The documentation is pretty poor anyway. The dashed circle when you place a TRP is the radius in which adjustments will happen faster. Outside of TRP range, they’re slower (much slower, depending on your choice of nation).
Top-down 2D maps and highly elevation-sensitive combat are a difficult pairing. (Command Ops is among my favorites, so it’s a problem I’m all too familiar with.) You can enable contour lines with one of the wee tiny buttons to the right of the minimap (I don’t recall offhand, but I think it looks like a contour line). Much more useful than that, in my experience, is the isometric view mode from the button on top of the minimap. Unfortunately, you can’t play the game from the isometric mode, but you can much more easily get a sense for the undulations of the map.
I might go make a suggestion on the Steam forums about borrowing a Command Ops innovation—the Command Ops LOS tool shows a bar graph of the terrain height relative to the reference point between it and the mouse, which is a handy shortcut.
My mapmaking exploration has turned into a mapmaking project. This is Fort Benning, along with the surrounding communities of Columbus, GA, Phenix City, AL, and to the southeast, Cusseta, GA.
Following the mapmaking tutorial helpfully provided by the developers, I downloaded QGIS and set to work. They recommended the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission dataset, whose 1-arcsecond/30-meter resolution is just about right for Armored Brigade’s 30m map cells, but it’s noisy—in particular, it’s a surface height map more than a terrain height map, so it includes trees. The USGS has a 10-meter survey dataset available which is just terrain, so I got two square degrees of that and chopped out the right part per the tutorial, to get the heightmap below, which is 42 kilometers on each edge at 30 meters per pixel.
The most notable feature is the Chattahoochee basin, which runs up the left side of the map. Fort Benning itself is heavily forested and features numerous small streams, rivers, and lakes, which make it an odd choice for an armor training school. Oh well. I didn’t put it there.
Anyway. On top of the heightmap, there’s a terrain definition map. Obviously, I have a good ways left to go, but you get the idea from this. Colors map to terrain types, on the same 30-meter scale as the heightmap. If you fiddle with a config file, you can put Armored Brigade into map editing mode, which gives you some help (square brushes of various sizes, a ‘draw line’ tool, a fill tool, and a palette of all the terrain types) in assembling the terrain bitmap.
I guess there are location labels, too, but a) happily, this is not a very heavily populated area of the world, and b) I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.