Tutorial for a custom mapping program

Hello, my name is Tim, and since I'm a programmer I wanted to create a little application to offer help with insights on what's actually happening in your mapping world. It's also helpful if you want to know what the best course of action should be.

When you first boot up.
Once you boot the application up, you're greeted with this screen.

This is the main screen. This screen contains all the countries that you've created in the Country Creator.

The Main Screen doesn't contain the words above the table. Those will be added in a future version (probably the next version).

Don't think of the "Turns: " counter as a slide counter. The "Turns: " counter is supposed to represent a more realistic timescale.

While the primary function of this application is to make mapping videos more realistic, too much realism in mapping videos can be very dull and boring to watch.

After adding some countries.
After adding some countries to this application, it will look something like this.

As you can see, the words above the table aren't present this picture. The reason for this is that I haven't had the time to add them to the program, as they weren't of any importance to me. Those words will be added in a future version, as I've stated before.

No turns have passed yet, and you might notice that the Military, Wealth and Technology squares are all empty.

The reason for this is because the country will create a military after it has completed its first turn. This is because most countries don't see a military as a primary objective at first.

Now, about Wealth and Technology.

Wealth is gathered every turn after the population has reached a certain treshold. After that treshold has been passed, the countries will receive income in the form of tax. This tax is dependent on the current population and on the Internal Attitude.

Technology is gathered every few in the form of research points. Each country has a set amount of research points that they can generate per turn. This research point amount is dependent on the Internal Attitude and the Goals of the country, especially if the country has a Technology goal.

The Country Creator
When you boot up the Country Creator, you will be greeted with a screen like this

Now, due to the way the population and size growths are set up, the initial Population and Size can't be lower than 100.

This makes sense, since we're talking about actual countries here, and we're not talking about very minor tribes.

The Country's Goals and the Country(Internal)- and Foreign(External) Attitudes affect the country in minor ways. It's not that much of an impact, and it's more as a roleplaying mechanism. If you want some more Attitudes or Goals to be added to these lists, just send me a message. If you want to include some bonusses that those Attitudes or Goals provide, that would be great.

The War Overview
When you've created your countries, and ran the application for a few turns, you might want to spice things up and add some wars to make things more interesting.

This is where the War Overview comes in, which will look something like this.

As you can see, Country 1(Attacker) and Country 2(Defender) are currently at war with eachother.

Adding a new war is very easy. Just select 2 countries to be the warleaders. Being a warleader is currently nothing special, but I might add some more functionality to warleaders in the future versions of this application.

After the war has been created, it will show up in the Warlist comboBox. The Warlist comboBox currently shows "The Country 1-Country2 War.".

If you'd like, you can add more countries to any side of the war.

Calculations for Military Size
I have included the calculations for the Military Size because if you don't like the way these calculations are preformed, just message me about it. I want this program to simulate the mapping as smoothly as possible.

The code for the calculations in military loss in the wars is as follows. if (Countrylist[i].CurrentWarStatus == Country.WarStatus.Attacking) {    Countrylist[i].SoldierCount = (Countrylist[i].SoldierCount - ((AllWars[Countrylist[i].CurrentWar].DefendSoldiers / AllWars[Countrylist[i].CurrentWar].Attackers.Count) / 10)); } else if (Countrylist[i].CurrentWarStatus == Country.WarStatus.Defending) {    Countrylist[i].SoldierCount = (Countrylist[i].SoldierCount - ((AllWars[Countrylist[i].CurrentWar].AttackSoldiers / AllWars[Countrylist[i].CurrentWar].Defenders.Count) / 10)); }

This roughly translates to NewMilitarySize = (OldMilitarySize - ((TotalMilitaryOpposition / TeamSize) / 10).

This means if the country has a Military Size of 500.000 with 3 allies in the war, and the opposition has a combined Military Size of 5.000.000, the equations would be as follows.

NewMilitarySize = (OldMilitarySize - ((TotalMilitaryOpposition / TeamSize) / 10).

OldMilitarySize = 500.000.

TotalMilitaryOpposition = 5.000.000.

TeamSize = (3 + 1)

NewMilitarySize = (OldMilitarySize - ((TotalMilitaryOpposition / TeamSize) / 10).

NewMilitarySize = (500.000 - ((5.000.000 / 4) / 10).

This would give the country a loss of 125.000 troops. So the new Military Size would be 375.000.

Graphs
If you want to see the change over time in Population, Military SIze, Country Size, Wealth and Technology, you can do that at the Graphs screen. The graph screen looks something like this. There's nothing to say about the graphs screen, since the only interaction you can do with it is changing the index of the comboBox.

The Graphs do offer a good insight on the status of the countries compared to other countries. This is similar to the InfoAddict mod for Civilization V, which makes use of graphs to show change in countries over time.

Some final words about this application.

 * Please bear in mind that this application is still in the beta version. Any bugs and glitches will probably be fixed in the final version. However, finding bugs and glitches by myself is very hard. Especially since there so many combinations of different controls to interact with, and it's almost impossible to test them all by myself to spot the bugs. So, if you do encounter some bugs or glitches, please don't ignore them, and provide information how to the replicate the glitch/bug. This is much more appreciated than simply saying "It crashes!".
 * This application isn't ment to be a strict set of rules to follow. This application is just ment to be a guideline or a help for when you are stuck and don't know what to do. You are still free to make the mapping videos in any way that you see fit.