August/September 2014 Lite Challenge : The Eskelon Pandemic

[Corilliant]

The Eskelon Pandemic

Storyline: In another world...
Following the end of the Savage War in 9655 W.E. (War Era), the entire world was left in ruins. In the space of nine millennia, sixty-two thousand years worth of progress by humanity was reverted back to the First Uncivil Age, resulting in an enormous technological halt. Man was now only capable of building castles, ships, carts; opposed to the portal rifts, electric stations and metropolises that used to cover it. For over eight centuries, anarchy was the way of life, leading to greater warfare, but now with only medieval weapons. After this period of time (841-1664 A.W.E), the resulting hierarchal feuds were settled, and many nations rose out of this dark age. Eventually, on the largest continent of all, eighty-two of these nations set up a great confederacy, known as Verrenis.

Verrenis soon began to collapse under its massive population that it could not support, and eventually its leadership organised the largest military operation in the history of man, to conquer and influence the world to be Verrenian, before their neighbours became powerful enough to retaliate. In After-War Era 2307 Annum, two thousand great fleets from Verrenis left its port capital, Isotreine, to conquer the rest of the world, or at least establish a trade between it and other forming nations.
This was highly successful, and Verrenis subdued most of the known world (the knowledge and maps had been lost in the Savage War) by the year 2416 A.W.E., and bound it by the Verrenis Charter to the mesocratic government of Verrenis. This meant over twenty billion souls were under thrall to Verrenis, a feat comparable to the Lozang Empire of the Before-War Era (thirty-three billion souls).
Due to Verrenis’s incredible stability, the entire known world was at peace from 2416-2502.

In 2502, the continent of Eskelon was the first to be released from the Verrenis Charter, under the condition that it would always answer to the High Council of Verrenis, among other rules. However, this was actually done by the council to remove the growing threat of Eskelon becoming more powerful than its father nation; the removal of government would leave Eskelon’s seven states (controlled by the three most powerful) broken and leaderless, i.e. no longer a problem. But the council did realise that a loophole in its release conditions meant that the Eskelon nations could create their own charter, binding them together.
This did not bear well for Verrenis, and soon relations between the super-continental federation and Eskelon became tense.
The Eskelon nations announced their intentions to conquer the rest of the remaining world, on behalf of Verrenis, but it was as a pretext as to invade it by Verrenis. From 2655-2690 A.W.E., the two charter continents invested in technological advance, into areas such as steam power, electricity and wind. The nations were soon so powerful, Verrenis considered an invasion during the meso-subcratic government period.
Just on the brink of this cold war turning into a world-shattering termination event, Eskelon suddenly lost contact with Verrenis. At first, this was taken as pre-war measures, but in 2800 Eskelon realised that something terrible had happened to its former rival, only observing small, burnt Verrenian flotsam from across the Great Ocean as signs of what had happened. By 2890, all signs that Verrenis had ever existed ceased, and soon the Eskelon countries sent scout fleets east to Verrenis to investigate its sudden silence.
Of the twenty fleets sent across, only two came back, bearing deathly news. They had investigated the entire coast, and all the cities had been ground to ruins, burning, burning. Some scouts went on inland to investigate, but many became sick and died. The ones that survived quickly left the remains of Verrenis, and hastily returned to Eskelon with evidence, such as the Broken Sceptre of Verrenis.
The entire continent had been destroyed, they said. Destroyed by some alien force; from another unknown continent, perhaps, or by the gods.
This left Eskelon in great panic. Between 2911-2918, the three nation states had secured the entire content against invasions, and braced for the worst. Already, a feeling of morbidity had crept all over Eskelon, sickness, famine and fear, despite the stability of the Charter.

By 2922, the entire population of the continent of Eskelon was dead, victim to the pandemic virus that had engulfed Verrenis and the the rest of the world, and the sixty-five thousand year long story of man ended.



Aim: So, have we guessed what killed off the entire world?
That's right, ladies and gentlemen, we have a pandemic here.
I intend to make a mostly black and white map of the content of Eskelon (i.e. the blobs/Stephen Fry drinking coffee) with all its minor towns and major cities and capitals. Then I'm going to kill everyone in the cities, and within a few maps demonstrate the spread of the virus, and its effects on the cities and why everything is on fire.

Most of the story I wrote to set a timeline I can base many other maps on in the future (heh, you know how it all end now though), but the main bits are in the last few paragraphs.

Sound cool?

[Diamond]

Sounds good! I'm surprised you didn't call it the Frydemic though... (It does kind of look like him, now that I look at the thumbnail.)

