More Information about BattleMaps
What is it?
BattleMaps means that creating readable and understandable maps of particular battles is no longer a time-consuming and specialist process. A sequence of well drawn maps can illustrate the action more clearly than many pages of written words. BattleMaps helps the historian to concentrate on the history and accuracy of the battle.
Several sequential maps of the battle can be created and displayed in a slide-show format thus animating the action. This format can show the tactical intricacies of a battle in a way never before available. It has great implications in historical education for both professionals and enthusiasts.
The current version of the product comprises an extensive set of tools necessary to create meaningful maps of naval and land-based battles. It includes standard military symbols representing modern, World War 1 and period warfare. You can draw schematic terrain backgrounds on-screen or scan & display a pre-drawn terrain map. You can then position and align units on the map background using a simple point-and-click technique to create the different phases of the battle.
Each map is fully annotatable. Notes and descriptions can be attached to the map, each phase, each unit and even the warring sides themselves can be described and displayed. You can then easily generate on-line, interactive pages for the maps or print-outs detailing the maps your have created and all accompanying text. It can even form the basis of your next book!
In this way meaningful maps can be created in minutes.
Who wants it?
Military Historians
An invaluable and cost effective aid in preparing illustrations for books, presentations, lectures and web sites.
Military & Civilian teaching organisations
Easy and quick to create and explaining military actions and principles in a very clear intuitive way makes BattleMaps an ideal tool for lecturers and students in both military and civilian institutions.
Publishers
With the benefits of standard media formats and ease of use, publishers of military titles can use BattleMaps to achieve a consistent, corporate image.
Wargamers
When documenting games, publishing write-ups of competitions or even running play-by-web games, BattleMaps makes the process simpler and quicker, thus leaving more time for gaming.
What makes battleMaps different?
Focus
The software is highly focused on a particular task. The language used will be familiar without having to learn a lot of new concepts or terminology.
Ease and speed of use
With familiar terminology, the point-and-click interface and the built-in library of symbols you can produce your first maps in minutes. Complex sequences can be created and altered quickly allowing you time to concentrate on the content and history rather than the computer.
Flexibility of use
The maps created can be from any period, any theatre. They needn’t even be historical. It is simply a tool for documenting military actions.
Flexible output
You can show an animated slideshow of the action for presentations, displays or web sites. You can produce publisher-ready image files of each phase of the battle or even print out fully annotated hardcopy hand-outs.
Cost effective
The price of the BattleMaps package is considerably less than the cost of a professional cartographer.