the first service of that kind on the map, though; that was the Southport and Colchester Express, opened a couple of years before). Still one of the busiest lines of the terminal.
- Platform 2, London and Devizes Line. The first line calling at Albert Square Terminal and the first attempt to connect London with the southwest regions of the island. At Devizes, passengers could change to another local service for Addingborough. Now that there's a direct express to Addingborough, there are only small destinations that can be reached via Devizes, so the local trains run less frequently than before.
- Platform 3, London and Harrogate Line. I wanted to give passengers a second option for the northern regions, other than the London and Carmarthen Line from Eastgate. At Harrogate, passengers can change to a local service to Edinburgh.
- Platform 4, The Flying Scotsman. The famous express service connects London to Edinburgh and Glasgow, via Harrogate. It's the newest long distance line, opened
in 1866. I planned it since I started playing the map; originally it was meant to use the Victoria Terminal.
- Platform 5, The Capital Express. It connects London With Southport, where people can board ships to "France" and south "Ireland". as you can imagine, it's one of the busiest services in the entire map. Since it comes from south, it doesn't stop at Beeham Exchange, so it's the only line that reaches London that has no interchange points with the Trainlink.

Next update: London Underground, history and current services.

Bear789

#8
Teaser of the next update: a XIX century style map of the railways in the Greater London area. :D
I cheated a bit to make it look more natural, but it's still a fairly accurate map.


Bear789

#9
Update time! The history of the London Underground.

London had some form of urban and suburban transport since the beginning of the game, thanks to the rivers in the valley: numerous ferry routes connected the inner city and some of the nearby towns to London Docks, where passengers could transfer to the ferries to Grangemouth and from there ships for the rest of the map.



Inner London was served by five minor ports other than London Docks: London Market, Battersea (which was actually on the Westminster bank of the river), Westminster Palace, Islington Market (which also served the Tower of London on the opposite bank of the river) and Tilbury. Other towns that are now part of the Greater London were served by faster long distance ferries.

The first railway lines in the area served as a relief for the overcrowded intercity ferries. With the opening of the Abbey Terminal (later Victoria), whose lines gradually replaced all the intercity ferries west of London, the passengers had to change from trains to a stagecoach to Battersea Dock, and there to a ferry to other destinations in the city. London Docks, Westminster Palace and Islington Market (because of the Tower) were the most requested. The ferry quickly became overcrowded, so I started to plan the Metropolitan Railway.
I had two alternatives: the first was an orbital route around the city, somewhat like the current Trainlink; the other was a rail circle through the city. I chose the latter, mainly because I wanted to dig through the city while there still were patches of unused land (originally I managed to use only three tunnels between Abbey Terminal and the Docks) and the buildings were still low level, thus cheaper to demolish.

This is a gif that show the steps of the Underground history. I'll comment the most important ones.



May 1831: the first stub of the Metropolitan Railway opened to the public with three stations: Abbey Terminal (It actually used the same platforms of the intercity train lines on the upper level), Westminster Central (serving the Palace and the city hall) and London Tower. The idea was to bring passengers to the Tower by train, so that only passengers to the town of Islington would use the ferry. It didn't work entirely as planned, as you will see.

September 1831: the line reached London Docks, allowing direct transfers to the eastern intercity rail lines.

November 1831: The line was expanded south thowards Battersea; opening of the lower level platforms at Abbey Terminal.

January 1832: The line didn't help with the overcrowding at Islington Market as intended, so the first stretch of the North Line (London Docks - Islington) opened. Originally it skipped Ratcliff.

July 1832: the metropolitan circle is complete.

December 1832: with the opening of the East Line, the city ferries were discontinued. Also, due to traffic, the eastern part of the circle was expanded to four tracks, so that  the North and East line could run separated from the Circle.

March 1833: the District Line opens, serving the western part of the Greater London.

March 1835: North and East lines reached Birchwood. Not a great expansion per se, but interesting because the tracks used will later reused for intercity services and the Trainlink.

April 1837: the Grinnington branch of the western mainline was taken over by the District line. Mainline and Metropolitan services shared tracks for decades. There is still today a short stretch of tracks just west of Llanduno Turnip Lane station shared by the two services:


October 1837: due to the increased traffic on the District Line, the western part of the circle was upgraded to four tracks, so that District and Circle could run independently.

