#self reference

Do you have a map idea that you think would be funny but you don't want to put too much work into? Are you just feeling kind of lazy and you don't care about nice looking tiles? Then this tutorial is for you. I used this method to make Wyoming Risk, which, as you can see, has A LOT of tiles that I definitely didn't hand draw.

To achieve something like this, or maybe something slightly less ridiculous, all you need is a free copy of GIMP. This definitely works on GIMP 3.0, and I'm fairly certain this works on 2.0 as well, but I haven't tested it and you should probably just move on to 3.0 anyway.

So. We have this map opened in gimp, it has two continents, one broken up into regions, and one not.

The first step is to select the area we want to tile. I'm gonna start with the continent with no regions, as there are a couple of ways to handle regions. We're gonna use the fuzzy select tool(bound to 'U') on the keyboard by default) to select just the part of the map we want tiled.

Next, in the menu bar we're gonna navigate to Filters > Distorts > Moasaic..., which will pull up this menu which by default has a lot of options that we do not want.

Pretty much every time you use this for tiling, you're going to immediately turn tile height and tile color variation to 0, untick color averaging, untick allow tile splitting, and most importantly untick Antialiasing. Just those changes are gonna bring us from tiles that look like this, and are pretty much unusable for Risk:

To tiles that look like this, and are most of the way to being usable

Here's what your mosaic dialogue should look like now:

The big options you can mess with depending on how you want your tiles to look and how many you want there to be are as follows:

Tile Geometry: This determines approximately how many sides your tiles have. Our options are square, octagon, hexagon, and triangle. I think hexagons are generally gonna look the best.

Tile Size: this one is self explanatory. Bigger numbers mean larger tiles, smaller numbers mean smaller tiles

Tile neatness: This one determines how similar to the shape you selected in Tile Geometry your tiles are. At a max value of 1, your tiles will be uniform. The lower the value, the more natural your tiles will look, but if you get too low there are gonna be gaps in your tile walls. I've found going below 0.5 makes things too messy, with .6 being a good sweet spot. If you do want to go below 5, make sure to increase tile spacing to prevent gaps in your tiles.

Tile Spacing: determines your line thickness. It defaults to 1, but if you want thicker tiles you can increase it by whole number values to achieve that.

Joints Color: this determines the color of your lines

The following are some examples of tile variation you can achieve by messing with those settings.

If you find something you like, or you just want to save the default with the settings you always turn off, you can use the Presets options at the top of the Mosaics menu to save all of these options to a named preset that you can quickly load.

Once you have them how you want them, click OK to close the Mosaic Dialogue. Then, in order to make them an actual editable part of the map, go to your layers, and click the fx icon next to the layer you made your tiles on.

Now in the Layer Effects window that pops up, click the button with 3 horizontal lines and a down arrow to merge the tiles on to the actual layer.

Now that we have our tiles as we want them, there's one final VERY IMPORTANT STEP to make these tiles usable as a Risk map. If you zoom in very closely, you'll notice these tiles have shadows between them.

This messes up our ability to use the bucket fill to actually run the maps properly. To fix this, make sure your region that you're filling is still selected. Grab the Select by Color tool(which is bound to shift+O by default), then in the select by color options under mode, choose the third option, "subtract from current selection". Also in this menu, make sure to set the threshold high(I set it to 95).

WIth your tool, click on one of the lines that makes up your tile. Then, making sure the color on your palette is the same as the background color you're using, navigate to and select Edit > Fill with FG Color on the menu bar(this is set to Ctrl+, by default). This will fill everything but the tile lines in the region with your selected color, thereby eliminating those pesky shadows.

From here, you can do any cleanup you want to do and export your map!

When doing continents with regions, you can either use the fuzzy select tool while holding shift to select all of the regions at once(or use the select by color tool depending on your map), which will give you uniform tiles between your regions, but may lead to some tiles crossing over between regions. This will look like this:

Or you can handle each region individually, which prevents the tiles spanning regions, and allows you to fine tune your tile size and shape on a per region basis, like this.