Haster, Imperial City

[Karro]

Uh, yeah, I have nothing to add. Anyway... good luck with more wonderful maps (city or otherwise).

[Coyotemax]

Amazing map! I'm impressed with the amount of work that went into this, I can only imagine at this point (but I'm starting to get inspired again, maybe i'll find out, heh)

[joferma0]

Wow! What a bunch of posts!
Thank you very much to you all, the map involved a lot of work, and your appreciation is really, really welcomed!
I lost the count of hours it took to me to complete it (or pseudo-complete for what I've read). Each building/block is an individual entity (layer) in the original file, so you can guess how much effort is in there.

Many questions have arised, so I'll try to answer/clarify them...

About what's the meaning of "insulae": an "insula" is a type of building common in the Roman Empire/Republic in which there was many distinct "apartments" that people mostly borrowed. They were several stories tall and could host over 50 people.

What I've tried to accomplish is a semblance of crowded city, a city that could host up to 500,000 people. A "medieval Rome". And it would be possible only with buildings that had more than one floor. And from that comes the "insulae" concept.

Regarding the garden/yards question. I totally agree with NeonKnight and Karro (sorry if I forget someone) that most of the city maps out there have too much "empty space" among buildings. My experience in medieval cities (I live in Valencia, Spain, which has an ancient medieval downtown) is that people builded their houses one next to the other, to get a more solid construction, and also to carry out less work. As far as I know, gardens and yards were placed mainly in neighbourhoods of wealthy merchants or high status people. Of course exceptions would exist, and surely the differences from one country to other or one region to other would be radical. But I wanted to break totally with the existing model of some kind of idilic, suburbial cities (that would be more appropriate for small towns), and create something more real. I'd like to have been able to get the same effect out of the walls of the city, but it was really exhausting and imagined that pressure in the outside was lesser and people could have spread more.

And the most important question for me, smaller streets and alleys. It's true that the green grass between houses is not very realistic, but two factors influenced the decision. Firstly, the map is designed to print in A1 size, and drawing a lot of streets with that light color didn't result in an enough satisfactory result. Secondly, the job had already been immense, and I was in urgent need to finish it to use in my campaign, so I opted for taking it out of my mind and just define the main roads and avenues. But I suppose that a good and easier solution, as someone has said, would be making the house patches more dirty in between. I'll try it (when I get back enough forces and resolution, hehehe).

Again, thank you very much.

[Lwaxana]

Wonderful map! And it is as if you have read my description of the capital of the Kingdom of the Holy Light in my epic campaign. Which is why I'm gonna use it as such. I was searching for a fitting map for like a year!

Thanks a lot for posting this.

[Katerek]

awesome, repped!

[Turgenev]

Fantastic map! The sheer number of buildings blew me away - very impressive indeed. Have some rep.

[DMT]

Man this is amazing.!!! So much detailed and we organized map.


DMT