December 1841: the Eastgate Terminal opened. Metropolitan tracks at London Docks were reworked to free space for the freight terminal expansion.

February 1847: the Central Line started it's service with a short section entirely inside London between the two terminals. Other than to provide relief to the Circle Line, the Central serves the city hall and some important landmarks in the center. I wasn't sure that I wanted to open it as a subsurface steam railway (it was quite expansive to dig the space for the station so close to the center), but the city needed it and I couldn't wait another forty years for the tube to become available. The Central line had two loops at the terminal to allow faster services. the eastern loop was easily reworked for an expansion to Whitechapel a couple of years later, while the western one, due to the cramped situation at Abbey/Victoria Terminal, is still there. Western expansions of the Central Line will have to wait for the tube so that I can build a deep level station under Victoria Terminal.

January 1856: Albert Square Terminal opens. Abbey Terminal was renamed Victoria, the Circle Line was rerouted so that it could serve the new terminal, the Battersea and Hapsley Line starts services, although initially it terminated at Islington rather than Hapsley, despite it's name. A month later, it extends it's service to Hapsley sharing tracks with the North Line. It's a complex situation, now, because both lines require  more trains but the tracks are already overcrowded and there's no room to upgrade the entireshared stretch to four tracks.

December 1860: The East Line was rerouted from Wolverhampton to Epsom, it's current southern terminus.

A large part of the network was built in an open cut or at ground level, and then later punt in a tunnel as the metropolis expanded.

I close this update with a couple of images of the most complex underground stations, Eastgate and Victoria:


Eastgate. From east to west, there are two platforms for North/East lines services, two platforms for the Circle Line, two for the Central Line, one for the city freight service and two for the Trainlink. You can see the old loop and a lot of unused switches and connections: originally the Central Line used the westmost platform; when the extension opened, all the other lines had to be moved one track to the west. I wanted to preserve all of those bits of old tracks that didn't mess with the proper trains routing.


Victoria. Again from east to west, two platforms for District / Battersean and Hapsley lines, two for the Circle and one for the Central.

isidoro

Very impressive!  The underground animated gif is amazing.


1993matias

That looks impressive! I really like your maps! But how do you get city growth across your railway lines? And aren't the steam trains **** slow?
Well, my real question is; does anybody have the original map? I can't seem to find it and the download link in the original thread does not work.

Bear789

#12
Isidoro: Thank you!

Matias: I should have the original savegame of the map. I'm uploading it, I'll edit the post as soon as it finishes.
EDIT: http://www.filedropper.com/islandnationsindustries
Yes, early steam trains are really weak and slow, but by 1840something there are passengers locomotives with decent power and speed. I also provide both passengers and freight services, and it seems that serving city industries is a great boost to city growth. Also, the underground really helps with the city development.
Then there are tecnical reasons, I believe: I've been playing this map for nearly a year and I usually play nightlies (both engine and pak), which are fun but sometimes far from balanced; the cities' growth has been erratic to say the least.


Real life hit hard in the last months, sorry for the lack of updates. Other than that, I'm playing with the idea of releasing my own version of the map, expanding the "France" region so that it becomes a proper island like the other thwo, with more land and more options for tranport expansions. Other than RL issues, I wanted to wait for the new landscape duoble height patch to be included in the nightlies before finishing it. My current game is on hiatus, because I'm not sure I want to develop the map too much if I'm going to start from scratch soon.

1993matias

Thanks! I'll try it out soon :D
I'll look forward to your updates!

Drewthegreat87

Hi!

Sorry to drag this thread up, but I was curious if there was a way I could get the map file for this game. The link a few posts up just takes me to the home page of the filesharing site. Do you have to have a membership on that site in order to download or is the link just dead?

The map and network looks amazing!

Thanks!

1993matias

Hi!

I had the same question a while ago and I got the map. Here it is:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxL13clucqWleF9wMWY0dnZPU1E/edit?usp=sharing

I really enjoyed the map, there is always more to do - especially London gets crowded really fast! I started in 1890 because I didn't want the slow steam trains :P I look forward to modern times though!

