posted 06 April 2005 03:04 AM EDT (US)
So...
This eye candy makes use of the bridge unit. Personally I think it is a very nice piece of item that can be used to eye-candy your map. It has many uses, stick it between two cliffs to make a simple non-useable bridge, shrink it down to make nice archeers or attachements to wooden buildings, or even use it to texture certain terrain. Anyways, enough babbling about the bridge. Let's start. Notes for cinematics and screenies: NOTE: The bridges CANNOT be walked on. That is its greatest drawback. This also measn the water town cannot be used. But if you want, you can use the following alternative.
1. You start off with a blank map. (No duh) Make sure you have adequate room for a nice amount of sea. Contrary to what I say, I failed to do so when I started to make the map.
2. You put in a sea. Any sea would work, but I love the Aegean so much that I am using it again. Anyways, put a blob of it. Depending how big you want your water town, the size of the water can change. You can have it like a bay, a lake, or even part of a huge ocean.
3. Add certain "foundations" for your buildings. This is simply to guage, and later you would add more "foundations". This makes your bridge laying next easier.
4. Put tons of bridges. Lay them out, then shrink them to the appropriate size. (Shift-K to shrink, k to enlarge)
5. Lay down your shrunken bridge into the water. Make sure they look like they are 1 big dock area. Try to get your bridges as close to the "foundations" as close as possible, since your buildings upon those will need to join with the bridges.
6. Add basic buildings, in this case houses. Since this is a small water town, I could not use buildings that are too big or very well-built ones. So I chose the norse for their shack-like buildings. Bascially by this, you already have the main part done. But that is just the easy part.
7. Here is the part where you make your water town look really nice. Adjust bridges, add more bridges, add additional buildings, add things to make the transition between building and water easier (In this case, wooden wall connectors), trees, waves and more water. This is where your creativity can shine. 
8. Add some boats, a skybox, a nice angle, a character or 2, and you have a nice cinematic background.
To make a nice screenie/cinematic with the dam, remember to add several things.
1. Change your view! Put it at a different angle. Zoom also. This can make your eye-candy better than it's viewed from above. Use A+Z, Page Down+Page up for maximum effect.
2. Render Sky. Unless you want to make it a night scene, a black sky is downright ugly. Turn off unit outline and make sure you turn off fog and black map. Add snow, mist and rain as neccesary.
3. Add sun/moon/star, animals, units. This will make it look lively. For example, I added some seagulls and boats. 
1. Lay down a strip of land on the water. Don't make it too high.
2. Simply put wooden walls, and flip them over so that they lay horizontally. Make sure the base of the walls does not lay across where the part where it is meant to be walked. Add fences to make it look better.
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