A Steam Punk Teutonic Dwarf City

[ravells]

If you don't mind parting with cash, then I can recommend Serif Drawplus X4 (which is what I use), it's about £60 and has most of the functionality of Adobe Illustrator, is pretty stable and has a very easy learning curve. Another one to look at as well is Xara which Gamerprinter and some others use. If you have loads of objects using filter effects you are going to get a slowdown, whatever application you are using as the effects need to be redrawn everytime you make a change and the calculations your processor has to do can get phenomenal. You can (in Serif anyway) disable the effects to speed up rendertimes and enable them again when you want to see you image in all its glory.

[Aval Penworth]

I have downloaded the trial of Adobe Illustrator but I couldn't make head nor tail of it. I hope Drawplus is easier to get started with.

I wanted to begin this project so I have gone ahead in Photoshop while I experiment with the vector programs.

Function over form is the idea at the moment, although I am planning to add some decorative art like Ravs has done in his "city madness"
I made a fill layer and then erased the non-building parts. Followed by a find edges filter, 1px drop shadow and a 1px black stroke. It was pretty quick and easy to get this far. I think about 90-120mins so far. The labeling will take some time but the map should be quite usable by the weekend.
I want to name the streets of the main grid as 1st street, 2nd street etc and have intersecting avenues numbered as well. I will give the alleys names to suit their uses.

Any of you language buffs out there have an idea for pseudo Germanic-dwarven words for "big street" and "small street"