The City of God

[thebax2k]

Excellent use of Photoshop and Illustrator Zeta Kai, your map is very sharp and the colors used are quite distinct.

I did have a few brickbats in regards to your city, but they have more to do with urban design and layout in general than with your artistic style.

First, why so many piers? Good lord, I count 56 of them! They stick out all along the length of the waterfront inside the wall, they even peek out between what would be small alleys between the houses. It may look nice on the map, but the number and placement of your piers is not realistic. Couple that with a lack of warehouses to store cargo being onloaded and offloaded and you have major gridlock at the waterfront.

Although the ports have been modernized, go into google maps and take a look at Aden or Tunis in the Middle East. Both are major Arabic port cities with two features you can keep in mind for designing your port city--certain areas of the coast that have more piers and port facilities than the others and artificial breakwaters/small turning basins have been created along the waterfront for boats.

Second, although the symmetry of your city makes sense for a city with a strong religious influence, in a way, your city is "too symmetric"--with what appears to be the same 6 or 10 buildings being rearranged in myriad ways to create the blocks. Although I spot a few special buildings and the Sultan's Palace, there is not a lot of variety of the building types themselves. For something that feels a bit more organic, try going with large homes/walled estates for the wealthy (and clustering them in a quarter or borough near the Sultan's palace would not be a bad idea either) and small hovels in a mazelike area for the poor. Also, don't be afraid to plop down the odd circular or unusually shaped building on the street grid. If the city's authorities will not tolerate hovels inside the city, then they should be outside the walls.

On the subject of buildings outside the city, I would add quite a few more than what you have. Given the desert surroundings, European style farms seem unlikely, but I suspect there would be quite a few olive/fig groves that do well in a Mediterranean/semi-arid climate.

Third, you did well having all of your temples in a given "area", but I would be a bit more explicit and put all of them on one or two streets and actually on the street where the followers could easily reach them (some of your temples look like they are in the interior parts of various blocks, requiring threading through alleyways to reach--useful for the god of thieves perhaps, but not the sun god .

Lastly, I would create a second market area near one of the two road entrances to the city (preferably on the inside) to handle goods and food coming over land. The market you have now seems better suited for handling sea trade (and given what I said earlier, you may want to cluster the piers and warehouses near it).

In any event Zeta Kai, your map looks great as it is. But if you wish it to be more realistic (as realistic as anything losely inspired by the Arabian Nights can be , give my suggestions some consideration.

[jfrazierjr]

Very pretty. However, I would not expect the large ships to be able to dock at the piers. Based on the sandiness of the beach(at least that's what it looks like), large ship would not be able to draw any where near that close to the existing docks. They are probably fine for small fishing boats, but anything more would be too deep in the water to approach the docks (unless it was a flat bottom barge type thing.) Think about the slope of the beach and how it falls away. Then, imaging a ship needing at least 25 foot of depth for any real sea trading, then add another 10 feet for lowtide into the mix(assuming this is in some tidal area), finally add 1/4 to that for the pilings to be anchored into the sea floor. This is just a rough guess on my part. Of course, if you have a technological or magical means for a floating pier system, then you just have to worry about the ships depth and not about the pier itself.