[Corilliant]

Right, now that exams are over (yay I am so happy with my results)...

This map is going to be very clean. Black and white, with only colour for symbols and roads etc.
Added mountains (this is a low quality jpeg file):


I know where my cities are going to go, but I need suggestions on what kind of data I should show on this map and how I should show it in terms of charts (i.e. a pie chart).
And do the mountains need shading...I shall experiment.

[Corilliant]

An idea of what I'm heading towards:


The map will depict the spread and death at around 4 years into the pandemic.
First I'll create the map, then I'll add the red circles of death and so on forth...

[Corilliant]

To emphasise the very clean style of map I want, I have used very smooth colours. Unfortunately this means my mountains are a fail.
I have designed some markers for my major cities and some little towns. The symbol will NOT dictate the population of the settlement, rather the size of the red ring around it. Then how far around the red ring goes around the city shows how many have died in the city. Using the exemplar above, Controlfreeke and Deathtosocks are BOTH politically towns, but their population sizes are very different. If from this we guess that Deathtosocks has a population around say, 10,000, then around 3/5 of its population are dead. Yippee. If we look at Controlfreeke however, its much larger population (the numbers are analogue. I don't care really how big the circles are) has already lost around 80% of its citizens. Oh dear.
I love Edward Tufte, you should search him up.
So for this map, I'd love it if you could tell me whether the symbols are too big, and if any of the two (land or sea) can have some very light texture on them. And how to fix my mountains, which either need to be thicker (any commands for PSElem?) or redone altogether...and if so, then how?

I've added some red rings of death around a capital city and a small fishing town (the middle of the map) to demonstrate. Is this colour scheme working out? :/


### Latest WIP ###

[Corilliant]

I think I have my mountain shading sussed.
I've only covered the southern mountains so far, but it's taking shape

### Latest WIP ###

[Corilliant]

Mountains are done. They don't look terribly smashing, but I think they'll fit in when I fill the map up with text and symbols


EDIT: Now with all new rivers and mini-map of the known world in the corner...are the river police going to eat me?

### Latest WIP ###

[Niall Mackay]

Only thing I noticed abotu the rivers is the top one on the western side of the southern continent - looks like it splits up, or is this supposed to be a delta?
(And Deltas don't necessarily lie in bays, they often enought build some kind of a peninsula with all the stuff the bring into the sea, look at the Nile for example )

About the colourscheme: I think the red yould be a bit brighter, at least if you a planning to do such thin circles.
Which brings me to the next point: The diameter of the ring tells the population total while the piechart (or better: doughnut-chart ) tells how many already died. But what information is coded in the (for the lack of a better word right now 'thickness' of the ring? Does it even have one? If not: Maybe you can use it to tell the time since the plague has struck the city. For example: 1mm means one year since the first plage death in the city. You could also do that with the colour, though, which might make tracking the path of the pandemic easier when looking at the whole map.

But looking good so far!

(One question: are you using GIS? Could make the chart part easier.)

[Corilliant]

Thanks, I'll have a little fiddle around with the rivers a bit more. I'm making my prevailing winds come from the west (it's a bog standard NSEW map) so I'll be shifting many of my ports to the west coast and behind mountains...likewise away from arid areas with other large settlements. You can't see the climates, but they'll be there
Yeah, the red will be brighter. I had some fun fiddling around with them, and I realised that I should split the ring into two parts, red for infected and black for dead.
I'm using simple photoshop elements to get my rings; I can customise them but I think three strands of information on a single ring is slightly overbearing. I'll consider it though...maybe I should make it one of my little corner maps, with just years and months written in particular regions in red, showing the expansion.
And then I'm going to make a small quarantine symbol

[Niall Mackay]

Then maybe you could make them proper pie charts with the city symbol in the middle? The various 'thicknesses' (is that even a word?) seem kind of confusing to me if they do not bear any additional information...
For the spead of the plage, maybe think of isolines or however they are called in english? So one city as the starting point, and then some lines for "the plague has spread this far after 3/6/12/.../n months? (You know, like height lines on topographic maps.)

But I don't think it is a good idea to add a "infected" number in the ring, I'd keep it just 'survivors' (the blank part) and 'deceased', if you want to show what the plague did everywhere in retrovision. If you want to make it a snapshot of the ongoing pandemic, however...

And another thought about the rivers: Maybe make them a bit wider? I find them kind of hard to see at a glance, but in a medieval fantasy world they've got to be important travel routes, I suppose.