-Matias

Bear789

Sorry if I didn't answer, I'm really busy right now. I have a big work on my hands so I'm off untill late semptember at least.
I'm growing quite convinced that when I get back to Simutrans I should complete my remake of the original map and play that (and maybe do a journal right from the start), so I believe I won't be updating this anymore. If someone wants my latest savegame, ask and I'll upload it. I don't do it now because appearently hosting sites delete the old files quite quickly, so it would be a waste.

@1993matias and Drewthegreat87: if you'd like to post some screenshot of your games on this map, feel free to do that here.
I like to compare someone else's gameplay with mine, and it also may give me new ideas for the remake. Right now the only new thing planned is that I want to turn "France" into a large, complete island like the other two.

1993matias



This is my map, green lines are stopping services and red lines are non-stop express trains. I am playing in 1895 (started around 1885), but my issue is that cities keep growing. This means I will have to constantly update my lines instead of building new ones, and it's a hassle to toggle citiygrowth off on each individual city :/

Here's a shot of London Battersea Abbey Station (which lies in Westminster...). There are four trains on the image, out of the 107 monthly trains. But nowhere near capacity :D
All the mail is because there are not enough capacity on the streets of London for all those horse-mail carriages...

Bear789

#18
Wow, that station looks massive.

You are right about the fast city growth; I forgot to mention it, I changed the growth parameters after the first years of gameplay to have a more reasonable growth rate. It's pretty much required in a map so big. If you plan to tackle freight transport too, I also suggest to change the industry growth parameter, otherwise you'll have new chains popping out every second.

If you don't know how to do it, search menuconf.tab in pak128.Britain/config, then search #dialog_tool[27]=, remove the # and add a comma and a key of your liking not used by any other menu (for example, dialog_tool[27]=,i - I don't know if "i" is actually free, I can't look at it right now because I'm not using the computer that has Simutrans on it; just look at the other entries in the file).
With that, you can use that key to open the map configuration menu, the same that you can use when you start a new game. Be carefull of what you change because you can seriously screw up your savegame; I actually don't know which parameters are not safe, though if you change only "growthfactor_villages/cities/capitals" and "industry_increase_every", you are safe.
Keep in mind that you have to raise the numbers if you want less growth. 10000 to all three parameters means no city growth at all. In my experience, multiplying all the values x 2 or 3 is more than enough, but that's me; do some testings for yourself so that you can find your ideal situation.
Industries are almost the same, in that you need to raise the number if you want a slower growth, but if you want to turn off industry generation completely you have to set it to 0.

1993matias

I'm quite sure 'i' is free, it is used for this exact purpose in the experimental version ;)

I might return to this map later, as it could be really interesting to play on it after 100 years and still follow the original rail alignments! How far did you get before quitting?
Btw, thanks for the city growth tips :)

Bear789

This map, 42 game years: from 1827, when the original savegame started, to 1869. Real time, about one year.
The longest I've ever played a map was 105 game years, on a randomly generated map.

Actually, I'm not bored with Island Nations. The problem to me is that, while "Britain" still has a lot of things to do, room for improvement and new development, "Ireland" and "France" are pretty much done.
"Ireland" is small, I connected all the major cities and built all the rail corridors I planned in the beginning. Now it's only a matter of updating the vehicles and wait a long time for usable road vehicles for urban transport.
"France" seems big, but actually it's only very long. Once you managed to build a long rail corridor from Paris to the west (which I did), that's it for large scale projects.
Basically, all my gameplay of the last hours I played the map was confined in one third of the map, I didn't feel the need to go back to the other areas. This is why I'm planning to remake the map in such a way that all three "countries" can provide the same amount of fun and challange as the courrent "Britain". Maybe I'm only going to make the whole thing bigger and more confusing and less fun, but I want to try.

Drewthegreat87

Would it be possible to get the .ppm file of just the map itself, so settings and industries and whatnot can be tuned to each other's liking?

I'm just curious. I'd love to post some shots whenever I get somewhere on this map.

Thanks!

Bear789

I didn't make the original map, so I don't have the grayscale image, I'm sorry.
When I'll have a bit of free time I'm going to revamp the map starting from the grayscale, but it won't happen for at least another month.