1 Map - 9 Encounters: help! :P

[Dunamis]

Hello all, I am relatively new to FG and am trying to become familiar with the program for creating and running campaigns. I have been through all the video tutorials and have read through the basic guides on the website as well. I was hoping that someone might be able to help me with this.

I am currently working on a campaign that features an arena. This arena will be the location of at least nine different encounters. I have placed the monsters for these encounters at three different locations on the map and have turned their visibility off. This way I can use the same map for those three encounters.
You can imagine however, how crowded and disorganized it will get if I use that method for 9 or more encounters.
My solution (being new to FG) was to copy the map three times and number them in sequence. The first copy of the map I put encounters 1 - 3, the second copy I put encounters 4 - 6, etc.

Was this the best solution? I am concerned about the fluidity of my campaign, I need a solution that is convenient and quick for me as the DM - but I don't want to force long load times that interrupt the game and make the players get OOC.

[Foen]

I tend to place the NPCs on the tactical maps on the fly (as and when needed) rather than in advance, so haven't come across this problem before. Your solution, with a combination of multiple maps and having three encounters per map, sounds like the best way if you absolutely must have the NPC pre-positioned. Two thoughts, however:

The way you describe it, you needn't have long download times when switching from one map to the next, provided you pre-load the map (usually a web icon about 7 o'clock on the image radial menu) a few minutes in advance. This pushes the data to the clients but doesn't display it until you do an ordinary 'share', at which point it becomes visible immediately.
If you are happy to place NPCs as you go, but just need to remember where they are placed (because the layout is complex), you can create a mini-version of the map for GM use, and mark the GM map with the NPC placement using letters of tokens. This is the way some commercial PnP modules work.

Hope that helps,

Foen