More cities (City Designer 3)

[Steel General]

Keeping in mind that you are still in the early stages/experimenting with the labeling... I think the key/legend (whatever) is looking pretty good, not sure how many labels you plan on adding but you may want to decrease the size a bit, it tends (at least for me) to drag the eye away from the city which really is the focus.

Also (and again this may just be me) not a big fan of using red colored text as labels, especially with all the green on the map. For me it tends to 'bleed' into the background. Maybe if you add a stroke/glow/outline it might help. *shrugs*

[Hoel]

I'm starting to look closer at fortifications, since they seem to feature on many maps but seldom gets commented.
Your walls seem good, they surround the whole city and have a castle inside.
A couple of things thou
-Would you rely on the hill only for defence north of old town and east of the harbour? I think the hill should have walls. It could be that parts of the old city walls was destroyed or dismantled on the hillside, so it's not essential.
-The southern road lacks a gatehouse and will be very hard to defend and since it's a long stretch of wall with a hole in it, it will be very weak.
-Same with the entrance to the castle, if the entrance is where i think it is

A gate is a hole in the wall and that makes it the weakest point. To make it tougher the builders almost always put a gatehouse over it, a thick, hard tower. The gatehouse had lots of nasty surprises for anyone trying to break down the gate.
The only gates that's frequently not defended like this are the sally gates, small gates in the back or an area that has other defences. Those gates were used for sallying forces that tried to drive off the attackers and were kept unused and often secret.
On another note, everyone has seen those big corner bastions on medieval castles. The purpose of those oversized or hanging towers was so the defenders could get an angle on the walls to either side. Later the star fortress was invented where the towers were lower but the anle of the walls was made to minimize the uncovered wall sections.

[Gandwarf]

Hoel, thanks for spreading your knowledge. You definitely have some interesting ideas, some of which I might pick up. Keep in mind though the map isn't finished yet.

I am going to add one or two fortresses and gatehouses in the southern wall. Also Concetron is protected to the north by the fortress city of Meerzicht and to the south by the castle at Ravenburcht. It was quite well defended. Also there used to be wizards ruling the city and they would make it very hard for an army to take the walls or sit out there. Confrontation between wizards were rare, so battles used to be very interesting... mostly just men fighting each other. Or in the case of a siege, lots of men trying to take a city where lots of other men and wizards were holed up. Most of the times it was slaughter

Last but not least, the city has grown too big over the last decades. Some of its defences are no longer up to par and the current garrison has far too much wall to protect.

*edit*: the castle inside the walls is the palace. Although it would be able to withstand a siege it wasn't really built with that in mind. The walls are decorated for example and the palace itself has gold domed roofs. The place is locked down by the elite guard of the Alliance government so it's difficult to enter if you are an intruder. In the past the wizards lived there and most people didn't even want to go near (except maybe if they tried to assasinate them, but the wizards had many guards as well).

[Gandwarf]

Keeping in mind that you are still in the early stages/experimenting with the labeling... I think the key/legend (whatever) is looking pretty good, not sure how many labels you plan on adding but you may want to decrease the size a bit, it tends (at least for me) to drag the eye away from the city which really is the focus.

Also (and again this may just be me) not a big fan of using red colored text as labels, especially with all the green on the map. For me it tends to 'bleed' into the background. Maybe if you add a stroke/glow/outline it might help. *shrugs*

Thanks for the feedback! I will experiment some more. The red labels stand out a lot and that is something I like. But I am not finished with it yet.

[Hoel]

Well. If you're going to go to the trouble of building a wall in the first place (it's a huge project) you will use every advantage you get. They're more likely to exclude the poor suburbs to save on wall lenght then build over capacity.
If it's supposed to be defended from other cities they wouldn't have the inner walls since they're there to protract the siege. A city that relies on outside force to defend itself will have an outside wall that can hold long enough to let the relief force get there.
Gatehouses are more or less essential thou.

Wizards in a battle would in my imagination be like heavy arillery but wouldn't really change the siege much.
I think high fantasy magig would push the fortification tech forward quite fast. The medieval high walls sould be very vulnerable to hard impacts from magic, and the modern low sloping walls would be more effective.

But the best defence/offence in a magic heavy world would be to have a mage on your side as well. There would be a mage battle with the infantry and cav as spectators. Until the mages were burnt out and the proper normal siege would begin.

I drew a quick example on how, with a small investment you could get it well fortified. You have some walls that serves no use for example.
Your walls are green, my examples are red and yellow.

