Continent/Island not named yet

[Strange_Kid]

The icon size is by no mean realistic when I create it, autorealm lag too much when I stuff several hundred trees in the forest (its THAT bad, now that I compared it to GIMP).

Question about cities, a capitol span of 10 miles does it mean a 10 miles diameter fully filled with buildings?
What is the city size (large city, port city, smaller town, village), a fortress size?
Then a forest/jungle/dessert, how big is it?

Kinda hard finding those stuff in google. I just need rough estimation, thanks

[Jalyha]

Well... lets start with the center of your city.

Do you have a castle? The outer *walls* of a castle could be up to 20 ft thick! A typical motte would measure around 40-50 ft in diameter (at the top), so your city *center* is at least 40 feet for this small-ish castles, or 17,000 sq ft ( 130 ft in diameter) for a very large castle in, say, a valley somewhere.

Then you have parks/grounds/lawns/gardens/etc, which would probably at least double the size of the city center, but some castles can have grounds that are 5-10 miles long...

But disregard that and count the average of castle and grounds at 160 ft total. There would be some sort of road around the castle, which would be another 8 feet, and then you have a block of (?) 5? houses which are the wealthier citizens, so they're large houses, and ....

Well, really I could average out the whole city, but it wouldn't matter because maybe they are town houses, or you don't have a castle, but a university with a 2 mile campus, or a small government building. It REALLY depends, and it's almost impossible to give you an estimation, because EVERY city would be different.

So is every desert, and every forest, and each lake and river, and ocean.

BUT (Usually!)

A shack in the slums is usually smaller (width at the top) than a tree. A tree is usually smaller than a small village house. A small village house is smaller than a city house. A city house is smaller than blacksmith or a stable. A stable is smaller than a large village house, which is smaller than a village inn, which is smaller than a large city home, which is smaller than a city inn, which is smaller than a meeting hall, which is smaller than a country manor, which is smaller ? than a central temple, which is smaller than a castle/university (unless your church runs your world).

A castle is smaller than a village of 30 (though a village might fit on the grounds!) And a village is smaller than a town, which is smaller than a normal city which is smaller than a port city which is smaller (sometimes) than a capital city, and a large capital could be twice that size.

A road is 8 feet. You could fit 3-4 trees across a road comfortably.
Depending on the size of it, a river can be anywhere from twice the width of your road, to wider than a large capital city.

You could fit anywhere from 2 - 10 capitals (the size of a large hill) around the base of a mountain (depending on the mountain) and you can have hundreds of mountains in a range.

A mountain range could span the length of an entire desert, or plain, or whatever... it could cross an entire country.

But you could fit hundreds of forests on a mountain.

An actual JUNGLE could be pretty vast... it could cover an entire island... or it could be not much bigger than a large forest.



I was being conservative with the 10 mile diameter, because you want your map small, so yeah, it means fully filled with buildings, and there'd probably be more outside the actual city walls.

No one can give you a rough estimation on the size of everything, because there's so much variation. But the sizes should make sense compared to other things. So that's all the help I can offer. :/

[HereBeLions]

Strange_Kid, here's a really handy tool I use when planning out countries; The Domesday Book - Medieval Demographics Made Easy. You fill in your country's size in square kilometres, figure out your population density, then presto! It'll tell you most of what you need to know. You can probably ignore the bit about the hexes, as you're not using a hexagonal grid. The tool is keyed for medieval demographics, but you can use it as a rough guide for more modern places with a bit of research and tweaking.

[Strange_Kid]

Thanks, that's really helpful.