A Harbour Capital

[ravells]

Ah it's loading now.....really love it. I like your road network! That bevel technique works fine as long as you don't zoom in too close and the buildings are all squares and rectangles.

[Aelyn]

Thank you for all the comments! I'll make more roads, you're right about that. The road network btw was rather easy, I made it the same way that real roads usually develop- I built houses and drew roads between them, only in younger parts of the city would streets be drawn with a ruler.

But I don't see whats wrong about the houses being squares and rectangles... where I live, most houses are rectangular

[ravells]

Lol nothing wrong with rectangular houses at all, although for variety it's usually fun to throw in a few L shaped houses and such like.

[Aelyn]

I spent some days on the houses and think I remember some L-shaped ones. If that's not visible perhaps I should enhance them somehow, or the big ones with atriums. What do you think?

[Gandwarf]

This is certainly a nice map. The scale of the city is impressive! Like Ravells I like the road network very much. Now for some criticism though:

- The houses to me look more like a giant mosaic at the moment. It's the pattern and shapes I guess. Not sure if and how you could fix this. Zoomed out the city looks really believable, but when I zoom in I get the mosaic effect. But hey, maybe it's all in my mind
- The farmland might need some toning down / more subtlety.
- It took some time for me to recognize the city walls, maybe make them pop out somewhat more.

Make no mistake: this must have been a huge effort and I applaud your work so far.

[Aelyn]

So I added more roads into the fields, toned the fields down as well. I made the walls (including the often missed wall around the palace) a lot darker. But I guess these are minor changes that don't justify another huge upload, so the next thing I'll post here will be the annotated version of the map. I just have to figure out a good style for that, any ideas?

[arsheesh]

Looking really nice so far Aelyn! I like your fields allot. Like Aval, I'm not huge on bevel/embossed houses either, but I can totally understand the rationale for making them: with the amount of detail in this map, it seems like bevel/emboss is just the most economical way to go (in terms of budgeting one's time). Looking forward to seeing more updates.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Aelyn]

What's wrong about bevel&emboss houses? How do you create your houses?

Btw, here's a tagged version of the map (different style, though). I named everything that seemed important to me, namely temples (blue), secular buildings (red) and squares, villages & stuff (brown). As you can see, there are a lot of temples- quite a religious country it seems. There are less red buildings, perhaps you know something that my city needs?
Still I'm not sure whether I need more or less tags- so please, if you find something superfluous oder something that's missing, tell me

Ideas concerning a better background are also appreciated. While working the anthracite was fine, but now it just seems a bit boring.

And the name tag on the top left... still not satisfied with it...

[Gandwarf]

Ah, this latest version is a LOT better. And I mean a lot.
The mosaic effect (partly because of the beveled houses) is now almost unnoticeable for me. I think it also had to do with some of the bright colored houses. The toned down colors are a great improvement and I really like the fact you gave the larger, more important buildings another color to differentiate. Labeling looks great as does all the extras, like the paper look. I wouldn't change anything... the name tag looks fine to me.
Very, very nice. A bit of a surprise to me that you turned the map into something this great (the first WIP you posted was good, but this latest version is an enormous improvement).

[ravells]

What's wrong about bevel&emboss houses? How do you create your houses?

There are some, my friend, who draw each house by hand....

but they are all in the asylum now...

we shall never see them again.

Great work on your last map....it looks brilliant! Don't change a thing!