Don't think I demand this of you, but with a bit more investment they could have made their city defences much more effective. Since they've aldready made the whole outer wall to the north..

[Gandwarf]

I like this discussion and I agree with you the city could have been more fortified. This is something I did deliberately, I need it for my story.

- Building the wall was a huge project yes, but there were quarries nearby and the wizards had thousands of slaves. The wizards needed to keep their people busy. So they also dug out canals that were not really needed!
- At one time the walls were more meant to keep people in than to keep people out
- Walls have been torn down over the years.
- There are actually poor suburbs in the city, but those were formed over the years as the wealth of the city fluctuated. The current rulers would like to "bulldoze" the Rats Quarter, but they don't want thousands of angry, poor people in their city (there are already thousands of very angry refugees in the lands surrounding the city).
- The wizards in my world can manipulate their surroundings but they cannot break the laws of nature. So they can stop a heart beating in a man's chest for example, but not create food from thin air. The more people around, the more powerful they were. It's hard to siege a city if hundreds of your buddies just bend over and drop dead all of a sudden
They are not really heavy artillery as they couldn't just let stone explode for example.
- Wizards fighting each other were very rare, as they are as vulnerable as any man. An arrow to their back kills them. Magic fights were VERY unpredictable and so dangerous (mostly over in seconds) no sane wizard would risk it unless cornered. The wizards of my world are the knights from the Dark Ages. Clashes between knights were rare and they tried to avoid confrontations. They used to ride up to each others peasants and slaughter those. That's much more fun and you don't risk getting hurt.
So wizards sieging other wizards in a city were very, very rare. The walls are just a precaution to make sure enemy soldiers are not suddenly in the streets (and the city can be better defended when the wizards are not there).

Oh, and I love fortress cities. Check out the town I grew up in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Br...g_20050518.jpg

*edit* About wizards fighting: if two wizards would confront each other, the wizard who first stopped the other wizards heart would win. There's no counter spell or anything. No magical shields. It's mind magic, manipulation. If you are dead, you are dead. So in general the wizard who acts first wins. That's why the wizards didn't like open confrontations. They avoided each other like the plague. But they were also very envious of each other and would use armies, agents and to some extent lesser wizards to confront each other. Also, most wizards have no way to "sense" if another person is a wizard. So they were very powerful people, but also very afraid of each other and other people trying to kill them.

[Hoel]

Ok. I was thinking D&D style wizards with fireballs and earthquakes.
Nice fortress, I'd say late 1600s? Probably built in time for the dutch republic. I would call it italian style, but since it's dutch it's probably from the dutch school. Looks a bit like kastellet in copenhagen.
Tonight I'm going to get to work on my map of the new-german-school fortress of Carlsborg.

[Gandwarf]

I finished up Concetron. See the finished map section:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...3309#post43309

This map took a lot of blood, sweat and tears

[Gandwarf]

I started redoing Meerzicht today.(http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ight=meerzicht)

Not sure if I am going to finish this however. The layout doesn't feel right. Maybe Hoel has some good suggestions as this city should be a fortress
I do have lots of elements I need because of my story.

Also the Concetron map turned out so well I think that it's going to be hard to do something better. And that's what I am striving for.

[Hoel]

Ok, here's the verdict from the field engineers office
-Good central court. You would want to add a keep (basically a big tower, or castle). Those two makes the inner defences, fort and baily.
-Then you have the second layer. It should go in towards the harbour instead of out. Think as each layer, counting from the keep, as a separate court. Two serious bastions would anchor the line.
-Then you have three courts, one for each road, that's good. Keeps the defence on a smaller surface.
-The two square courts on the flanks are more or less useless. Put a big bastion in each corner instead.
-To add to the defences, if this is supposed to be a real fortress, and not a fortified city, add small courtyards behind each gatehouse to make a killzone for anyone who breaches the gates. The consider the way an attacker moves inside the fort. If he can move outside the range of the defenders on the walls, then he will be able slow his attack and bring in reinforcements.
-Try to limit the area that is the actual fortress. if the city isn't the primary reason for the fort, then let them live outside the walls, or a ring wall outside to protect the city, then put everything else into the fortress and keep.

Overall, it's a bit square and boxy. Use the terrain to augment the walls, a wall on a hill is much more defensible than a wall on flat ground. The terrain is seldom flat, so the walls shouldn't be either.
Depending on the tech level of your world, use more and more star shaped defences... That's all off the top of my head, I'll add more when I see what you make of it.
I think I'm going to have to make that essay on fortification after all...