Hello gmiranda5247 and welcome to Emperor Heaven!

The game does not provide an option to directly use a saved game to open its map for editing. However, there are some workarounds, which you seem to be exploring. The most important investigation you need to do is to determine if the map you want already exists on your computer (or not). Here are my recommendations:

1. Look through the minimap images of all the maps (both delivered and custom) on your computer, to see if the map you are looking for already exists there. Once you find it, open it in the Campaign Creator and do a Save As to clone the original map, then open your cloned version in the CC and edit it as desired. Note that I say to look through "minimap images", because that is faster than tediously opening each map file in the Campaign Creator. You can look at minimap images of maps by downloading and installing Pecunia's Emperor Mapper utility, available at this link:

https://emperor.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=390

2. If you determine the map does not exist on your computer, then first double-check the zip file you downloaded, to see if the map designer included it there. I have always tried to provide the custom maps I build in the zip file along with the campaign pak file, but other designers do not necessarily do this. Finally, if you still cannot locate the custom map then you can leave a comment on the download and ask the designer if they can send it to you.

Hope this helps.

I actually have the same idea before.
To just edit the raw starting map itself (using the campaign editor), and then just rerun a game and rebuild my city back from scratch.


But I kinda imagine that the process would be tedious. I mean my city is kind of like an organic mess, with lots of little unplanned alley ways and dog-ears protruding from the city walls which I added impromptu here and there as I reclaimed the environment for various development purposes, and crammed my city tight and random to fit the contours of the land.

So I'm kinda hoping for some easier way to do this using the save game file (where everything is already built) and I don't have to do everything again from scratch just so I can have some few annoying rocks and river banks tiles removed and altered.

I"m guessing there wasn't anything similar to that, base on your reply.
Sigh.

(spam link deleted)

[This message has been edited by Gweilo (edited 08-15-2022 @ 07:29 AM).]