Kursk mod

[Philippe]

I'm getting pretty long in the tooth myself, but tend to prefer groping around in the dark (if it's aesthetically pleasing).

If you really need to make the contours stand out, hit the contour switch. If that doesn't do it, chances are you need some conceptual help, which I usually get by dropping into 3D. Provided, of course, that the ugly graphics don't make you faint. If you think about it, most units have ranges of one or two hexes at most, so the contours aren't really an issue. What's more important is whether a unit is a qualified artillery spotter for a given gun and whether he can see the target. Which really means playing around with the 'w' switch or the highlight target item in the view menu.

Teleporting modern super highways via time machine has always seemed too anachronistic for me. An alternative, if you aren't too fussy about how things look, is to substitute violent colors for primary and secondary roads. That will make them stand out even in my cities which are a bit denser and more crowded than Jison's.

At one point I experimented with red primary roads, and they worked quite well, even with my failing eyesight. I think I got the idea from an old SPI boardgame about Smolensk. I hated the red roads then, and I'm not too fond of them now, but they aren't hard to make.

Go into Photoshop and replace whatever the base color for the road you want to change with white (or whatever you use as a transparent color). [Note: this can also be done in Paint but it's a lot more labor-intensive]. Then layer it over a field of a color that you're pretty sure will stick out like a sore thumb. When you start playing around with reds and violets small paths will become clearly marked, even in the most congested warrens.

If I ever decide to mod one of the Modern Campaigns I'll probably do something like this. But it just looks too out of place in the early and mid-twentieth century. (Even so, the red roads were pretty tempting -- give it a try sometime, you may find that you like it).

Having said all that, towns and cities are supposed to be tank traps and you're supposed to get lost and confused in them.